This blog post has been authored by Stand Out Online Member Lauren Russell, Wild Spirit Development
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, that 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. Which 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 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?
Mobile Responsive
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 vise 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.
SEO Optimization for Rankings
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.
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 and set different prices. 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.
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 sCanva website is 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.
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.
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.
Hi there! I’m Lauren, a website developer that works with business owners to establish their online presence and help them do better business online.
To accomplish a businesses’ goals, I work one-on-one with clients to develop a website that provides a great user experience from the second a visitor lands on a page, to incorporating sales funnels that work and bring their business more clients.
My favorite point in a project is when a client see’s the end goal, and gets excited for the new changes that are on the horizon for their business. A new spark of excitement for their business happens, and being part of that time for a client is more th