Building a website with Figma

The latest review in our series looking at online website builder tools, and this time it’s Figma.

This was carried out a little while ago and, as with the rest of this series, it’s been done by my 12 year old son, who’s technical – but 12, so doesn’t have any business experience or much experience of online systems.

Figma: a review

I recently tried using Figma to create a website for a made-up business, Magenta Interiors, in order to see what it was like as a website builder. These are my findings for anyone who is looking for a good website builder to use to start their business.

To begin with I went to the figma website and clicked on the button on the header that said “Get Started for Free”. Figma then asked for my email and name, ect, before asking me details about what I wanted to do. I said that I wanted to make a website, and that I was doing it as a company. It then asked how many people were in my company, so I chose 2 to 100 (quite a broad bracket, I know). Next came the most important question of all: if I wanted to design the website myself or get AI to do it for me. Nearly every other website builder that I have worked with has had an AI that could be much better, so I decided to see how Figma’s AI held up. Instead of asking me loads more questions, it simply gave me an AI chatbot interface and effectively just told me to get to work!

I told the AI that I wanted a sleek and sophisticated website for my interior design company called Magenta Interiors. It then started to make it. Before actually getting the response, it showed me its entire reasoning as it was working, which was very interesting. After roughly 30 seconds, I got a bit of a standard response, just a quick progress update, before it got back to reasoning. I received lots of small responses here and there, until after 1 to 2 minutes it gave me my website. It looked really good! There was one big page, but with a header that took you to different points down it. It had given me a portfolio with a bunch of random interior design images, as well as random interior design images everywhere else. I uploaded a bunch of my own pictures which I had prepared, and asked it to put those in instead. It did that after 1 to 2 minutes again, with very interesting reasoning. It did that flawlessly. I then asked it to make some more technical changes, such as making the text appear in a different way when you put your cursor on an image. It did that flawlessly, as well as some other changes. Since it had only been editing my website so far, I decided to test it and said “Thank you so much!” to see what it would do. It gave me this reasoning: The user is thanking me for the work I’ve done on their Magenta Interiors website. This is a polite closing message. I should respond warmly and briefly, acknowledging their thanks. I don’t need to use any tools here – this is just a conversational response. The system reminder about TodoWrite is not relevant here since we’ve completed the requested changes and the user is expressing satisfaction. I don’t have a clue what TodoWrite is, but it appreciated my thanks! Next, I decided to see if it would let me have multiple pages on my website. However, when I went to ask it to do that, it said I was out of credits for the day! I had only given it 5 messages, and one of them hadn’t needed any tools (as the AI put it). Nonetheless, I supposed it had given me a fabulous website, so I decided to try and publish it. I clicked Publish at the top, then gave my website a name and set it live. I was impressed to find that it didn’t have any watermark, but the URl was this: https://yin-matte-94183660.figma.site, so it wasn’t that great. There was a brief popup at the bottom saying this website was made with Figma, but you could dismiss that very easily.

I tried to research the limitations of the Figma free plan, but I found it quite confusing. There wasn’t clear or consistent documentation on exactly what you can and cannot do. The official Figma website mainly states that the free plan includes unlimited drafts, UI kits and templates, and a limited number of AI credits (150 per day and up to 500 per month).

However, I also received conflicting information from different sources. ChatGPT and Gemini both suggested that publishing a website might only be available on paid or education plans. Despite that, I was still able to publish a website myself on a free account without selecting an education plan. One thing that is clear though is that AI credits are limited on the free plan, although it is still possible to create useful designs with enough patience. The free plan also seems to include significantly less collaboration and team features compared to if you paid.

Overall, I think Figma is a good website builder, and it is definitely worth considering. However, in my experience, for free you get a random URL, and very limited AI credits.