HOW TO CREATE A FREE OR VERY CHEAP LANDING PAGES WITH CARRD.CO

I recently discovered Carrd.co

It is a simple platform to create Landing pages (the typical landing pages).

There are many tools similar to Carrd.co, some free and some much more expensive.

Why and what am I using it for?

I am a FullStack web developer. I can perfectly do the frontend CSS work and set up a cheap hosting on one of my servers, why on earth would I want to pay for a platform that allows me to create pages and that "takes my work"?

There are several reasons, but the main ones are:

• Cheap, very very cheap and somewhat limited, but cheap at the end of the day.
• Carrd allows me to use the domain names, which allows me to have simple but professional looking websites.
• The time-saving. You can create in 5min a new website with a new domain, and it looks good aesthetically.
• Cost savings. My time is money. It would take much longer if I had to chop code, which means money for me.
• Having a hosting, no matter how simple it is, has a cost. This is what Carrd gives you including
• Easy editing without having to know how to code
• If in the future I want the HTML to put it on a server of mine ... I can do it !!!! This is not allowed by all platforms.
• Carrd is very SEO friendly, at least technically, below I comment on its negative points.
• It has aesthetically very attractive templates
• It is very very flexible with the design, you can modify almost everything without touching code.
• By default, it is all responsive (works well on mobiles, tablets and desktops).
• It has several integrations. For example, it allows you to put forms or integrate with Stripe (I have yet to test this). This allows to make a MVP (minimum viable product) very fast and validate if there are customers.

But not everything is good

It is a cheap service, which means it has limited options. In some cases too much.

It is designed to have a Landing Page, not a website with multiple pages. And I make the distinction because in some cases it is necessary to have more than a single Home page in the project. This means that if you want to have several pages (home, prices, who we are, history, a page for each product, ....) then Carrd is not for you.

It is not intended to have a multi-language page, although I want to try to make two different pages, with two subdomains for two different languages. The idea is to have en.domain.com, fr.domain.com and domain.com (for English). If you have few languages it is feasible. If you have many ... it's a hassle.

SEO has a problem, and that is that having only a single page ... you are very limited. You don't have the option to position several URLs of the domain to attack different keywords.

As for performance... I use stackdriver to monitor when I have websites down. I have noticed that during some days I have had intermittent downtime of 1 min on the website I have in Carrd. When I was visiting the site it was always online, so I guess it was intermittent downtime because it must have shared hosting with other sites (normal for the price).

The free version does not allow you to have custom domains

In which cases do I recommend using Carrd?

I would separate it in these cases:

• If you are looking to have several Landing Page with different domains and you want something easy and fast to use.
• If you want to have a Landing Page to use it as your contact website (show your photo and contact details, like your CV online).
• If you are developing several MVPs and want cheap and attractive Landing Pages with Stripe integration and/or forms.

Which ones don't I recommend?

• If you need to have the website translated into several languages.
• If you need to have several pages within the same domain.
• If you want to have a blog
• If you want an e-commerce
• If you want anything that means having more than a single page.

Why Carrd and not another one?

I haven't tried all the competitions, but I have tried some of them (maybe they have improved since the last time I saw them).

The ones I have tried always had some problems:

• Too expensive if you wanted to have multiple domains.
• They don't have integrations with forms or payment forms.
• They didn't look good on small screens because they didn't have responsive designs.
• The editing interface left much to be desired
• The footer always showed the company's branding
• They forced you to place advertisements
• They were very slow websites
• And many other disadvantages...

So far I have not had any of these problems with Carrd, so I recommend it.

Price

Carrd has several different rates, but in general, it can be considered cheap.

It has a free tariff with some limitations, as usual, but it works perfectly well for people who don't want to spend any money.

I recommend paying for one of their plans. For example, the cheapest one is 9$ a YEAR!!!. Yes per year, not per month. That's less than 1$ per month. Anyone can afford it.

In my case, from time to time I created a cheap hosting for 5€ per month (that's 60€ per year) at DigitalOcean or Linode. Those cheap hostings that I used to set up for a Wordpress or Drupal website .... compared to Carrd are expensive!!!

Indeed, they are not the same, but if you have a wordpress just to have a Landing Page with a form ... if I were you I would look at it.

By the way, I have a referral link. So if you use my link or my referral code you will get 30% discount on the plan you choose to pay.

I leave them below in case you want to use it.

Link discount Carrd

The code without the link, in case you want to put it in the form that asks you for the discount coupon.

Y7V67HBS

And remember you can try it for free, if it works for you then you pay for it.