Canvas FAQ: licensing, demos, updates and support

Canvas is a WordPress theme with a companion plugin. The theme carries the templates, the style variations and the design system; the plugin carries the 258 blocks, the header and footer builders, the forms, the SEO and performance layers and the demo importer. You edit all of it in the block editor and the Site Editor WordPress ships.

No. Everything a visitor sees is a control in a block settings panel or a field in Theme Options, so there is no code view to open and no shortcodes to memorise. If you do want CSS, every block has a custom CSS field and Theme Options has a typography rules panel.

Download the theme and the plugin from your dashboard. Upload and activate both in the WordPress admin, then paste your licence key. The setup wizard starts by itself and takes 8 steps: welcome, licence, demo, plugins, recommended tools, import, SEO and done.

It activates your licence, lets you pick one of the 80 demo websites, installs the plugins that demo needs, imports the demo, and writes your site title, description and SEO basics. When it finishes you have a site that looks like the preview you chose, with real content to edit.

Yes. Skip the demo step and you get the theme with its 173 templates, 4 style variations and 183 patterns. Insert a pattern when you want a finished section, or build the page from blocks yourself.

Yes. Your posts and pages keep their content, because Canvas edits the standard WordPress blocks and saves nothing in a format of its own. Import a single demo page into the site you have, and your settings, menus and front page are left alone.

Starter covers 3 websites, Pro covers 10 and Agency covers 100. Agency also activates a whole WordPress multisite network from one key. Every plan ships the same blocks, patterns and demos, so the site count is the only thing you are choosing between.

One WordPress installation on one domain. A staging, development or local copy of a site you have already licensed does not use a seat, so building and testing never costs you twice. See the pricing page for the full rule.

Yes. Client sites you build and manage count towards your limit like any other site. Pro covers 10 and Agency covers 100, which is the usual reason an agency picks the larger plan.

Yes. Deactivate the old site from your dashboard and the seat returns to your pool straight away, ready for the new domain. A rebuild, a handover or a move from a temporary domain to the real one costs nothing.

Yes, on Agency. One Agency licence activates the whole network, so every subsite gets the premium blocks, the demos and AI without holding a key of its own. Starter and Pro license single installations.

No. A licence covers the websites you build and manage, and it is not transferable to another person as a product. If a client wants to own the licence for their site, they buy their own and you release the seat from your dashboard.

Starter is $39 a year, Pro is $89 and Agency is $199, all in US dollars. The White Label add-on is $99 a year at account level and works with any plan. Full detail is on the pricing page.

The same price you paid the first time. There is no introductory discount that expires into a higher renewal, and the renewal is once a year on the date of your first purchase.

Yes, at any time from your dashboard. Cancelling stops the next renewal; your licence keeps working until the end of the term you paid for, and your site keeps rendering after that.

Yes, at any time from your dashboard. You pay the difference between the two plans for the time left on your term, and the higher site limit and AI allowance apply immediately. Your existing activations stay where they are.

Yes. Ask within 7 days of your first purchase and you get a full refund, no questions asked and no support ticket required first. Renewals and upgrades are not refundable. The refund policy has the detail.

An invoice is issued from your dashboard after every payment, and it stays there to download whenever you need it. Your billing history stays with the account, so renewals and upgrades sit alongside the first purchase.

Through the normal WordPress updates screen. Your licence key tells WordPress that an update is available for the theme and the plugin, and the standard updater installs it, with maintenance mode, a temporary backup and a rollback if anything fails. Automatic updates for patch releases are an opt-in setting.

New blocks and features, design and performance improvements, WordPress compatibility work, bug fixes and security patches. If a release changes a template you have customised in the Site Editor, Canvas names that template for you, so the change never arrives as a surprise.

When a Canvas licence expires, your site keeps rendering exactly as it does today. Every premium block stays on the page and nothing is hidden from visitors. What pauses is the service: updates, new demo imports, AI generation and editing of premium blocks, until you renew.

If a licence check cannot reach our servers, Canvas carries on as normal for 14 days and locks nothing. Your site does not depend on our servers being reachable, and a network problem at either end is never a reason for your editor to change behaviour.

