AI on WordPress
You can paste a vendor's script into your theme and have a chat bubble by lunch. What you'll also have is your traffic routed through a third party, an uncapped monthly bill, and a bot that will confidently invent your pricing. Done as a custom WordPress plugin, all three of those are solvable.
Four things to understand before you pay anyone — including us — to put AI on your website.
You can't paste the ChatGPT everyone knows onto your site — and you wouldn't want to, because it's never heard of your business. A proper build uses the same technology through OpenAI's or Anthropic's API, grounded in your actual information: services, service area, hours, pricing policies, FAQs. It answers from your facts, and hands off to a human when it should.
The three jobs that justify the build: answering the questions that interrupt your day ("do you service Riverview?", "what do you charge for..."), capturing the 9pm visitor as a lead with a name and number instead of a lost tab, and triaging intake so you open a tidy summary — what they need, when, where — not "hi do you do roofs."
Two honest numbers. The build is a one-time project we scope and quote at a fixed price, sized to your site and how much the assistant needs to know. Then the API usage is billed per use — and at typical small-business traffic that lands closer to a utility bill than a payroll line. No per-seat licenses, no surprise tiers. You'll see both numbers before you commit.
The $50-a-month embed that answers every question with "Great question! Please call us" is worse than no chatbot — it annoys the visitor and burns the one chance they gave you. If a pitch doesn't explain how the bot learns your information and what happens when it doesn't know an answer, keep your doubloons.
Whether you talk to us or someone else, these are the checks that separate a real build from a rented widget.
Ask what it knows "Where does the assistant get its answers?" is the whole ballgame. The right answer names your content — your pages, price sheets, policies — and a process for keeping it current. A shrug means it's guessing with the public internet.
Ask what happens when it doesn't know A well-built assistant says so and collects the visitor's details for a human, rather than improvising an answer about your prices. The failure mode matters more than the demo.
Ask whether you even need one Not every site does — low traffic or a handful of simple questions is often better served by a good FAQ and contact form. Our guide to when a chatbot is worth it for a business website covers that honestly, including DIY options we don't sell.
Ask who owns it Accounts, prompts, and the assistant's knowledge base should be yours, in your name — same rule as your website. This build is one piece of our broader AI integration services, and everything we build ships under that flag: your property, documented, no hostages.
Every AI feature worth having on a business website ends up as code running on your site. On WordPress that means a custom plugin — which is how you keep your API keys server-side, your costs capped, and your data yours.
A plugin holds credentials server-side. Pasting a third-party script into your theme hands your traffic and your data to someone else.
Custom code lets you cache answers and cap spend. Subscription AI plugins bill per seat or per message whether or not anyone uses it.
A custom plugin can feed the model your actual pages, products, and policies — not a generic web scrape.
Built once, yours to keep. When the vendor raises prices or shuts down, your site doesn't care.
Tell us what you'd want it to answer. We'll scope a custom plugin with your content, your keys, and a spend cap — at a fixed price.
No ransom required. First consultation is free.
Tampa Forge