Steve Ramos
What is Carrd?
Carrd is a simple website builder, just like Kartra or Clickfunnels but it is way more focused and optimized to create simple pages, like a portfolio or a personal profile. Carrd has more than 800,00 users and hosts more than 1.2 million sites. The platform is super easy to use, and the best part… it is free!
Carrd requires no coding skills and allows you to start building a professional website in no time with premade templates and a user-friendly interface.
Carrd Dashboard
The Carrd Dashboard is the first thing you will find after creating a free carrd account and sign up. It is pretty straightforward and doesn’t have lots of sections and features to overwhelm you.
You basically have the option to change the view to small and large icons or a list and a button to sort from newest and oldest.
There’s also a button to sort your sites to see only the drafts or published projects as well as the archived ones.
This may look too basic and simple for the more demanding users, but this is the magic of Carrd, simple and easy…
My Sites
On the Carrd dashboard, you can see at a glance all your sites (published and drafts).
In this section, you can easily edit your site, share it with other people, transfer the website to another user, make a copy of the site, archive it, or access the settings of a particular site.
Shared Sites
In this particular section, you can see all the Carrd sites that people shared with you and also the ones that other users shared with you.
You can use this section to collaborate with a team on a project. You are able to let other people edit your websites, and get access to other users’ websites.
How To Create a Page With Carrd
There are two ways of creating a page with Carrd: using a premade template or using a blank canvas and designing from scratch.
If you don’t have design skills, I’d recommend starting with card templates. You can create an awesome card website by using one of the pre-existing templates and modifying it.
All you have to do to get started is click the ” new site” button on the top corner of your dashboard.
Then you just have to navigate through all the templates or click “blank canvas” if you want to start from scratch (image of the bank canvas section with an arrow)
Carrd Editor
Before we dive deep into the creation of page sites, it is important to get to know the Carrd web builder.
Just like with other website builders, you have the page layout, the container inside the page layout, and then the elements like text and images inside the container.
In my opinion, the Carrd experience is pretty simple and straightforward. You don’t have a million feature options to tweak and this makes it less overwhelming to work with. If for any reason you need any assistance, you can use the Carrd Helper.
Page
The page section is the one that contains all the other elements: containers, text, images, icons, etc.
You can change basic settings like style, position, width, and padding in the top right corner.
There’s also a second tab where you can create and edit animations like fade in, and zoom in.
If you click outside of the page area, you can also change the background color of the project.
Container
The container has three tabs in the top right corner where you can change basic settings like type and columns in the first one.
There’s the appearance tab where you can change the styling like colors, margins, padding, and more.
The last one is the animations tab, where just like with the page, you can set up animations.
Elements
The elements also have three tabs. In the first one, you can change basic things like the text, upload the image, or change the icons. In the second you can change the appearance like the font, colors and more. In the third, there are the animations as in the previous ones.
Create a Page With Free Carrd Templates
Carrd offers many templates that you can use for free. Of course, the best carrd templates are only available in the paid plan. You can easily spot the pro templates in the gallery, as they have a small yellow rectangle on the top right corner of the template card.
You still have plenty of free carrd templates that you can use for many purposes. Let´s go through some of the categories and Carrd layouts.
Profile
This is probably the main reason why people use Carrd. This is why I discovered Carrd in the first place. I needed a simple personal page that I could use to feature my social media and work.
With Carrd you can create an aesthetic page very easily simply by using one of the well-predesigned pages that they already have for different styles.
Landing
A landing is basically a landing page. It is a little more elaborated than a profile page and allows you to sell a product or a service. This is perfect if you are a freelancer or a consultant and want to create a simple landing page for your business.
Carrd is way more simple and easy than most of the best sales funnel software in the industry and allows you to create a simple landing page in just a few minutes without any coding or design skills.
Form
Do you need to collect emails for your business or newsletter? Again, Carrd makes it super simple to do this with amazing design forms that you can use to boost your email marketing campaigns.
You just have to choose the fields you want to collect, adjust headings and colors and connect it to your favorite email autoresponder.
Portfolio
As the name says, these are portfolio templates. They are specially created for professionals who want to showcase their work.
This is perfect if you are a writer, photographer, or designer and need a simple portfolio to show on your social media or even attach to your CV.
Sectioned
Sectioned templates basically use multiple pages on one page. This is perfect if you want to create a simple page but need multiple sections.
This will use a carrd layout with buttons that will change the section of the page every time someone clicks on it.
New Carrd Website From Scratch
Making a carrd website is pretty simple and straightforward. Carrd offers all the necessary features and tools to create a nice page without any coding or design skills.
Let’s walk you through the process of creating a Carrd from scratch:
Step 1: Go to Carrd.co > Choose a Starting Point > Blank Canvas
You will land on a page like this, a blank Canvas.
I find it easier to start with a template I like and edit. I also recommend that to most people, especially if you are a beginner.
But if you have some experience with design and page editors, this might be just what you are looking for.
