Most people who want to redesign their site think they need a new tool. Usually they need a plan and about four hours. AI can compress a chunk of that, but only if you hand it the right jobs.

Everything below works today with tools that exist right now. Nothing here is waiting on a roadmap.

Step 1: Have AI audit the site you have

Before touching the design, paste your homepage copy into ChatGPT or Claude and ask it three questions. What does this business do, stated in one sentence? Who is it for? What's the single action the page wants?

If the answers come back vague, that's your actual problem and no redesign fixes it. Most bad sites aren't ugly. They're unclear, and the ugliness is downstream.

Then ask it what's missing: pricing, service area, proof, a phone number. It's good at spotting absences because it's seen thousands of pages in your category.

Step 2: Cut before you redesign

Take your full sitemap and be honest about which pages get traffic. Check Search Console if you have it. Most sites carry three or four pages nobody has opened in a year.

Ask AI to help consolidate. "Here are four thin service pages, merge them into one strong page without losing anything specific" works well. Deleting pages is the single highest-return move in most redesigns and AI makes the merge less tedious.

Step 3: Rewrite the copy, then cut it in half

This is where AI earns its keep. Paste in your existing page text and ask for a tightened version that keeps every concrete fact and drops the filler. Then tell it to cut the result by half again.

Two things to watch for. It will invent claims if you leave gaps, so read every sentence and delete anything you can't back up. And it defaults to a smooth corporate register that sounds like every other site, so give it a sample of how you actually talk and tell it to match that.

Step 4: Use AI for the visual direction, not the execution

Describe your business to an image model or an AI design tool and ask for three different directions for a homepage. Don't use the output. Use it to figure out what you react to.

You'll look at three options and immediately know one feels right and two don't. That reaction is information you couldn't get from a blank page. Then build the real thing yourself, or with a designer, informed by it.

Step 5: Rebuild the design somewhere you control

Here's where tool choice matters. If you redesign inside a builder that owns your layout, you've bought the same constraint you already have, and the next redesign will be as annoying as this one.

Figment's approach is to make the design file the real thing. You design in Figma, which is free, and our plugin publishes those frames as a live website in under a minute. Custom domain, SSL. Next time you want to change something you open the file, change it, and republish.

For a redesign specifically, that's useful in a practical way: you can build the new version in the same file as the old one, side by side, and publish when you're happy. No staging environment, no half-broken live site.

If you don't want to design from scratch, Figma's community has thousands of free website files. Open one, paste your tightened copy in, adjust it to your brand.

Step 6: Don't break your SEO on the way out

The most common way a redesign loses money is URL changes with no redirects. Keep your existing URL structure if you can. If you can't, list every old URL and map it to its new home, and set up redirects before you switch.

Also keep your page titles and meta descriptions. If a page ranks, its title is part of why. Ask AI to improve titles by all means, but change them one at a time and watch what happens rather than rewriting all forty at once.

What AI still won't do for you

It won't tell you which of your services actually makes money, which testimonial is from the client everybody recognizes, or which photo is of your real shop rather than a stock office. Those calls are yours, and they're most of what makes a redesign work.

Where this is going

We're building an AI website builder on top of the Figma publishing engine. It's in early access right now, not self-serve, so the workflow above is what I'd actually do today. If you want to see where it stands, request a demo.

The reason we're building it this way rather than shipping a prompt box: for a redesign especially, you need to fix things by hand. AI will get the new hero 90 percent right and you'll want the last 10 percent your way. If the output lands in a closed template system, you're stuck describing changes to a chat window. If it lands in a design file you own, you just drag the thing.

Want to see the publishing flow as it works today? Book a demo, or ask about your specific redesign in Discord.