Odoo's Website module lets you build web pages without technical knowledge. This promise, shared by other tools on the market, deserves a concrete look. How it works, what you can do, what you cannot do, what to watch out for. This article gives you an overview so you can picture it.
The visual editor: what you see is what you publish
The Odoo editor works in drag-and-drop mode. You land on your page in edit mode, you see exactly what your visitors will see, and you drag blocks from a side panel to build your content.
Many blocks are available. Simple title block, two-column text-image block, three-column block to present services, testimonials block, call-to-action banner block, team block with photos and job titles, news block, pricing block, FAQ block, interactive map block, contact form block. Each block can be customized: change of color, image, text, button.
- You can also go into the details.
- Text can be made bold or italic.
- An image can be resized.
- A button can be linked to an internal page or to a form.
- Advanced users can even inject custom HTML in certain areas..
Our advice before getting started: plan half a day of onboarding with an integrator. Not to learn how to use the tool, but to define the page structure, the information hierarchy, and the visual conventions that will ensure consistency across the whole site.
Structure: pages, menus, navigation
Before creating pages in every direction, take the time to think about the structure. Which pages do you need? Home, about, services or products, references or case studies, blog, contact, legal notices. For a standard SME site, seven to ten pages are often enough.
The main menu is organized by categories. Submenus let you group service pages, for example. Mandatory pages such as legal notices and the privacy policy are usually placed in the footer.
- Also think about special pages.
- 404 page when a link is broken.
- Confirmation page after a form submission.
- Thank-you page after a download.
- These secondary pages improve the user experience and send positive signals to search engines..
Multilingual: plan for it from the start
If you sell internationally or have a bilingual target in France, Odoo handles multiple languages natively. Each page can exist in several languages. Translation is done either manually, through a built-in machine translation tool, or by calling a professional translator via an export in a standard format.
Our advice: if you plan to go multilingual, plan for it from the start. Designing a page in two languages from its creation takes far less time than adding a language to a site that is already live.
Integration with other modules
This is where the Odoo approach stands out. Your website is not an isolated object. It is wired directly into the rest of your ERP.
- The contact form creates an opportunity in the CRM, with the salesperson assigned according to the rules you define.
- The “request a quote” button on a product page directly creates a pre-filled quotation.
- If you enable appointment booking, the available slots match your salespeople's real calendar.
- If you enable the Events module, registrations on the site flow back automatically..
- For an online store, the connection goes further.
- The stock displayed is the real stock.
- The prices displayed are those of your pricelist, with automatic handling of promotions if you use them.
- Existing customers log in to their account and find their orders, their invoices, their abandoned carts..
SEO: the fundamentals to respect
Odoo includes basic SEO features. On each page you enter the title, the meta description, the main keyword. The tool checks the length, the presence of the keyword in the title, the presence of images with alternative text, the quality of internal links.
Our advice: don't expect everything from the built-in SEO. Serious SEO requires a keyword strategy upstream, regular content production, and work on inbound links. If you have ambitious SEO goals, plan for an SEO specialist alongside the site setup.
Hosting and performance
If you are on Odoo Online or Odoo.sh, hosting is handled for you, with satisfactory response times for SME sites. If you are on on-premise hosting, plan for a properly sized server and a CDN for images if your traffic is significant.
- On loading, watch out for poorly optimized images.
- A raw photo straight from a camera often weighs several megabytes.
- Compress your images before uploading them.
- Odoo offers automatic compression, but manual optimization before import always gives better results..
Pragmatic conclusion
Odoo's Website module largely covers the needs of a standard SME. For an institutional site or an online store of average complexity, it is competitive with specialized solutions on the market, while offering unbeatable native integration with the rest of your ERP. For very creative or very technical sites, plan for an Odoo developer who will complement the standard with custom work.
The initial investment for a professional Odoo site is generally between fifteen and forty person-days of work, excluding graphic design. The return on this investment is quickly measured in the operational simplification brought by native integration.