Can you make a Canva portfolio website? What the free plan covers

A Canva portfolio can be a real website, not just a PDF. Canva's help center says free accounts can publish five sites on a my.canva.site address, up to ten sections per page, with a "Designed with Canva" footer. A custom domain and removing that footer both need a paid plan.

A friend of ours asked last week whether she could just build her design portfolio in Canva, since she already had her case studies laid out there as slides. The answer was yes, and also "it depends what you mean by portfolio." Canva does two different things under that word, and the free plan treats them differently. We read Canva's help center and pricing page directly today (the help page blocks plain scripted requests, so we opened it in a browser) to write down what is actually promised.

A Canva portfolio is either a file or a website

The first one is a design you export: a multi-page PDF or a presentation you send as an attachment or a link. That is the version most "Canva portfolio template" searches are after, and it works fine for a job application where someone asks for a PDF.

The second is Canva Websites, where you design in the same editor and press Publish. Canva's own help page lists portfolios among the things you can build this way, next to landing pages and bio link sites. This is the version people mean by "Canva portfolio website," and it's the one with limits worth reading before you commit.

Two details from that page are easy to miss:

• If you start from a mobile website or a Link in Bio template, the design publishes to a canva.link address only. Canva says the free .canva.site address, purchased domains and connected domains are not available for that design type. To get them you resize to a Website template or start over from one.
• A design that wasn't built as a website gets turned into one on publish, but a presentation opens in presenter view like a slideshow, and a video plays in a video player. If you want a normal scrolling page, you start from the Website format.

What the free plan actually restricts

Reading the same page, the free limits are specific:

• Five published sites on the free my.canva.site domain. Canva Pro has no cap there.
• Ten sections per page when published. You can design with up to 20 sections per page on Free, but if a page goes past ten, Canva prompts you to cut sections or upgrade before it will publish.
• 45 pages per multi-page site (a design-time limit that Canva states for the site as a whole).
• A "Designed with Canva" footer that includes Canva's privacy policy link and, per the help page, can't be removed on a Free plan.
• No custom domain. Using your own domain is listed for Pro, Teams and Education.

On price, Canva's pricing page shows Canva Pro at US$144 per year for one person as of today. That is the cost of getting a domain of your own and losing the footer, and it also buys everything else in Canva, which may be the reason you're paying anyway.

For a portfolio, the ten-section cap is the one that bites first. A section is a vertical block of the page. A case study with a hero, a problem statement, three image rows, a quote, and a results block is already seven or eight of them. Two projects on one long page and you're over the line.

Where a Canva portfolio website holds up, and where it doesn't

Canva is good at what it was built for: layout, typography and image treatment, with templates that look designed. If your work is visual and you already live in the editor, the speed is real. Page-level title and description fields and a search visibility switch are there too, which covers the basics of being findable.

What it isn't built around is the everyday job of a portfolio link: the thing you paste into a job application, an email signature or a social profile and expect to keep working. A my.canva.site address on the free plan is under Canva's name, and if you later switch to your own domain the old link is a different URL.

That's the gap we built Nameplate to cover, and it comes with its own trade-offs. A Nameplate page is a single profile made of blocks (projects, links, a contact card, a form) published at nameplate.cc/yourname, and the free plan has no time limit. We fetched two live public pages today: both return 200, ship index, follow, carry a canonical URL pointing at themselves, and come to about 21 KB of HTML. The free plan allows one published profile and puts a small "Made with Nameplate" badge on the page; custom domains and badge removal are on Pro, which is $12 a month or $120 a year. You can browse how that plays out for different kinds of work in the portfolio examples and the template gallery.

We should be plain about where it loses. Nameplate is not a design tool. You pick a template and arrange blocks; you can't drag an element to any pixel position, and a heavily art-directed layout is easier in Canva. Page titles carry a "— Nameplate" suffix by default. And if your employer wants a PDF, Canva is the tool for that and we are not.

A two-minute check before you commit to either

Whichever route you take, test the link as a stranger would:

1. Publish, then open the link in a private window on your phone, on mobile data rather than Wi-Fi.
2. Scroll to the bottom and read the footer. Decide whether you're comfortable with someone else's name there.
3. Count your sections or blocks against the cap before you add the fifth project, not after.
4. Paste the link into a note and imagine it in a printed resume. If you may move to your own domain in a year, it's worth checking now how you'd redirect the old one. We cover the same trap for printed codes in our post on QR codes that keep working.

If you're still choosing between builders more broadly, what to check before you pick a portfolio maker goes through custom domains and branding on three other pricing pages.

Common questions

Is a Canva portfolio website free?

Publishing is free on Canva Free, to a my.canva.site address, with a limit of five published sites and ten sections per published page. The "Designed with Canva" footer stays on. Custom domains and unlimited sites need Canva Pro, listed at US$144 a year for one person on Canva's pricing page today.

Can I use my own domain for a Canva portfolio?

Yes, but not on the free plan. Canva's help center lists connecting or buying a domain for Pro, Teams and Education accounts, with up to five outside domains connected per Pro account. A Link in Bio or mobile website template can't use a custom domain at all; it publishes to canva.link.

Is there a free Canva portfolio template I can use?

Canva's help page says to start from Templates and search "website", then customise one or start from a blank website. Canva's pricing page counts premium templates in the Pro plan's library (3.6M+ against 1.6M+ on Free), so check what a template includes before you build a whole portfolio around it.

What is the best way to share a portfolio link?

Use one address you control and that won't change. Test it on a phone first, because most people will open it there. If you rely on a platform subdomain, keep a list of every place you've pasted it so you can update them if you move.

How do I make a portfolio for a job application?

Pick the three to five pieces most similar to the job, give each one a short description of your role and the outcome, and put your contact details near the top. Send a PDF if they ask for one and a link otherwise. Cutting to the relevant pieces matters more than the tool.

Can a Canva portfolio show up on Google?

It can. Canva's website settings include a search engine visibility switch and page-level titles and descriptions. Having a page that's allowed to be indexed doesn't mean it will rank, so give each page its own title and description, as Canva's help page itself advises.