canva-to-html vs Canva's built-in export

Canva can export your design as an image or PDF. But if you built a website, you probably want an actual website.

What Canva export gives you

Canva has an export button. It works well for what it does. You can download your design as a PNG, JPG, PDF, SVG, or even a video. These are all flat files. They are great for printing, sharing on social media, or embedding in a document.

But none of those formats are a website. If you built a multi-page Canva site with animations, scroll effects, and interactive elements, exporting as a PNG gives you a still image. That is not what you spent all that time designing.

What canva-to-html gives you

canva-to-html captures your published Canva website the way a visitor would see it. It opens the site in a real browser, scrolls through every page, collects every asset, and packages it all into a zip file.

What you get is the actual working site:

You can open the zip, run it on your computer, and see your site working exactly as it does on Canva. Then you can host it on Netlify, Vercel, or Cloudflare Pages for free.

The key difference

Canva export is designed for print and social. It turns your design into a picture. canva-to-html is designed for the web. It turns your published site into files you can host, edit, and own.

If you want to put a Canva design on a poster, use Canva's export. If you want to put a Canva website on your own domain, use canva-to-html.

What about Canva's website hosting?

Canva does host your site for you at a yoursite.my.canva.site address. That works fine for some people. But if you want a custom domain, better performance, or just to own your files, you will need the HTML. Canva does not give you that. We do.

You can read more about why you might want to leave Canva hosting.

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