I was very privileged to have early access to GeneratePress AI for testing purposes. In so doing, I was able to use it on a number of different providers: Claude, Codex, Cursor, Grok, GrokBot, and even Meta’s Muse on my phone. Building a WordPress site chatting with “Jared” (Muse made me name it) on my phone was a little discombobulating, but with GeneratePress AI, it actually worked.
This is the process that I found worked best. Of course, GeneratePress AI can work with whatever process you choose; it’s flexible to nearly any workflow. The more familiar you are with GeneratePress, the easier it is to instruct your AI to build things your way. And if you’re not yet familiar with GeneratePress, the abilities in GeneratePress AI give you answers and options right in your AI chat or project.
Here is the order of operations I used when building a new site from scratch with GeneratePress AI.
1. Define your design
Start with the brand, not the blocks. Decide on your fonts, your color palette, and the overall feel before you build a single section. Your AI tool is genuinely useful at this stage. It can help you name a palette, suggest font pairings, and talk through the mood you are going for.
Fonts used to be a step you did entirely by hand, and that has changed. With the GeneratePress Font Library enabled, your AI tool can now install Google fonts for you and reference them everywhere by name. A custom or self-hosted font is the one case you still add yourself.
A habit that pays off on every future prompt: write a short brand book, a one-page document with your colors, fonts, voice, and the kind of site you are building. Set it up as a project in your AI tool. I use Claude for this, because inside a project it holds onto my brand and I stop repeating myself. Every request after that lands closer to right on the first try.
Sample prompt:
I’m building a new WordPress site for Fernwood Coffee Roasters, a small-batch roaster that sells whole bean coffee and subscriptions. The vibe is warm, earthy, and a little bit bookish. Suggest three color palettes with names for each color, and three font pairings from Google Fonts. Tell me the mood each one creates. Don’t build anything yet.Sample follow-up prompt:
Install the heading and body fonts we picked from the Font Library. Then write a one-page brand book covering colors, fonts, voice, and the kind of site we’re building, so I can save it to this project.2. Set up your Design Tokens
With your brand decided, turn it into Design Tokens: named values your whole site points at, like a token for your primary color or your link color. This is the most important habit in the entire workflow.
Tokens mean you never hardcode a color or a font into a section. You reference the token instead. When you decide a color is one shade too loud, you change the token once and the whole site moves with it. On a recent build I set the link color as a token, decided later it was too bright, and recolored every link on the site with a single edit.
Ask your AI tool to set your palette and type up as tokens before you build anything else, and everything you make afterward inherits them easily.
Sample prompt:
Turn our palette and type choices into Design Tokens before we build anything else. I need tokens for primary, secondary, accent, background, text, and link colors, plus heading and body fonts and a basic spacing scale. Show me the list before you apply it.3. Build your Global Styles
Next, define how your common elements look: body text, headings, links, buttons. These are your global styles, and they should consume the tokens you just created rather than carry their own hardcoded values.
This is where the site starts to feel like a real design system instead of a pile of one-off sections. Point your links at your link token, your headings at your heading font, your body at your body font. Build it once, and every page you make from here inherits a consistent look without you styling anything twice.
Sample prompt:
Create Global Styles for body text, headings 1 through 4, links, and buttons. Every value must reference our Design Tokens. Don’t hardcode any colors or fonts. Show me a preview of each before applying.4. Build your pages
With the foundation in place, building pages is fast. Describe the page you want, section by section, and let the AI assemble it from your tokens and global styles: a hero, an intro, a feature grid, a call to action.
Because the design system already exists, you are not making a thousand small styling decisions per page. You are describing structure and content, and the look takes care of itself. Watch each preview, approve what is right, and ask for adjustments where it is not. That back-and-forth is faster than it sounds, because you are correcting words and layout in your native language, not hunting for hex codes.
Sample prompt:
Build the homepage as a draft using our tokens and global styles. Sections in order: a hero with a headline and a “Shop the roast” button, a short intro about our roasting process, a three-column feature grid, and a closing call to action. I’ll supply the real copy later, so use sensible placeholder text for now.5. Add your posts and categories
If your site is a blog, publishing with GeneratePress AI is incredibly easy. Planning your blog’s architecture makes sense when you’re instructing AI to build out content. Draft your posts, organize them with categories, and select featured images and excerpts. Instruct your AI tool to create the categories and to create drafts of the posts in your WordPress admin.
