We Tried Canva Websites, Here’s What We Think!
Many people are familiar with Canva for their shop designs, social media posts, reels, or school projects. Some people see Canva as a free design platform for those who can’t afford graphic designers or graphic software like Illustrator or Photoshop. We recently saw an increase in business owners recommending Canva as a website platform, and as we were curious we had to try it out.
We’ll go ahead and break the ice now, Canva is not the place nor should it be for anyone to build their website on.
We want to help everyone understand why, although Canva may advertise that you can make websites on their platform, there are significant downsides to using it for your business website that will affect your lead generation and sales.
What is Canva?
Canva is an online platform that allows people to create graphics, design brochures, and flyers, create social media posts, and more. You’ve already seen the templates packs by now that you can purchase, and customize that fit your branding or the printable planners. We use Canva for our social media posts – it’s great, it’s easy to use but in saying all of that it’s not a website-building tool for businesses.
What’s So Important About a Website?
Your website is the first impression of your business, it’s a digital eco-system. It’s where people go to find out more, learn about what you do, and see if they want to work with you or buy from you. If it looks unprofessional, dated, or doesn’t function well on different devices, visitors are going to be less likely to stick around.
Here’s some quick stats that we pulled solely on user experience!
- 90% of users stopped using an app due to poor performance.
- 52% of users say the main reason why they won’t return to a website is aesthetics.
- 48% of users get frustrated when a website is not mobile responsive.
When building a website, a few key components that web developers build into the site are:
- Mobile Responsive for Tablet & Mobile Devices
- SEO Optimized for Rankings
- eCommerce Capabilities for Selling Products
- Built-In Blogging Platform
- Accessibility for anyone with a disability
What are the Problems with Canva Websites?
No True Responsive Design
Canva websites are not responsive, although there are videos out there showing how to make a mobile-friendly site, all these are doing is creating a “site” within the dimensions of a mobile phone. If you opened that site on a desktop, then the dimensions are not going to be correct, and vice versa. Responsive design is where your site is built to be usable on practically any screen size. The goal is that your user should have the same or very similar experience no matter what device they are using. It’s not built to be responsive across different types of screens and formats.
Not SEO Friendly
Canva gives you no ability to optimize your website for Search Engine Ranking. You can’t add titles, meta descriptions, or keywords to your pages. You also don’t have the ability to connect a Google Analytics account for tracking and insights on how people are using your site.
Lacks eCommerce Capabilities for Selling Products
You can sell products through Canva but it’s not built as an online shopping cart where you’re able to create a product catalog, add multiple photos for each item, set different prices, view sales reports, or even set up an abandoned cart email strategy. The only way you can do this is if you have an existing online store that’s built on another platform like Shopify or Squarespace, or linking product links from other platforms’ checkouts.
No Built-In Blogging Platform
Like WordPress, which was originally built for blogging you have the ability to post blogs and share content on your website. With the way Canva websites are built, there’s no way for you to create a search engine-optimized blog, at most you can create pages with blocks of texts.
You’re limited to what you can post as a “blog” and it’s not going to help with your website ranking or generating leads.
Not Optimized for Website Accessibility
Accessibility is a key component of any website, and this means that anyone from someone that’s color-blind, low vision to those who are deaf can access your site or even someone that might have a temporary disability, with Canva you don’t have the ability to make your pages accessible for everyone which will affect your sales and in some cases be a legal issue.
Frequently Asked Questions
Canva is not designed to handle complex e-commerce websites or custom web applications. While it can be useful for creating visual assets for these types of websites, the actual development and functionality of e-commerce websites or custom web applications require specialized tools and expertise in web development languages and frameworks.
Canva does not offer specific SEO optimization features within its platform. While you can create visually appealing designs for your website using Canva, implementing SEO best practices such as meta tags, alt text, and proper heading structure would typically be done within your website’s content management system or through other SEO tools.
Canva does not provide built-in analytics features for websites created using their platform. Canva primarily focuses on design creation and offers tools for creating graphics, but it does not offer comprehensive website analytics capabilities.
At most, you can use a tool that tracks where someone clicks to your domain from, but not more intuitive analytics data.
Canva’s design templates are not inherently responsive, meaning they are not automatically optimized for different screen sizes. However, Canva does provide some flexibility in terms of resizing and adapting designs manually to fit mobile devices. It’s important to consider responsive design principles when using Canva for website elements and ensure that the final website is mobile-friendly by using responsive website development tools or frameworks.
Conclusion
Our conclusion, Canva should not be used as a website platform for businesses. There are significant downsides to using Canva for your business site where you won’t be able to achieve the same results as if you were using a platform like WordPress, Squarespace, or Shopify.
If you did try to make a Canva website, and try to build out everything you need – in the end, you still are going to run into roadblocks, as well as the time spent creating that you could have just applied it to building a website or hiring a website developer to do it properly for your business.
If you’re looking for a quick and easy website that you can get online without too much effort, we recommend against using Canva websites. While they may seem like a good option at first, there are several drawbacks that make them less than ideal for businesses. Mobile responsiveness, lack of eCommerce capabilities, and poor SEO friendliness are just some of the reasons why you should steer clear of Canva websites. If you need help finding the right website platform for your business, our team at Wild Spirit Development would be more than happy to assist you. Book a discovery call with our team and we can discuss the best options for you!
