Odoo Website Builder: design pages, themes, forms and SEO without code

What the Odoo website builder actually is

The Odoo website builder (the Odoo Website app) is the tool for creating and managing a website in Odoo. It provides tools to design, publish, and maintain web pages without advanced technical skills, customize layouts, add multimedia, and integrate with other Odoo apps to expand functionality.

The Odoo Website documentation is organized around three areas: Web design (building blocks and website themes), Structure (website pages, menus, and search engine optimization), and Configuration (domain names, Google Search Console, a cookies bar, translations, multiple websites, forms spam protection, and CDN).

For an SME, this matters because the website is not a separate tool sitting next to your ERP — it is part of the same Odoo database. A form filled in by a visitor can create a CRM opportunity, a Helpdesk ticket, or a Project task directly, with no middleware to maintain.

The drag-and-drop editor and building blocks

Building blocks (also called snippets) are how users design and lay out pages in the Odoo website builder. To add one, open a page, click Edit, then drag and drop the desired building block into place.

There are two types of block: Categories blocks (containers) and Inner Content blocks. Inner Content blocks — such as videos, images, and social media buttons — can only be placed inside Categories blocks. Some blocks, like the Products block, require their respective application or module (such as eCommerce) to be installed first.

A typical SME page-building flow is therefore: pick a theme, add Categories blocks for layout, drop Inner Content blocks (text, image, video, social, form) into them, set the page URL and SEO, then publish. Because blocks are reusable and visually consistent, non-developers can maintain the site after launch without breaking layout.

Themes, colors and responsive layout

In the Odoo website builder you can switch themes at any time from the Theme tab of the editor (Edit, then Theme, then Switch Theme). Hovering a theme shows an extended preview, and clicking applies it. If no theme is chosen at first-run setup, the default theme is used.

Theme colors consist of three main colors plus two light and dark colors. The editor offers Solid or Custom (#HEX or RGBA) color picking and auto-generates Color Presets from a chosen palette, so brand alignment does not require custom CSS.

All Odoo-provided website themes are built on the Bootstrap CSS framework to ensure responsive layouts across desktop, tablet, and mobile, which supports SEO. This is worth flagging for SMEs that have heard Bootstrap associated with older site-builders: here it is the foundation of every official theme, including the newest ones.

Static vs dynamic pages, templates and AI generation

The Odoo website builder supports two page types: Static pages (fixed content such as the homepage, manually created with definable URLs) and Dynamic pages (content generated automatically from database data, for example /shop or /blog, or when publishing a product or blog post). Dynamic pages are managed differently from static pages.

Page-creation templates are grouped by type: Basic (multi-purpose, including a blank page), About, Landing Pages, Gallery, Services, Pricing Plans, Team, and Custom templates — a saved page promoted to a template via its properties.

The Odoo website builder also includes an AI webpage generator. When creating a new page, toggling AI Generate Text and entering a short description and a tone (Concise, Professional, Friendly, Persuasive, or Informative) produces page content via Create with AI. The AI app does not need to be installed on the database, and the feature is not available for the Blank page type.

Pages must be published to be visible to visitors, toggled from Unpublished to Published in the upper-right corner. Pages can also be published or unpublished from page properties, or in bulk from Website > Site > Pages via Actions > Publish or Unpublish.

The Form block: turning submissions into Odoo records

The Odoo website Form block collects information from visitors and, if applicable, creates records in the database. The default submission sends an email, and depending on installed apps, additional record-creating Actions become available:

Apply for a Job (Recruitment), Create a Customer (eCommerce), Create a Ticket (Helpdesk), Create an Opportunity (CRM), Subscribe to Newsletter (Email Marketing), or Create a Task (Project) — plus other models.

This is the core reason an SME running Odoo tends to build its site in the Odoo website builder rather than a standalone CMS: the same form can feed sales pipeline, support, marketing, or project delivery without writing integration code. Configuration for spam protection, CDN, and Google Search Console lives under the Website Configuration area.

SEO: titles, descriptions, redirects and performance

The Odoo website builder's Optimize SEO tool (Website > Site > Optimize SEO) lets you edit the page's title tag and meta description, with a search-results Preview card. Changing a blog post title or product name auto-updates its URL, and the old URL remains functional via an automatic 301 redirect to preserve SEO.

Odoo's SEO documentation recommends using only one H1 title per page and distinguishes in-text keywords (which appear in visible content and affect ranking, edited in the page itself) from meta tags (edited in the Optimize SEO pop-up). The hidden <meta name="keywords"> tag is noted as ignored by major search engines with little or no SEO impact.

On performance, Odoo automatically compresses uploaded images and converts them to WebP (a behavior introduced in Odoo 18.0 and present in 19.0) to improve page speed, which pairs with the Bootstrap-based responsive themes to address the Core Web Vitals that Lighthouse and CrUX measure.

The Dynamics 365 equivalent: Microsoft Power Pages

The Microsoft ecosystem equivalent of the Odoo website builder is Microsoft Power Pages. Power Apps Portals was rebranded as Microsoft Power Pages in October 2022, and Power Apps portals Studio was retired effective February 26, 2024; all sites now open in the Power Pages design studio.

Power Pages is a low-code website builder in the Microsoft Power Platform. Its design studio is organized around four marquee workspaces — Pages, Styling, Data, and Set up — that focus on specific user jobs (page creation, theming, business data, and site set up including security and behavior). Like Odoo's themes, the rendered pages are built on Bootstrap for responsive rendering.

The architectural difference is the important part for SMEs. Where Odoo's Form block writes directly into Odoo apps (a CRM opportunity, an eCommerce customer, a Helpdesk ticket, a Project task, an Email Marketing subscription), Power Pages forms are data-driven configurations created from Microsoft Dataverse table forms — built in the Data workspace or from model-driven apps in Power Apps — and can be combined with lists to build a complete web application over Dataverse, extended with Power Automate and pro-developer tooling.

Power Pages is technically a Power Platform product rather than a Dynamics 365 app per se, but it is the recommended Microsoft-path builder for customer, partner, and self-service portals that need to expose D365/Dataverse data to external users. Both the Odoo website builder and Power Pages are Bootstrap-based, drag-and-drop builders; the choice is usually decided by which back office you already run.

Which fits an SME: the Odoo website builder or Power Pages

If the SME already runs Odoo as its ERP/CRM, the Odoo website builder is the natural fit because forms create Odoo records directly and there is no second database to integrate. The site, the shop, the helpdesk, and the CRM share one data model.

If the SME is invested in the Microsoft stack — Dynamics 365, Dataverse, model-driven apps, Power Automate — Power Pages is the consistent choice for external-facing sites and portals, because forms and lists bind to Dataverse tables and inherit Microsoft's security and governance model.

Because Flectic implements both platforms and is platform-neutral, the recommendation is not which builder is universally better — both are capable, Bootstrap-based, drag-and-drop — but which one matches the systems your business already depends on. Our AI-Accelerated Delivery is designed to deliver either implementation up to 3x faster, with the website rollout tied to your CRM, sales, eCommerce, and service processes from day one.