Canva Websites in 2024: Pros, Cons, and FAQ’s
Holy Canva!
They did it again.
Canva continues to absolutely CHANGE THE GAME for creatives of all types.
You know the story:
They started out as a nice little graphics design company…
And then sometime in the past few years, Canva absolutely erupted:
- Canva Websites
- Scheduling
- AI content creation
- Embedded Apps
- Videos
- Animation
Oh my!
For many of the nonprofit and spiritual folks we work with, Canva is the go-to for creating social media posts, communications graphics, presentations or anything else that requires a creative flair. It’s FREE for nonprofits, easy to learn, and extremely capable.
Earlier versions of the website option limited you to one long page, with no menu navigation and no options for SEO or insights. Having built a few Canva sites myself, I can confidently say they have made some progress.
In case you missed it, here is our 2023 Pros and Cons video
That being said… there are still some “Cons” to report – and we’ll get to those.
But *spoiler alert* we find there to be way more “Pros” than cons.
Let’s get into it…
Pros
- Both the free and Pro versions of Canva allow you to build websites. Pro version gives you more templates to choose from.
- When using Canva as the hosting provider, you can develop and publish a website at completely no cost. Yup – FREE WEBSITE.
- Multiple templates to choose from; filters; slides to build pages, call-to-action, contact forms.
- Great way to quickly make a mobile-ready website with premade templates if most of your audience is viewing on mobile phones. Just make sure to check the mobile version of your site so you can fix any responsiveness issues..
- Great option when you need a creative and professional-looking landing page… digital business card
- Easily customizable with all the features you would expect in Canva – can change colors, fonts, text, sizing; and even add links to buttons
- Can easily embed your Canva images and videos on the templates
- There is a Navigation bar functionality with auto scroll down to the page you click on
- While multipage functionality is not ‘built in’ to canva websites, you can hack your way around it. Essentially you would create your additional pages as “sites” that link from your home page. Instead of publishing “with navigation” you publish without navigation and instead, set up custom links (via text or graphics) to your “sub pages”. Drop Down/Hamburger Menu on Canva Websites | MULTIPLE PAGE WEBSITE
- Contact form is also possible using an integration with Google Forms, Tally or Microsoft Forms
- To extend its functionality, there are many apps (think “plugins”) that can be added into a Canva website. E.g Google Maps, Pixabay, Emoji..all the usual apps you would expect to be able to embed.
- You can sell Digital Products, even if not directly through Canva – we walked throught that process in this video.
- AI for the win! The newest, hottest, trendiest features for Canva are around, no surprise – AI! And its quite magical.
- Canva now has:
- Magic Write (think ChatGPT) give it a prompt and it generates text for your site that you can refine and edit for your needs. Similar to ChatGPT, but with the convenience of having it directly in Canva.
- Magic Design leverages AI to use your own photos or videos to create customized templates for your image.
- Text to Image (think midjourney) – this is an “App” as opposed to a native element of Canva that also works from your prompts to describe the type of image you want.
- Some work well, some need some work
- Expand and remove background good
- Creating an image off text needs work
- Hot off the press: Design Lab!
- Canva now has:
- Canva now has SEO capabilities – not a ton, but…
- Pages do get indexed regularly –
- Canva websites don’t collect cookies! There is no need to have a cookie consent banner and have the website visitor acknowledge
Cons
- The URL link created with the free Canva domain has “canva” as part of the name, communityame.my.canva.site. This is generally bad form and not exactly professional, however you can mask this with a bit.ly link.
- Canva Free users can publish five (5) websites, and Canva Pro users can publish unlimited websites. If you have existing domains that you want to use, Canva Pro users can connect up to five domains to Canva.
- You can purchase a domain right through Canva but it is a little pricier than standard domain providers. You could make the argument that this cost would balance out because you don’t need a hosting provider.
- Buttons still do not allow for any animation when you hover over them, though they do have a good variety of stylized buttons with pointy fingers that help to indicate the element is a clickable button.
- Customized mobile view is not possible – so they look the same
- Ecommerce sites, as we know them, are not natively possible in Canva. You can embed photos of products and “buy” buttons, but they will need to be directed to an external site.
- While the apps greatly extend the functionality, it does come at a performance price. Adding a number of these apps, we found slows down the load time of the website. It’s not soul crushing, its something to be aware of. This is a factor in Google search rankings.
- It claims to be SEO friendly, but with the absence of the industry standard measurements (Header tags, etc) it is really difficult to evaluate. The most “SEO” we have seen is the ability to add a website description.
- Mobile version can be difficult – as seen in our other videos about resizing graphics/needing to group items together so they don’t go above/below each other on mobile and stay side to side
- Another HUGE CON: impossible to add HTML coding
- This is a huge CON because you cannot add Google tag/ any tracking code to a pag – which ultimately means limited analytics on where traffic comes from.
Overall, Canva Websites continue to improve on features and functionality. There is a place for it, but it may not be the right fit for your community or business.
What do you think? How are you using it, or would like to use it? Drop us an email and let us know!