Canva websites vs a real business website

A Canva website is a perfectly good one page holding site and a poor foundation for a growing business. It is fast, presentable and free to start. What it lacks is the page structure, search control and portability that a site needs once you want strangers to find you rather than just friends.

Let me be fair to it first, because plenty of advice on this topic is snobbery dressed as expertise.

Where it genuinely works

A cake maker I know runs her entire business off one Canva page. Photos of her work, a short bit about her, a form, her Instagram handle. Every customer arrives from Instagram or word of mouth. They already know her name. They just want to see the cakes and get in touch.

For that job the page is excellent. It loads fast, it looks nice on a phone, it took her an afternoon, and it costs her almost nothing. Telling her to spend a few thousand on a proper site would be bad advice.

The same applies to a market trader, a tutor taking bookings from a Facebook group, a photographer whose work lives on Instagram, or anyone testing an idea before committing money to it. If your traffic comes from somewhere other than search, and one page holds everything you need to say, you have the right tool.

Where it stops being enough

The limits arrive in a predictable order.

First is structure. A business that does five things needs five pages, one per thing, each written for the person searching for that specific thing. Canva sites are built around design and single-page layouts, not around a site with real depth. Cramming five services onto one scrolling page reads worse and ranks worse.

Second is search control. Being found on Google is mostly about having a page that clearly answers a specific question, plus the technical scaffolding underneath: headings in the right order, internal links between pages, structured data, clean URLs. Design-first tools give you very little of that. You can set a title and a description. Beyond that you are largely trusting the platform.

Third is growth. A blog, location pages, a booking system, a shop, a proper enquiry flow into your email. Each of those is either awkward or impossible, and the workarounds accumulate until you are fighting the tool.

Fourth is portability. Your text and images can be copied out by hand. The design cannot. When you move, you rebuild. That is survivable if you plan for it, and it is worth knowing before you spend six months polishing something you will eventually throw away.

The honest test

Ask where your next ten customers will come from.

If the answer is Instagram, Facebook, referrals or people who already have your number, a one page site does the job and spending more is spending for the sake of it. Put the money into photos and posts instead.

If the answer is “someone in my town searching for what I do”, you need a site built for search. That means separate pages, ongoing content, a Google Business Profile pointing at it, and someone keeping the whole thing current. A design tool will not get you there no matter how good the page looks, and it is not designed to.

Most small businesses eventually need the second one, because social platforms give you reach you do not control and search gives you customers who are actively looking. But eventually is not today, and there is nothing wrong with running on a single page until the business earns the upgrade.

Moving on later

When the time comes, the move is a rebuild rather than a transfer, so treat it as one.

Keep your text somewhere outside the platform as you write it, a document is fine. Keep the original photos, not just the versions inside the design tool. Keep the domain in your own name. Do those three things from the start and moving later costs you a bit of design work and nothing else.

The same advice applies to any simple builder, and the parallel comparison for the other common one is in Google Sites vs a real website. If you want the wider picture of what a proper build costs, small business website cost has the ranges.

What we would tell you

If a one page site fits your business, we would tell you to stay on it and spend the money elsewhere. We have said that to people and meant it.

If you have outgrown it, our plans are £49, £99 and £199 a month with no contract, covering the site, hosting, updates and the work of getting found. Send us your current page and we will tell you honestly whether you need more than it, or whether it is doing its job perfectly well already.

A simple page that gets used beats an ambitious site that gets abandoned. Choose the one you will actually keep alive.