8.1 Website builder

The Website App

Odoo's Website app is a no-code, drag-and-drop site builder that shares one database with every other Odoo application. A product shown on a web page is the same record Inventory and Sales use, and a contact form writes straight into CRM. For the certification you must be able to build and edit pages visually, manage navigation, configure SEO, run more than one website from a single database, and control exactly what visitors can see.

Pages and the page editor

New public pages are created from Website ▸ Site ▸ Pages, or with the + New button in the top bar while browsing the front end (which can also spin up products, blog posts, or events). Clicking Edit at the top-right opens the website editor — a right-hand panel with three tabs:

• Blocks — the library of building blocks (snippets) you drag onto the page.
• Customize — options for the selected block or the whole page: background, colors, spacing, visibility, and animation.
• Theme — global colors, fonts, buttons, and layout applied site-wide.

The editor is WYSIWYG: you type directly on the page and reposition elements by dragging. Edits are staged until you press Save, and Discard rolls everything back, so you always work on a safe draft. A device switcher previews mobile, tablet, and desktop layouts, and per-block visibility rules can hide a snippet on small screens.

Building blocks (snippets)

Building blocks are grouped so a page assembles quickly:

Once dropped, a block is tuned in Customize: change its column layout, background image or color, padding, and mobile order. Dynamic Content blocks are special — they pull live records, so the Products snippet lists currently published eCommerce products and refreshes automatically as the catalog changes.

Menus and navigation

Top-menu links are managed with the Menu Editor (Site ▸ Menu Editor), where you add, rename, reorder by dragging, and nest entries into sub-menus. A menu item can link to an internal page, an external URL, or a Mega Menu — a full-width dropdown you lay out with building blocks and images. The footer's links are edited the same way, giving consistent primary and secondary navigation.

Themes and design

Odoo 19 ships with one flexible default theme instead of many separate installs; you shape its look from the Theme tab by choosing a color palette, heading and body fonts, button styles, and page-wide layout options. Because these are global settings, changing the palette restyles every page at once — the fastest way to keep an entire site visually consistent.

Multi-website

A single database can host several websites, switched with the selector in the top bar or configured under Configuration ▸ Settings. Each website has its own domain, menus, pages, theme, and language set, and — critically for eCommerce — its own published products, pricelists, and payment setup. A website can also be tied to a specific company. This lets one Odoo instance run, for example, a wholesale brand and a retail brand from shared back-office data while showing a different front end to each audience.

SEO tools

SEO is built into every page. The Optimize SEO dialog (reached from a page's Promote menu) lets you set the page title, the meta description, and keywords (with suggestions) while previewing the Google snippet live. Odoo automatically generates /sitemap.xml and robots.txt, injects Open Graph tags for social sharing, produces clean translatable URLs, and lets you manage 301 redirects when a URL changes. It also warns about images missing alt text. Remember the search-intent split emphasized throughout Odoo SEO: these controls target search engines and public discovery, not internal record keeping.

Beyond static pages

The Website app is also the front end for other Odoo modules: Blog, eLearning courses, Events, and Online Appointments all render through it and reuse the same editor and building blocks. For optimization it supports A/B testing of alternate page versions, visitor tracking, and link trackers / UTM campaigns so you can measure which pages convert. A site can run on Odoo's own subdomain or a custom domain, and a built-in cookie bar and consent tools help with GDPR compliance. Because every visitor becomes a res.partner, live-chat conversations and form leads feed the same CRM the sales team uses.

Website forms

The Form building block turns any page into a data-capture tool. In its options you choose the Action — what a submission creates or does, such as Send an Email, Create a Lead/Opportunity, Apply for a Job, or Create a Ticket. You add fields (including custom and required ones), map them to model fields, and set the thank-you message or redirect. Because the form writes directly to Odoo models, an entry can appear in CRM the instant a visitor submits it.

Publishing and unpublishing

Nearly every front-end record — pages, products, blog posts, events, and courses — carries a Published / Unpublished switch shown in the top bar while you browse as an editor. Unpublished content is invisible to the public but fully visible to users who hold website-editing rights, so you can build, preview, and approve privately before flipping the switch to go live. Together with the Save/Discard workflow, this gives a controlled path from a private draft to a published, indexable page.