I Cloned My Entire Website in One Afternoon Claude’s CLI — Then Cancelled My $336/Year Wix Subscription 🚀
I’ve been paying Wix $28/month to host my professional coaching website for a while now. It works fine. But as someone who’s spent nearly two decades building products at Google, Meta, and DoorDash, the lack of control always nagged at me. I couldn’t easily version my content, the performance wasn’t great, and I was locked into a platform for what’s essentially a six-page static site.
So I decided to try something: could I use Claude Code, Anthropic’s command-line AI coding agent to fully replicate my website and migrate off Wix in a single sitting?
Spoiler: yes. And I cancelled my Wix subscription that same day. ✂️
The Challenge 🎯
My site (briankemler.com) is a professional coaching and portfolio site with six pages: a homepage with multiple sections, PM interview guides, coaching packages and rates, a portfolio of accessibility work I shipped at Google, an about page, and a contact form. Nothing wildly complex, but enough moving parts — navigation, responsive layout, background images, external integrations with Calendly and Substack — that rebuilding it by hand would have been a tedious multi-day project.
The question wasn’t whether I could rebuild it. It was whether AI tooling had reached the point where I could do it fast enough to make the migration worth the effort.
The Process 🛠️
Step 1: I used Claude to scope out my existing site. I gave Claude my URL and asked it to crawl every page and produce a detailed project brief capturing the content, structure, design patterns, and all external integrations. Within minutes, I had a comprehensive Markdown spec document covering all six pages, the shared layout, design tokens, and deployment instructions.
Step 2: I opened Claude Code in my terminal. Claude Code is Anthropic’s CLI tool for agentic coding — you run claude in your terminal and it can read, write, and execute code in your actual project directory. 💻
Step 3: I fed it the brief and said “let’s build.” Working through the spec step by step, Claude Code scaffolded an Astro project with Tailwind CSS, built out the shared layout and navigation, then constructed each page one by one. When something didn’t look right, I’d tell it what to fix and it would edit the files directly. The back-and-forth felt less like prompting an AI and more like pair-programming with a very fast junior engineer who never gets frustrated.
Step 4: Deploy to Cloudflare Pages. Claude helped me deploy the site to Cloudflare Pages, and had a live site in under five minutes. Free hosting. Global CDN. Automatic HTTPS. ⚡
What Surprised Me 🤔
The thing that impressed me most wasn’t the speed though going from zero to a fully deployed site in an afternoon is genuinely remarkable. It was the quality of the workflow. Claude Code doesn’t just generate code; it operates in your file system, runs your dev server, catches its own errors, and course-corrects.
It’s not perfect. I still need to fine-tune my contact me form and get the video previews working. But easily 90% of the work was done by the AI, and the remaining 10% was the kind of polish work I actually enjoy.
The Math 💰
Wix: $336/year, locked into their platform, limited customization, difficult interface
New stack: $0/year hosting on Cloudflare Pages, full code ownership, version-controlled in Git, deploys in seconds
That’s not a tough decision.
The Bigger Point 🔮
We’re at an inflection point with AI-assisted development. Tools like Claude Code aren’t replacing developers, they’re collapsing the time and friction involved in going from idea to shipped product. For a product leader like me, that’s transformative. I can now prototype, build, and deploy without context-switching into a no-code platform that charges me for the privilege of simplicity.
If you’re a PM, founder, or anyone paying for a website builder to host a relatively simple site, I’d encourage you to try this. The barrier to owning your own code just got a lot lower. 🙌