Build a website with Claude: what you get, and what to check before launch.

How do you build a website with Claude today?

You build your website with Claude by describing the site in a prompt, letting Claude Code write your files, pushing them to GitHub and connecting your host, like Vercel or Cloudflare Pages. One beginner tutorial lists the toolbox: a Claude Pro subscription, a Vercel account and a GitHub account. You also need Node.js (LTS) and a terminal, and you install Claude Code through npm. Build small, and your $20 Pro plan works, Ryan Doser says. But for heavy build tasks, he recommends the $100 Max plan.

You have other routes. Chris Lema's 24-step guide has you build your free site with Claude Cowork, GitHub and Cloudflare Pages, and you need no terminal. Claude Design lets you start with visuals instead. Anthropic says you get designs, prototypes, slides and one-pagers, and that if you are a marketer, you can build landing pages in it. Whatever you pick, a host serves your pages to visitors. And those pages are what a public read scores.

What is the difference between Claude Design, Claude Code and the chat?

You use Claude Design for visual work, Claude Code to write and push the files that become your site, and the chat for plain conversation. Subscribe to Claude Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise, and you can try Claude Design, an Anthropic Labs product powered by Claude Opus 4.7, in research preview. It draws on your subscription limits. On your Enterprise plan, your admin has to switch it on in Organization settings (so if you can't find it, ask there first).

Use all three on your site, and watch the handoff between them. Anthropic says product managers can sketch a feature flow in Claude Design and hand it to Claude Code for implementation. For the steps, start with Claude Academy's 15-minute guide to that handoff. You can export your design decks as PPTX or send them to Canva. But none of that tells you what your deployed page contains. What ends up there depends on your files, your host and your prompt, so your live URL is the only honest witness. Check yours, not the tool. Read what your browser receives.

What does a Claude-built site ship by default?

Your Claude-built site ships whatever your prompt, your framework and your build settings put in the output. You cannot quote one default. Leon Furze's first prompt asked for an Astro site, and his Cloudflare Pages settings use the Astro preset, the build command `npm run build` and the output directory `dist`. Compare your settings with his: do yours match? Pelcro describes a live site with no traditional server, where pages are built ahead of time and served by Cloudflare. Does your site work that way? Whatever the answer, the deploy is the truth, so check what you deploy.

Look at your markup. HashBuilds says Claude writes clean, semantic code but needs guidance on viewport meta tags, charset declarations and title hierarchy, so check your head for all three. It can produce JSON-LD schema when you give it specific business requirements. Did you? The assessment reads your homepage and up to eight sampled pages, and you see your headers, markup, structured data, headings, script weight and image weight. Your prompts and your repository stay out of reach. So what you get is a read of what your site ships, nothing more.

What should you check before you publish a Claude-built site?

Before you publish, check your metadata on more than one page, then your canonicals, response headers, structured data, crawler access and image weight. Changed a shared template? Open at least two of your routes for each one. Screpy warns you that your metadata helper can look correct in isolation while returning the same values on every page, so test each route you touched. In one plugin demo, a newly deployed About URL returned a 404 and had to be repaired. And a page that fails quietly is the worst kind, so after you deploy, load your own new URLs.

Check your schema twice. eSEOspace recommends you parse every JSON-LD block, sample your templates in Google's Rich Results Test, and confirm your markup matches what your visitors see. It cites Google's rule: "Don't mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page." Screpy tells you a clean parse does not prove your pages are eligible, and valid markup can carry invented or outdated values. Read yours before you ship. And Pelcro flags anything over 500 KB, so weigh your images.

How do you deploy and keep a Claude-built site?

You deploy by connecting your GitHub repository to a host such as Vercel or Cloudflare Pages. Push changes to your repository, and your host redeploys. In one beginner tutorial, Claude Code asks whether to push each of your updates to GitHub, and Vercel redeploys your site automatically. Ryan Doser tells you Cloudflare deploys in under a minute. He keeps repositories private for real client sites (a sensible habit). Keep yours private too.

Your site lives at a pages.dev address until you point your own domain at it, Chris Lema tells you. Once you do, MindStudio says your DNS changes usually propagate within a few minutes to a few hours. Vercel provisions HTTPS on your custom domain automatically. Pelcro opens each of your changes as a pull request with a preview link you can open, and runs checks first. So should your required check fail, Cloudflare is never told to deploy your build.

Where do Claude-built sites score well, and where do they drop?

None of the sources publish scores, so they can't give you a general answer. Your own pillar results are your answer. You get one score out of 100 for your site, built on eight weighted pillars: architecture 15%, performance 15%, security 12%, search 12%, schema 10%, AI readiness 10%, editorial experience 10% and operational health 16%. Behind each pillar sits the evidence, so you can check it before you trust your score. A number without its evidence is just an opinion.

You can see the drops the sources name on your own pages. Your metadata may repeat across pages. Your new route may return a 404, and your images may run over 500 KB. Your sampled public pages show you all three. The read cannot tell you whether a schema value is true for your business, so you judge that. Your score lands in a band: 80 to 100 good standing, 60 to 79 constrained, 40 to 59 at risk, and 0 to 39 legacy condition. Find your band. Then fix what you can see on your site.

How do you check your Claude-built site in two minutes?

Paste your site's address into the free assessment, enter your work email so your report link arrives once, and about two minutes later you see your score out of 100. The assessment reads your homepage plus up to eight sampled pages from your site: your response headers, markup, structured data, headings, script and image weight, and your robots and canonical signals. You get one score. And you get the evidence behind each pillar of it. Before you change anything, you see what lowered it, so you never guess which fix to try first.

I use Claude Code daily and built this assessment with it, so the checks come from the same habit this page recommends: judge the output, not the tool. The assessment does not log in to your site, read your analytics, run field performance data or interview anyone. You get three checks per hour per connection. Fix one pillar, redeploy your site, and run it again. Your next score then shows you what your change did, and that is the only feedback worth trusting.

Questions, answered.

Check your own site.

1. 01Astro SEO checkIslands, content collections, schema, vitals.
2. 02Next.js SEO auditRendering mode, metadata, hydration cost.
3. 03Website health checkThe general read, all eight pillars.

More from What Ships.

1. 01AI code vs human code: what the difference looks like on a live website.Evidence · 2026-10-25
2. 02How to build a website with AI without the mistakes everyone makes.Guide · 2026-10-25
3. 03Vibe coding security: what shipped AI sites leak, and how to see it from outside.Security · 2026-10-25