If your building your side hustle, a hair business, cake business, coaching, baby sitting services or tutoring, you need a website to validate your authenticity to the customer. In the meantime you are trying to figure how to do this on a shoe string with a budget you do not have.
Canva keeps popping up as a tool to design websites. You think it looks simple and you have probably used it for some basic graphics before. Compared to WordPress you think that its cheaper and easier because you believe the WordPress is expensive, complicated, intimidating and techy.
In this guide Ill tell you what each platform can a cant do, the limitations of each and which one makes sense based on the stage you are at in your side hustle journey.
What Canva Websites Are Built For
If you already know Canva, you can have a basic page live within a few hours using one of their templates. Canva websites are fast to set up and easy to use.
For someone testing an idea, as only 65% of UK sole traders have a website. Speed is genuinely useful. You can put something online quickly, share the link on your social media and see if people are interested before you commit to anything bigger.
The free plan puts your site on a Canva subdomain, so your address will look like yourname.my.canva.site. You can connect a custom domain on their paid plan, which will give it more of a more professional feel.
Where a Canva website works well:
- You are testing a new idea with no budget
- You need something live quickly as a placeholder
- You are not yet taking clients and just want a basic presence
- You already use Canva and want to stay in one tool for now
Once your side hustle starts growing though, you will begin to notice the limitations. And they are significant.
Where Canva Websites Fall Short
Canva was built for design, not for running a business online. There is no built-in blog, no booking system, no e-commerce and no email list integration. With limitations like these my clients realise that they cannot add a contact form, can’t take bookings and is not showing up on google. This means starting all over again on WordPress. Rebuilding from scratch. This is a waste of time and energy and most of all, lost revenue.
The inability to tap into SEO is the greatest obstacle. This is what affects side hustlers the most. Canva gives you very little control over how your site appears in search results. Without an SEO plugin or proper page optimisation, showing up in local search results is a real challenge. I saw this recently with a tutoring service I put a proposal together for. Google had barely registered them.
What Canva websites can’t do:
- Rank competitively on Google for your services
- Take bookings or payments directly
- Run a blog to attract search traffic
- Grow into a fully functional business site
- Give you the same level of ownership and control as a self-hosted platform
Canva Website vs WordPress: What WordPress Gives You
WordPress powers over 40% of the entire internet. It is the industry standard for a reason.
With WordPress you own everything. Your content, your data, your site structure. You are not building on someone else’s platform with someone else’s rules. If Canva ever changed their pricing or shut down their website feature, your site would be at risk. With WordPress, that is not a concern.
You also get full SEO control. Everything can be optimised with its own title, description and keywords. You can install plugins that guide you through the process. You can write blog posts that bring in organic traffic month after month.
Another client of mine runs a herbal shop in Perry Barr. Within the first few months of launching his WordPress site, he was appearing in local Google search results for his services. He had not paid for ads. The site was doing the work for him.
WordPress also scales with you in a way that other platforms struggle to match. Start with a simple five page site and add a shop, a blog, a booking calendar or a membership area as your business grows. These features exist within the same ecosystem, so you are not patching together separate tools or paying for a different app for every new thing you want to do.
On platforms like Shopify, adding bookings, memberships and digital downloads means stacking third party apps on top of each other, each with their own monthly cost and none of them designed to work together from the start. On WordPress, it all lives under one roof. You are not starting over every time you level up, and you are not paying more every time your business gets more interesting.
What Does a WordPress Website Cost in the UK?
A large agency will quote you anywhere from £8,000 to £15,000 and ask you to wait three months. That is not the only option available to you.
As a solo designer, my starter packages are £1,500 and I deliver in 2 to 4 weeks. I also offer payment plans, so you are not handing over a lump sum at once if budget is limited.
You do not need to be earning money from your side hustle before you invest in a website. Most of my clients use their full-time income to fund the initial cost, the same way you would fund any other business start-up expense. Some use a credit card and clear it over a few months. Some save a set amount each month until they reach their budget. A website is part of how your business takes off.
So…Canva Website or WordPress Website?
Put simply, if you are at the very beginning, still testing your idea, not yet taking clients and you have no budget at all right now, a Canva website can hold the space for you while you get started. As of 2025, there were 5.4 million micro businesses in the UK so using Canva as a temporary measure can help in some way.
If you are serious about your side hustle, you are actively looking for clients, you want to be found on Google and you want a professional online presence that works as hard as you do, WordPress is the right choice. It is built for business.
The sooner you make the move, the sooner your site starts building authority with Google. Waiting another six months means six months of lost search visibility.
I’m Onika Sabrina, web designer in Great Barr, Birmingham who works exclusively with side hustles and small businesses. Transparent pricing from £1,500, payment plans available, your website delivered in 2-4 weeks and SEO to grow. No agency overhead, no corporate pricing, just affordable websites that convert.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Is Canva or WordPress better for website design?
For a business website, WordPress is the better choice. Canva produces visually appealing pages quickly but lacks the SEO functionality, blogging capability and scalability a growing business needs. Canva works well as a placeholder. WordPress works for businesses that need to be found on Google and grow without switching platforms every time their needs change
Is making a website on Canva worth it?
As a temporary placeholder, yes. If you are testing an idea with no budget and just need something live quickly, Canva gets you there fast. As a long term business website, no. The SEO limitations alone will hold you back from being found by new clients.
Can I use Canva for a WordPress website?
Yes, in a limited way. You can design graphics, banners and images in Canva and upload them to your WordPress site. What you cannot do is build your WordPress site inside Canva. They work best together rather than as replacements for each other.
Canva website vs WordPress pricing
Canva’s free plan includes basic website publishing on a Canva subdomain. Their Pro plan starts at around £10.99 per month for a custom domain. WordPress is free but requires hosting at roughly £5 to £15 per month plus a domain name. A professionally built WordPress site is a separate investment that pays for itself through search visibility and client enquiries over time.
How much is Canva website hosting?
On the free plan your site sits on a Canva subdomain at no cost. To use your own domain you need Canva Pro at around £10.99 per month. There is no separate hosting fee but you are tied to Canva’s infrastructure, their rules, their pricing decisions and their limitations for as long as you use it.