If you're looking for the best way to grow your brand online, you need a tool that can help build awareness, boost visibility, help you stand out. Essentially, creating a beautiful website is a must for any brand or business. Canva, the graphic design tool that populates your brochures, wedding invitations, and blog copy with delightful images and graphic designs, allows you to design Canva websites.

But are Canva websites worth it? Let's start at the beginning, culminating in Canva pros and cons and our verdict on Canva websites.

The Canva Website Process

Before you start designing content for your business, you have to sign up for Canva. Signing up for Canva is simple; enter your name and email address.

Once you sign in to the website, it's time to familiarize yourself with templates.

Getting Familiar with Templates

Once you sign up and make your way to the website builder, it's time to pick a template that works for you. Strangely enough, Canva categorizes them by color and not by business type.

While not a deal-breaker, we found this a bit irritating when looking for the best Canva website design. Couldn't we add colors later?

Canva Images: Free or Paid?

While scrolling through the options, you'll often notice that Canva designs will tout that a specific image, design, or template is free or included with Canva Pro. Not a problem, right?

Well, while we were perusing the multitude of options, we couldn't determine what was free or paid.

We have to admit that this was much more of a problem than simple categorization preferences.

We can't tell you how many times we've sifted through the extensive Canva graphic catalog only to meet stiff resistance.

Find yourself scrolling endlessly through templates to find the perfect one only to find out that you can't use it? Not a good look, literally and figuratively.

No Response From Canva Websites

When crafting the perfect content to post, you want it to be responsive to every platform you view it on. You don't want the integrity of the elements on your page to change from desktop to mobile platforms.

Unfortunately, with Canva websites, designs are responsive. This means that there's no one-size-fits-all (literally) version of your online page. In this day and age, that's a bit of a problem.

Sharing Canva Websites Is Caring

With Canva, you can collaborate and edit photos, images, and designs with team members. Much like Google Ads, sharing access is crucial to any marketing or advertising campaign.

When creating a site with a team, it's great to have that unfettered access that makes everything simpler. With Canva, getting that new blog page ready to publish or get an ad campaign underway is excellent when you can collaborate openly.

Just make sure you're on the same page with your SEO copywriter to ensure everything comes together for your website.

The Different Canva Website Plans: Which Is Best?

What Canva plan should you choose for your business? It depends.

There are three Canva plans, including the standard free option. Pro and Enterprise are paid options ($9.99 and $30.00, respectively).

With Pro, you get all of the existing free options, plus you can use over 400,000 new templates for your designs. You also get access to stock images and the chance to upload your own fonts and logos.

With the Enterprise option, Canva begins to look more like a well-run operation. For example, you can share access with team members, add workflows, and unlimited storage. And, of course, you have everything both the free and Pro versions have.

Each version of Canva is excellent, and each plan suits different situations. If you're running a small company, Pro or Enterprise is your option. If you're someone just starting to learn web design basics, maybe opt for the free plan.

Canva Websites: Our Verdict

Overall, while viable, creating a Canva website is often much more trouble than it's worth. And this is coming from huge Canva fans! However, there are still benefits to using Canva. Let's look at some pros and cons of Canva website templates.

Canva Pros:

• Extensive customization of templates
• Great selection of designs
• Good UX/UI

Canva Cons:

• Unresponsive web design and optimization
• Categorization of templates leaves much to be desired
• Inability to determine what's free or paid on Canva websites

We've already covered how we feel about templates vs. custom-made websites, so you can imagine our feelings regarding the customization (or lack thereof).

Wrapping Things Up

In short, Canva serves as a great visual tool.

But for websites? That's where it gets a little trickier.

If you're aiming to craft flashy and creative web graphics and brochure designs, Canva is fantastic. You can spend hours tinkering around with logo designs, blog page layouts, and more. Truly an unbeatable platform to let your creative side run wild and flourish. Pepper your blog posts with great custom images.

But when you want to start creating a website from the ground up, Canva lacks in many ways. You'd be better off using an Internet staple like WordPress to craft your web content and brand your website.

Listen, we love Canva, and it works as a fantastic supplemental website branding tool. But it doesn't have the same user-friendly UX/UI and capabilities that some other alternatives have. And when you need to help customers on their journey down the marketing funnel, you need the best design you can get.

Canva works well in many ways but comes up short in others. Determine what you need from a Canva website, how that facet will work for you, and what alternatives can serve you better.