In May of 2025, Figma released the Figma Sites beta with great fanfare. Figma, a very popular web based design tool, is used by millions of designers, so Figma Sites was a natural progression for the company. However, the beta launch proves that the solution has quite a long way to go before it could actually support any type of sophisticated businesses or organization with their web development needs.
ZAG took this beta program for a spin, and the results show that so far, it doesn’t meet the standards we adhere to when building custom designs.
Figma Sites: Design, Prototype & Publish
The idea behind Figma Sites is that one can now design and, directly from the design, generate a website. It’s likely that smaller digital agencies are excited to be able to save time and effort by being able to skip far ahead in the software development lifecycle. Further, the heavy use of Artificial Intelligence in the tool adds to Figma’s library of AI tools and is being touted as being integral to being able to deploy a site faster and cheaper than ever before. But, with this, comes significant challenges.
Designing with AI
AI can be fantastic to help speed up processes, replace time consuming tasks and more. As such, many programs are looking to leverage AI. However, the idea of a well-thought-out prompt yielding a great design is still in its infancy.
Recently, ZAG was creating a banner with text overlaid. There was a section of the image that was too dark and it made reading the text too difficult – both a UX and ADA compliance violation. A Designer used Photoshop and made the wall to the left of center lighter so that the dark text could be easily read and meet ADA contrast guidelines. But she decided to also try Adobe’s AI functions to see if it can do what she did. In this scenario, she could make the change just about as fast as the AI could, but should she consider the use of AI for even more complicated tasks?
She selected the area that needed to be lighter and told the AI, to paraphrase, “Make the selected area lighter.” So, what did the AI do? It added a candle to the area. Technically it added light to the area. This makes the use of AI highly dependent on using the right prompts – yielding a trial and error scenario that for this situation is more time consuming than making the change manually.
Developing with AI
Figma Sites is still a work in progress, so obviously the beta that was released is not expected to be the final incarnation of the tool. However, fundamentally there are major concerns that the development model will be able to be used for large, complex sites.
On the positive side, the resulting site does look like the design. Maybe for a personal site or a very small business site, that is good enough. On the critical side though, there are several notable red flags. The quality of the HTML on a site is important. High quality HTML enables good performance, good security, can be easily maintained, and is accessible to most users. Figma Sites has some fundamental, significant issues that anyone considering building a site in it should be well aware of. From the use of inline styling (versus CSS) to link tags and many more issues, the way it’s built means that it’s nearly impossible to create a site that is ADA conformant.
Watching to See How Figma Sites Evolves
Figma Sites is on its way to being a useful tool, but at this point, it’s not the tool to be used for any situation more than a small personal site. For businesses and institutions who need a site designed and developed by experienced artists and developers who are also experts in ideal user experience, ADA and clean code, this isn’t the magic solution. But that is not to say that the product won’t evolve over time and be useful for some scenarios, so we will continue to monitor it as it evolves from its beta release.