The latest report in our series looking at online website builder tools, and this time it’s Canva. As with the rest of this series, it’s been done by my 11 year old son, who’s technical – but 11, so doesn’t have any business experience or much experience of online systems (except for those he builds himself!).

Using Canva’s free website builder

I recently tried using Canva to create a website for a made-up business, Magenta Interiors, in order to see what it was like as a website builder. These are my findings for anyone who is looking for a good website builder to use to start their business.

I started by searching Canva website builder in Google, clicking on Canva, and since I already had an account I could get started straight away. I began by searching for and selecting a theme that I liked. I chose to add all five sections of that theme to my page, then got to work changing the images and text.

I must say, Canva’s image generator is VERY good. Completely for free, I could make any image of a nice interior that I wanted. Admittedly, if you were making a website for an actual company you would use your own images and not AI’s, but it was nevertheless very good. I also managed to create decently good videos and 3D models.

Changing and deleting sections was very easy. Sections are horizontal, full-width rows that group related content into distinct, manageable segments. I have used many website builders, and Canva is BY FAR the nicest to use. It is intuitive and easy to understand, not annoying like WordPress can be, and is very quick. However, there are some aspects of it that could be improved. For example, you can’t add a blog without making it an individual page or section. This means that you can’t have things like comments or likes or anything like that. The way to get around this is to link your Canva project to a third-party website.

On a similar note, you cannot sell things directly through Canva in the same way that you can with Wix or other website builders. You would have to, once again, link to a third-party marketplace such as Etsy. However, in my opinion, the biggest problem with Canva is the fact that you cannot edit directly in the mobile view. Websites that you make will look great on desktop, but once you go to mobile it will fall considerably. And there isn’t a clear way to get around this, other than just fiddling around, hoping to improve it when you preview it in mobile mode.

Hopefully Canva will improve this in the future, but for the time being that is the main thing that prevents Canva from being the PERFECT website builder.

Also, I couldn’t figure out how to customize my header. It works fine, you just name your pages and Canva puts a header there automatically, but I couldn’t figure out how to customise it. The header does perfectly match my theme though, so either it automatically matches your site or I just got lucky. 

Title tags for SEO in Canva

In Canva you can give individual pages names. This will affect what appears in your website’s tab in someone’s browser. Do it by clicking publish website, then in the menu clicking settings at the bottom, then going to pages and changing your pages’ names. Then click continue to publish at the bottom.

One odd thing that I picked up on is that in other website builders there is the option to replace an image, but in Canva there isn’t. You need to delete the image, and then insert and resize another one to replace it. It doesn’t hinder your experience much at all, it’s just something I noticed.

I ran Canva through a tool called Page Speed Insights and got these reports. (bearing in mind this is done with just the base website, no SEO tweaks or anything done to it).

Canva: conclusion

Overall, Canva is a very pleasant website builder to use. However, by choosing it you are sacrificing on functionality, SEO, performance and enhanced mobile compatibility.