I got a SGD 4,000 agency quote for my personal site. Built it in 4 days with AI for SGD 157 instead. Here's what actually worked.
After 14 years running a digital marketing agency, I somehow never had my own personal site. The irony was not lost on me.
I had Figma designs ready. My dev team was backed up with client work. So I decided to find out if AI could actually ship something professional — not a template, not a quick WordPress site, but a custom multi-page site from my own designs.
Four days later it was live. Here's what surprised me.
What I expected AI to struggle with — it didn't
The tedious stuff. Renaming 83 images with SEO-friendly filenames. Generating JSON-LD structured data for every page. Converting PNGs to WebP in bulk. Adding alt text across the entire site. Each of these would have taken me half a day manually. AI handled them in minutes.
What I expected AI to nail — it completely failed
Screenshots-to-code. I fed Claude my Figma designs as screenshots and asked it to build the pages. The structure was roughly right but the precision was completely off — wrong spacing, wrong typography, layouts that looked AI-generated rather than designed.
The fix: I needed a tool that reads actual Figma design data (layers, spacing values, component hierarchy), not visual interpretation. That changed everything.
The decision that saved the most time wasn't a tool
It was an architecture choice: separating content from code completely. Every page's copy lives in Markdown files. Templates handle layout. When I rewrote all the copy after launch (which I did), I touched zero template files. When I added FAQ sections, it was adding data, not writing code.
This saved more time than any tool in the build.
The honest caveat
Those four days were 10-12 hour days, and my dev background meant deployment and DNS weren't obstacles. Without that background, this workflow will slow you down significantly. For most founders, WordPress + a developer is still the right call.
The final numbers
Build time: 4 days (vs. 4-6 weeks agency timeline)
Tool costs: SGD ~157/month (vs. SGD 4,000 agency quote)
Lighthouse homepage: 99 performance, 100 accessibility, 100 SEO
I wrote up the full workflow — exact tools, what each one handled, where it broke down, and the Lighthouse scores across every page — if you want the step-by-step: https://www.dhawalshah.net/article/building-personal-site-with-ai
Happy to answer questions on the stack or the workflow.