On an installation that has never held a licence, premium blocks render a notice that only signed-in administrators can see, so a visitor is never shown an upsell in the middle of a page. Free blocks, patterns, templates and options work as normal, and activating a licence brings the premium blocks back in place.

Everything the live preview shows. Every page and post, the menus and forms, the header and footer, the sliders and popups, and any custom content type the demo uses, with the images sideloaded into your own media library. 75 of the 80 demos ship a working form and 19 are complete WooCommerce stores.

Yes. Every Canvas demo runs as a live website on demos.canvaswp.com, with its inner pages, archives and forms in place. Open any card in the demo catalogue to click through its preview; the card also lists the page count and the content types that demo ships.

Not unless you ask it to. A site-wide import adopts the demo's Theme Options, menus and front page so new pages match; a page-scoped import brings in the pages you picked and leaves your settings alone. Existing WooCommerce pages are adopted in place, so you never end up with two carts.

Yes. Every import is tracked: the posts and terms it created, the attachments it sideloaded, the menus it built and the options it replaced. One rollback removes the demo content and puts the site back as it was, so try a demo, decide against it and go back.

Treat them as placeholders. The photography in the demos is licensed for demonstration and is there so the layout reads correctly while you work, not as a stock library for your business. Replace it with your own images, or with images you have licensed, before you go live.

Yes. Post the request on the support forum and say what you are building. A new demo ships every two weeks with the features it needs, so requests with the most votes are built first. An advanced AI blocks and page composer is also on the way.

Yes. Import one demo site-wide for the design and the settings, then import individual pages from others into the same site. Because a page-scoped import never touches the global options, the pages you borrow adopt the design you chose.

No, and there is no separate editor to learn. A page, a header, a footer, a hero, a page title: all of them are edited in the block editor and Site Editor that WordPress ships. Pages open with the whole template rendered around your content, so what you edit is what visitors get.

It stays standard WordPress block markup, because that is what Canvas saves. A block from Canvas that another theme does not recognise stops rendering its design, but your headings, paragraphs, images and lists are core blocks and read normally anywhere.

Yes. Any block can save its current settings as the default for the next one you insert, and you can also store named global styles and apply them to blocks across the site. Change the global style once and every block using it follows.

A page enqueues only the CSS and JavaScript of the blocks it actually contains, so a pricing page never loads the slider script. On top of that there are 35 optimisations you can switch on, covering deferred JavaScript, lazy loading, preloading, local fonts, database cleanup and WooCommerce trims.

Yes. Animation, display conditions, custom classes, custom attributes and custom CSS are added to every block in the editor, including core blocks and blocks from other plugins. You do not have to replace a core paragraph with ours to animate it.

They are records of their own, composed from 14 header blocks and edited like any other content. Assign one globally or override it on a single page, and the same goes for top bars and mega menus, side panels and page titles, heroes and sliders.

WordPress 6.8 or newer and PHP 7.4 or newer. Canvas is tested up to WordPress 7.1. Anything older than the minimum will not have the block editor features Canvas is built on.

Yes. Canvas ships 22 WooCommerce blocks for the product page, the shop grid, the cart and the checkout, plus colour swatches, add to cart without a page reload and 18 store templates. 19 of the demos are complete stores that import with their products and checkout in place.

Yes. The theme and the plugin ship translation files, and Canvas includes a WPML configuration file so WPML picks up its content types, its options and its block fields without you mapping them by hand. Any plugin that reads standard WordPress translation files can translate the interface.

No. Everything Canvas does happens in the editor WordPress ships, so there is no second subscription and no proprietary markup in your database. If you use a builder for something specific it can stay, but nothing in Canvas depends on it.

Yes, in the standard WordPress way. Most of the reasons people used to need one are settings now: colours and typography in Theme Options, layout in the Site Editor, per-block custom CSS in the block panel, and template edits that WordPress saves for you and keeps through updates.

Documentation is at docs.canvaswp.com, with 382 articles and 313 screenshots generated from the shipped code, so every block field and option is documented and dated. Support is at support.canvaswp.com for as long as your licence is active.