Two pieces still stay in your hands: setting the featured image and the excerpt on each post. They are quick, and they matter more than they look, because the next step depends on them.
Sample prompt:
Create four categories: Brew Guides, Origin Stories, Roaster Notes, and News. Then create five draft posts, spread across those categories, with titles and short placeholder bodies from the content I've pasted here. Leave the featured images and excerpts empty, because I’ll set those myself.6. Pull it together with a dynamic section
Static pages are only half the picture. The moment you have posts, you can build a section that shows them automatically: a query loop that pulls your latest posts into a grid of cards, each with its featured image, title, and excerpt.
This is where the featured images and excerpts from the last step pay off. Build the feed once on your homepage, and it stays current on its own as you publish. Ask for a card layout, point it at your posts, and the design system styles the cards to match everything else on the site without any extra work from you.
You can even create separate pages for different post categories, and set a Query Block to pull only from specific categories based on taxonomy that updates as you publish. Your AI tool can set up those pages for you, too.
Sample prompt:
On the homepage, add a Query block below the hero that shows our three latest posts as cards. Each card gets the featured image, title, and excerpt. Style it with our tokens. Then create a separate Brew Guides page with a Query block that only pulls posts from that category.7. Add a contact form
If you want a contact form, enable Forms in GenerateBlocks first. Once Forms is on, your AI tool can build the form for you.
Be specific about two things when you ask: whether you want submissions stored on your site, and the address you want them emailed to. Tell it both up front and it will wire the form to do exactly that. Give the form the same tokens and styles as the rest of your site so it reads as part of the page, not something bolted on at the end.
Sample prompt:
I’ve enabled Forms in GenerateBlocks. Build a contact form with name, email, and message fields. Store submissions on the site and also email them to hello@fernwoodcoffee[.]example. Use our tokens so it matches the rest of the page.8. Build your header
Build your header as a GeneratePress Element, using the Site Header and Navigation blocks, and set it to apply to all pages so it shows everywhere.
Your AI tool can build the menu for you now, ordered and nested, and the header references it by name. If you would rather set it up by hand, Appearance to Menus still works: add your items, save, and the header fills in the moment you do. Style the header from your tokens, so your wordmark, your links, and any button match the rest of the site.
Need a Mega Menu? You can ask your AI tool to create that as an Overlay Panel and attach it to whatever menu item you’d like it attached to.
Sample prompt:
Create a header as a GeneratePress Element, using the Site Header and Navigation blocks, applied site-wide. Build a menu with Home, Shop, Brew Guides, About, and Contact, and use it in the header. Style the wordmark, links, and a “Shop now” button from our tokens. Then build a mega menu as an Overlay Panel and attach it to the Shop item. It should have columns for Coffee, Gear, and Gifts.9. Build your footer
Finish with the footer, also as a GeneratePress Element, set to apply site-wide.
This is the easiest Element to make and the one that quietly ties the whole site together. A short mission line, a column or two of links, your key call to action, and a sign-off. Keep it on the same tokens, and it reads as the natural bookend to your header rather than an afterthought.
Sample prompt:
Create a footer as a GeneratePress Element, applied site-wide. Include a one-line mission statement, two columns of links, a “Join the subscription” call to action, and a sign-off line. Keep it on our tokens so it matches the header.The payoff
Build in this order and the work compounds. Every step makes the next one faster, because the design system does the heavy lifting and you spend your time on structure and content instead of styling the same thing twice.
And notice what stayed in your hands the whole way through. Even with the AI installing fonts, creating menus, and drafting your posts and categories, you still set the featured images and excerpts, and you approved every change before it went live. That split is the point. The AI does the scaffolding and the repetitive building. You keep the decisions, and you keep the keys to your site. That is what makes it a tool you can trust on real client work, not just a demo.
Sample prompt:
The link color feels too bright. Change the link token to a deeper shade and show me a preview of the change across the site before you apply it.GeneratePress AI is a part of GeneratePress One. Use it on a staging site to get familiar with its abilities, then watch how fast your workflows become. If you’re like me, you’ll find it next to impossible to build any other way.
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