Canva’s design platform offers a way for novices to design professional-looking graphic designs, social posts, and even websites. You don’t need a computer science degree to build a Canva website, nor a UX/UI qualification. Building a website with Canva opens the doors for many, but what are the pros and cons of Canva’s website builder, and is it worth using?
What Are the Pros of Using Canva’s Website Builder?
You can easilybuild a website with Canva; here are the benefits of doing so.
1. Efficient One-Page Design
One-page designs are great for anyone who doesn’t need anything complex for their website. Canva only offers a one-page website design, but it doesn’t have to be limiting.
One-page websites are best for landing pages, personal websites, and small businesses. You can design your one-page site with infinite scroll capabilities, at least to the extent that Canva offers. Having too many pages or elements mayprevent you from saving your Canva document.
Canva’s website builder labels pages by number and sections each screen-sized area by page. This allows for plenty of design space, color options, and separation throughout your website design.
2. Add Hyperlinks
Screenshot by Ruby Helyer, author. No attribution required.
You can easily add hyperlinks to both text and elements in Canva. This allows you to easily link to external places when needed.
Simply right-click on the element you wish to hyperlink, choose to link it, and add the URL. Once your website is live—or in preview mode—you can select and open any links you’ve added.
3. Create a Personal Design Style
Although Canva is well-known for supplying pre-designed templates, using Canva to create a website has the benefit of adding your own personal design style to your page.
While you can use the myriad of template options, they can also be customized exactly how you want for unique results. For an entirely custom website design, you can design a one-page site from scratch with Canva’s website builder.
You don’t have to use pre-made and overused templates that look like everyone else’s websites. And it doesn’t take much skill to add custom design elements in Canva, either.
4. Choose a Custom or Free Domain
Canva’s website tool offers its own domain for you to share your live website. Canva users get up to five free Canva domains to use from their accounts. If you wish to use a custom domain or import an existing domain, you can do that for around $20 per year, depending on the domain ending.
5. Incorporate Company Branding
For Canva Pro members, you’re able to add your personal or business branding to your Canva projects, and that includes your website. UseCanva’s brand kit featureto save your logos, brand color palettes, and font choices for easy access when designing your Canva website.
The brand kit is a great feature to save time and frustration when making your Canva website, and it keeps your website design cohesive with your social posts and other Canva designs you’ve made.
6. Responsive Design
In the modern day, all websites need to be responsive, and Canva’s website builder agrees. The responsiveness of your web design is automated by Canva. You can easilycreate a mobile-friendly portfolio site with Canvawhich utilizes Canva’s responsive design.
Designing using a grid will assist responsiveness. You can alsogroup or ungroup elements together in Canvato ensure the correct text sits with the correct image when resized for mobile.
7. Turn On Password Protection
Protecting your website with a password is a handy option if you’re creating a website for children, a surprise, or a private event. Canva lets you turn password protect on or off at any point, allowing you control of who can access your Canva website.
There’s also the secondary option of hiding your website from Google and other search engines by not indexing your website. This option isn’t foolproof, however, and doesn’t give you the choice of who can access your website if it is found somewhere.
8. Access to Traffic Insights
In a world of content marketing, traffic insights are one of the most important parts of running a website. Viewing your traffic insights is only available to users of Canva Pro, Canva Teams, and Canva Education, but it’s one feature thatmakes it worth upgrading to Canva Pro.
What Are the Downsides of Using Canva’s Website Builder?
There are some cons to Canva’s website builder. They might be a deal-breaker for you, so it’s good to know what you’re working with before getting started.
1. There’s No Multi-Page Design
For some websites, a multi-page design is more beneficial than a one-page site. Canva’s website builder doesn’t offer traditional multi-page websites, but you do have the choice to add a navigation bar to the top to guide viewers through the one-page site.
There is a workaround to add multi-page to your website. you’re able to add hyperlinks and link to multiple one-page designs built in Canva, but that’s a tedious method and won’t be a smooth transition.
There are many other website builders—likeSquarespaceorWordPress—that allow for multi-page website design instead.
2. No CSS or In-Depth Coding
Despite Canva’s great responsive website automation, it still won’t be as precise as a coded website. Canva’s website builder doesn’t offer a way to add code like HTML, CSS, or Javascript.
If you want to create a website and develop it yourself as well as the design, Canva might not be the best option. If you only need good visuals and a simple web page, then Canva’s offerings are fruitful.
3. No Integrated Forms or Charts
Adding forms or interactive charts to a website is important for your audience to contact you, share information, or for onboarding new clients. Canva’s website builder doesn’t have a native form tool; however, you’re able to integrate Typeform forms into your Canva website.
Although Typeform is available in Canva, you’ll need to make a separate account with it to use the integrated form app. This adds an extra step, preventing you from adding forms in a simple manner. And the downside of Canva’s apps is that they may be removed at any point, preventing you from using them consistently.
4. The Design Elements Aren’t Unique
While you can create your own elements elsewhere to upload and edit them in Canva, that can be time-consuming, or even impossible if you lack illustration or design skills. Most Canva users take advantage of Canva’s huge elements library, but this has the risk of using the same elements as other Canva users.
Many Canva users often follow design trends, resulting in hoards of designs with the same elements and styles—these designs don’t give them a unique edge.
Unfortunately, you cannot integrate external elements likeSpline 3DorLottie animation filesinto Canva. Canva is a simple design app that offers great access to design tools but comes with the unfortunate result of being difficult to create or use new, unique design elements like traditional website builders offer.
5. No SEO Tools
If you’re building a website with a tool like WordPress, you have SEO plugins like Yoast to help push your website to the top of Google’s algorithm. Unfortunately, there’s no such plugin for Canva.
You’ll need tolearn SEO skillsand apply them yourself rather than relying on a plugin or internal SEO tools. It’s never a bad idea to improve your knowledge of SEO if you’re creating a website or trying to improve your online presence, though.
Is Canva’s Website Builder Worth Using?
Canva’s website builder is great for content creators, small businesses, and design novices or those who don’t need anything complex. It’s a free tool with very few paid-for features or add-ons, and the result will be a fully functioning website.
Canva’s website builder isn’t the best choice if you want to develop a website from scratch and use integrated features like Spline 3D, complex forms, or in-depth coding.
