So there I was, making my way around the internet, following one random thought/idea after another, and I ended up seeing someone selling a website template for Canva. What? Making a website on Canva? Is this even possible? Well, the short answer is No. Let’s explore…
A while ago, Canva released the option to be able to publish a design as a web page. And if you consider that a web page is a page of information available at a specific address on the web, then it would meet that definition. It is a viable option to use for your business? In my experienced opinion, no it is not.
You cannot specify a domain name.
When you publish a Canva design as a web page, you cannot specify the domain name or URL that it will be available at. You just get a randomly generated URL on Canva’s server. This is not a good idea for your branding, since you want people to remember your business or website name, not Canva’s.
Cannot embed optin forms
There’s no way to embed custom HTML or optin forms on this page, so if you wanted to invite your customers to join your email marketing list, you’d have to send them to another page somewhere else to do so.
Load time
Even the very simple demo page I made took 1.6s to load in my speed tests. My full website, which includes more content, images, and resources, loads in only 1.4s.
Cannot optimize for SEO
Other than using keywords in your content, there’s no way to optimize the page(s) for SEO. Lots of the work for effective SEO happens “off page” or outside of/in addition to the content.
No Functional Blog
Almost any marketing person will tell you that one of the more effective ways to bring traffic (i.e. potential customers) to your site is to add relevant content regularly (i.e. blog posts). The Canva website has no functional blog system so if you did try to write blog posts there, you would have to create each one as a separate page and manually add it to the “home” page or wherever you want it to be linked. And since you can’t optimize for SEO ranking, and it’s not on your domain, any search engine benefit would really go to Canva, not you.
Cannot easily sell products
There’s also no eCommerce options or a functional way to sell products. Like I mentioned with blog posts, you could set up a page for each product and manually add it to others, but it really shouldn’t be that much work to keep a cohesive website together.
Is there any practical use for a webpage made in Canva?
Given the above specified limitations of a website made in Canva, I can’t recommend using it to make a website for really any purpose, at least not long term. I could almost understand using it to make a links page or temporary landing page for a new domain while the main site is being built, but even for those situations, there are much better options available, for little to no cost.
Want to see an example?
I created a mockup of my site in Canva and published it as a website.