Build a website entirely with Kartra

A few weeks ago I was thinking:

Is it possible to run your website entirely in Kartra?

No wordpress, no weebly, no squarspace, no wix….

You know what I’m saying?

Traditionally, marketing software like ClickFunnels and Kartra was designed to run alongside an existing platform.

You’d either embed the relevant code or link out to pages built with these tools.

It worked reasonably well because you had a CMS (content-management-system) like WordPress, which was great at storing and handling a large number of posts, pages, and comments…

…and then you combined it with the marketing software for advanced funnels, pages, and automations.

But, recently the developers of Kartra released some updates to the website and blogging aspects of Kartra.

Let’s dive into that.

Here’s why you can run your entire website through Kartra

Kartra supports website building out of the box in two ways.

It includes a variety of templates for all the pages you need.

Frontpage, 404 page, blog page, etc

It also includes sitewide-templates, which allows you to define a certain element (like navigation) as part of a SITE and then have it replicated across all pages on that site.

What this means is that you won’t have to recreate these elements for every new page, which would have been a massive headache with other pagebuilders.

By using Kartra pages as your website pages your infrastructure is completely preserved, and you will have perfect information about what your visitors are doing.

From the very first visit to the sale.

Also, you’ll save the subscription costs for hosting your website. It’s a relatively small expense, but worth taking into consideration.

Here’s why I’d still run my website on WordPress

Even with the above features, I would not run my website entirely on Kartra. Here are a couple of reasons why:

  1. You’re locking in your assets to a platform – leaving you vulnerable to future updates, or company changes. If Kartra shut down tomorrow, your website would go with it.
  2. It’s very impractical as a blog because every post needs to be hand-made and added to your category pages or front pages manually.
  3. You lose out on a million WordPress plugins which can provide amazing value to your business, but aren’t available for external platforms like Kartra. My site has an abundance of plugins (I’m a bit of an addict…) and a big reason for staying with WordPress.

Exceptional use cases where you could run everything on Kartra

While I’m not going to be using Kartra to run my website for now, there are still use cases where it might make sense to do so.

Personal portfolio-style websites that don’t feature regular blog content.

Imagine you’re an online coach, and the website is just your digital business card where people can book a call, buy your products, or access their membership area.

In this case, you might not need the additional features of WordPress, and should you need to move off Kartra in the future it’s not a huge process, as you don’t have a huge library of posts and pages.

You might prefer instead to have everything in one place for simplicity, and save the hosting fees.

Offline Business – but using Kartra for helpdesk and calendar booking

You might be running a mostly offline business, but you use Kartra to manage your leads, respond to support requests, and take bookings to your calendar.

In this case, since you’re not really publishing content – Kartra will do just fine.

Get started with Kartra