Carrd allows you to customize an entire web page from scratch just by adding elements and customizing the appearance and settings.
For this example, we will use a header, an image, some text, and a footer with social media icons.
Step 2: Adding a Header on Carrd
To add a header section to a Carrd page: click the ´+´button > #controls > Type: Header
Everything above the —–Header End—– will be the header section.
Everything below will be the body section.
Step 3: Choose and add an element to the page
By clicking on the ´+´on the right top corner you will be able to see a list of all the Carrd elements you can add to the page:
- Text
- List
- Image
- Video
- Links
- Audio
- Icons
- Gallery
- Table
- Timer
- Divider
If you have the Carrd Pro Plan you also have access to premium elements like forms, slideshow, widgets, and embedding.
The most basic elements are free, so unless you need one of these premium elements specifically, there´s no need to upgrade.
You can also add a new container to the page section if you want to add separate sections.
The last one is adding a control. This is used to mark where the header ends and where the footer ends. I will show you more about how this works after we add some elements.
Step 3: Edit the elements
After choosing the element you want to add to your page, it is time to customize it.
If you click on any element you add to the page, you will always see this window on the left with three tab sections at the top.
Here is where you change the text or image you want, colors, fonts, animations, and much more.
Carrd supports markdown formatting meaning that you can add the formatting that you can see in the picture above to change the text.
For example:
- **text** to bold the text
- __text__ to underline the text
You can see all of them right below the text field so you just have to copy and paste them.
If you change to the second tab you will see the appearance options and if you change to the third you will see the animation settings.
This process is exactly the same for other elements like images, videos, icons, etc.
Step 4: Adding a Footer On Carrd
To add a footer section to a Carrd page: click the ´+´button > #controls > Type: Footer Marker
Everything below the —–Footer Start—– will be the footer.
This makes it pretty easy to visualize the different sections of your web pages and add specific elements to them.
Step 5: Publish your Carrd Site
When you feel that your Carrd looks good, you have four options:
- Publish to a .carrd.co URL (this is free)
- Publish to a custom domain (this is a pro feature)
- Save as a template (this is a pro feature)
- Save as an offline draft (this is free)
To publish a free site: click on the hamburger menu on the top right > Publish… > Choose an available name for your Carrd domain > Click Publish.
If you want to have your own domain on your Carrd page, read our guide on how to choose the best domain name for your website and follow the steps to set up your custom domain name on Carrd
Your site will be live on the URL you choose and you can use it the way you want.
If you followed my steps, you ended up with something like this.
Of course, this is a super simple test page just to show you how it works. You are free to play around with it and create a much nicer design.
Best Free Carrd Templates
Most people choose to start a page from templates as they are very well designed. But which ones are the best?
Below I´ve compiled a list of the most used and popular Carrd templates that people use to create websites.
You can access most of them on the Carrd library after creating a free Carrd account.
Aesthetic Anime Carrd Template
The Aesthetic template is one of the most popular carrd templates. You can create a personalized page card for your favorite anime or cosplay.
This one is not on the Carrd library, but you can use the share code below to access the aesthetic anime carrd and build your own.
Profile Card Template
Freelancer template
Website template
Portfolio template
Most Popular Carrd Websites
Need some inspiration to create your masterpiece? Don’t worry, I´ve compiled a list of the best websites online built with Carrd so that you can take some ideas and see what´s possible with this free landing page builder.
Here are 10 of the best and most popular websites built with Carrd:
Carrd Tutorial in a Nutshell
As you can see from our carrd tutorial, creating a simple website is easier than ever and you don’t even have to spend any money.
Carrd is becoming more and more popular, especially among Twitter creators, for a reason: it is handy, beginner-friendly, and totally free unless you want to use some premium templates or use your own domain name for the webpage.
You can create pretty much anything you want with Carrd, you just have to be creative.
I hope that this card tutorial will help you create awesome single page websites that you can use to sell your products, showcase your work, or simply practice your landing page skills.
Carrd Tutorial Faqs
Carrd is a website builder just like Wix or Leadpages, but optimized to create simple one page websites, like portfolios, CVs, and landing pages. Its simplicity is what makes the software so popular among web creators.
Yes, Carrd is probably one of the simplest website builders online. You don´t need any code or design skills to create a beautiful one page website that you can showcase on your social media profiles.
A Carrd is usually composed of a header, body, and footer. You should include a heading with a clear and simple message and pictures or other visual elements. You should also include your social media cards, your portfolio, and links to your projects.
Yes, Carrd is free to use. You only need to upgrade to Carrd pro if you need any of the premium templates or features or want to use your custom domain on your website. With the free plan, your page comes with a ´built with Carrd´badge.
Carrd is perfect for simple one page websites because it doesn’t require any coding or design skills and it is free to use. If you are looking for more demanding projects like complex sales funnels or a whole website, I´d recommend something like Clickfunnels or Kartra.
