I love, love Canva. I use it daily for all of my different businesses. I’ve even been to skill shares at their headquarters in Sydney! But did you even know you can use Canva to build a website? I didn’t know that until a client came to me and asked me to rebuild her Canva website in WordPress.
Canva is amazing at what it does. I’ve built so many images and graphics and things in Canva over the years. I use it for my Pinterest images, for backgrounds and textures for my website designs, and for graphics for newsletters. I even use it to make the covers for my teaching resources. Canva can even make gifs and other animations files, which are super fun to play around with!
So how do you use Canva to build a website? It’s surprisingly easy! They have a free website maker. You just click a button to get started in their website builder. Once you’re in there, designing a website is just like creating any other Canva design!
It’s super easy to use. It’s all drag and drop. Canva works more like a graphic design tool than a website builder, so it’s overall more user-friendly than other ways to build a website. You have access to all of Canva’s graphics, photos, fonts, etc. to use for your site. It’s all right there in one place, which makes designing a website so much easier. However, it’s really easy because it’s extremely limited. There’s just not the level of functionality that you would have with a WordPress site.
What can you do with a free Canva website?
The honest answer is ‘not much.’ That’s why my client was contacting me to help her switch to WordPress. You can add images and text, and links. You can even get fancy and add in some animations if you’d like. But beyond that, you can’t do a whole lot.
As far as I can tell, there’s no way to add plug ins for tracking stats or backing up your site. And no way to connect your mailing list or add a contact form unless it’s via a link. You can add a menu to the top of the site using the different page titles of your document. But I’m not really sure how great a Canva website would be for SEO.
As far as mobile responsiveness goes, it exists, but it’s not the best. Canva automatically resizes your designs for phone, which is a great start. That saves a ton of time. But if you edit the designs, they may start to look wonky on the phone version, and then it takes a lot of time to fix them. There’s also no option to resize for tablets or larger screens, it’s just the desktop and phone versions.
If you just need a super basic splash page for something like an event, a free Canva website would probably work great. Or maybe you just need somewhere you can send people from social media to see your content and links. If you need to set something up quickly and for free, it could be a good option. But you’re never going to get the level of functionality that you would get with a hosted WordPress website. (I recommend using SiteGround & the Divi theme.)
How do I publish a website on Canva?
When it’s time to publish your free Canva website, you have a few options. You can use a free Canva domain to host your site, which is nice because it makes the entire process free. You can also purchase a domain for your website. You can do that right there in Canva or through an outside company like SiteGround. Either way, the process is super simple and Canva has customer support to guide you through it if you get stuck.
Summary: Should I use Canva to build my website?
You can use Canva to publish a website if you want to. However, I don’t recommend it, even for beginner sites. I often end up having to rebuild these sites in WordPress anyway. They aren’t super flexible and it’s hard to make them mobile responsive. Canva is built for graphic design, which is different enough from web design that it just doesn’t work smoothly.
If you think you might want to grow your site at all by adding additional functionality or a lot more content, it’s going to be really difficult to do that in Canva. In my opinion, it’s best to start off with a platform that can do the things you need it to do from the beginning, or to choose a more flexible started platform. To guide you through the process, I created a 10 day challenge for people who want to DIY their website using WordPress instead.
