For some website owners, the idea of using AI on their site may seem a little far-fetched. It is often seen as a tool for large businesses with complex websites, big budgets and experienced IT teams. While this may be true for some AI tools, others are easy to implement, need little or no technical know-how, work autonomously and are inexpensive or even free to use. What’s more, they can help you create content, support customers, improve user experience, enhance SEO and strengthen security. In this post, we look at five practical ways AI can improve your website.
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1. Using AI for content creation
Creating engaging content is one of the hardest parts of building a website. No matter how appealing the design, if the content doesn’t work, you will find it difficult to drive sales. While larger companies can afford the services of a professional copywriter, smaller companies have often had to write the content themselves.
If you’re short on time or writing isn’t one of your strong points, you can now use free generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot, to do the work for you. Provided you give them accurate prompts, these tools can generate web pages, blog posts, marketing emails, product descriptions, privacy policies, FAQs and more. While AI content may lack some of the creative individuality of a human-written text, it will be well-structured, error-free and produced in seconds.
Additionally, you can now use these generative AI tools to create website images, infographics and even short videos. More advanced users can also use tools like ChatGPT to write the code for custom plugins and themes.
Learn more about generative AI, read: Generative AI: What is it and How Can it Benefit Website Owners?
2. 24/7 customer support
Live chat is a great way to support website visitors by answering questions, recommending products and solving problems. While many customers find this feature helpful, even large businesses struggle with the costs of staffing support teams around the clock. The solution that many have turned to is the AI chatbot, a tool that automates customer support 24 hours a day.
Today, these tools are accessible to smaller businesses. Moreover, they are intuitive, easy to set up and require no coding skills. Once installed, they use your website content to train themselves, and if they are unable to answer queries, you can configure them to hand over to a human contact, if available.
There is a growing range of AI chatbots that offer free trials and low-cost services, including Tidio, which integrates with WordPress and Shopify websites, Zoho SalesIQ and Zendesk.
3. Real-time UX optimisation
Poor user experience (UX) can quickly drive frustrated visitors away and affect your sales. To prevent this, you can now use intelligent analytics tools that analyse how users interact with your site and report what is and isn’t working successfully.
One useful product is Hotjar, which offers five free visitor tracking tools. These analyse pageviews, conversions, drop-off points, exits and conversion blockers to provide UX improving insights. You also get help improving website performance and identifying and fixing issues.
You may also be interested in: How to Enhance Customer Experience on Your Online Store
4. Enhanced SEO
SEO is vital if you want your website to appear in search results, however, it is a time-consuming and complex process in which the goalposts are constantly moving. Over recent years, there has been a growing number of tools that help with SEO, some of which are now beginning to make use of AI.
While older tools were able to provide site-specific suggestions for SEO improvements, the newer AI tools go further, automating many of the SEO tasks and thus taking the time and the complexity out of the process.
Helpful all-in-one SEO tools include Alli AI, SE Ranking, Writesonic and Semrush. Additionally, Yoast, which has long been the go-to SEO plugin for WordPress, now offers several AI features in its premium plans. Alternatively, you can use ChatGPT to analyse your site’s SEO, suggest keywords, and write meta descriptions and SEO optimised content.
Find out how AI can improve your marketing, read: How AI-Powered Analytics Enhance Digital Marketing Strategies
5. Intelligent security
AI is now being used on both sides of the security battle, with cybercriminals and cybersecurity software developers both using it. The good news for website owners is that some service providers, Webhosting UK among them, have now begun to adopt advanced security tools, like firewalls and intrusion and malware detection software, which use AI to protect against today’s most sophisticated threats.
AI-enabled security tools can identify malicious behaviour patterns in real time, allowing them to quickly block suspicious login attempts, brute force attacks, DDoS attacks, IP addresses and bots. They also monitor file changes, looking for potential breaches. A major improvement over older security tools is that AI learns from each new attack, enabling it to identify evolving and zero-day threats and protect with more accuracy.
If your hosting provider doesn’t provide AI-enabled security, you can use WordPress plugins like Wordfence or Sucuri or get a Web Application Firewall (WAF) from Cloudflare. All of these utilise AI and offer free and premium services.
Conclusion
The wide availability of AI tools, often with free or inexpensive options, means all website owners can take advantage of the same technologies available to their larger competitors. Easy to implement and use, they enable you to undertake a range of helpful actions to improve your website, including content creation, customer support, UX improvement, SEO and security.
Whether you need an AI-enabled website builder or an enterprise cloud server to run large-scale AI applications, Webhosting UK has the expertise, infrastructure and tools to help you take advantage of the latest technologies. For more information about our full range of hosting solutions, visit our homepage.
