| Zoho Sites standout features | |
| Customization | Full freedom with an intuitive design tool |
| Templates | Over 40 ready-to-use templates |
| Sections | More than 190 pre-built layouts |
| Free trial | Yes, 15-day free trial included |
| Hosting | Free Zoho subdomain or connect your own |
| Integrations | Integrates with other Zoho Apps |
| Support | All plans include e-mail support 24 hours a day on weekdays |
What Are the Pros and Cons of Zoho Sites?
Although Zoho Sites offers robust features at a reasonable price, there are some shortcomings regarding its customer support, SEO tools, and more. If you’re thinking about choosing Zoho Sites as your website builder, consider the following advantages and disadvantages.
Pros of Zoho Sites
- Affordable: Compared to its competitors, Zoho Sites is one of the cheapest website builders available. Despite its affordability, it has a lot to offer.
- Get a website up in no time: Zoho Sites is an easy-to-use platform that doesn’t require any coding knowledge, allowing you to have a website up and running in minutes.
- Easily customizable: With Zoho Sites’ templates, drag-and-drop blocks, and a simple visual editor, you can easily create a website that fits your brand and looks professional.
- Great integrations: You can seamlessly integrate Zoho Sites with other Zoho products and third-party apps such as Google Analytics and Mailchimp.
Cons of Zoho Sites
- Not much choice regarding available plans: Zoho Sites only offers two plans, which is low compared to some of its competitors.
- Limited customer support available: It only offers email support, contrary to its competitors, such as Wix, which has 24/7 support.
- Not much storage space: Zoho Sites Starter plan comes with 500 MB of storage, and the Pro plan comes with 100 GB, which can be a dealbreaker for some users.
- No e-commerce features: If you’re looking to build an e-commerce store, Zoho Sites may not be the right platform for you; you may want to try Zoho Commerce or an alternative website builder.
1. Website builder with robust customization features
Both Zoho Sites plans come with the same drag-and-drop editor. I used it to design and customize my website, and it’s handy for those without any coding knowledge who want to create a website.
To make things easier to manage, the Zoho Sites editor is divided into two sections: the Builder and the Visual Editor. The Builder is where you’ll add, delete, or move around website elements called blocks. In the Visual Editor, you can see a real-time preview of your website and make changes to the design, such as adding color or changing fonts.
There are over 190 sections to choose from, which I found more extensive than most other low-cost website builders. Sections include text blocks, images, forms, maps, videos, social media buttons, and much more. I liked this flexibility for customizing the look and feel of my website — you can add, delete, or move around sections to create the layout you want.
You can also change the order of the sections by dragging and dropping them around, which is handy if you want to change the layout of your website. And, if you want to add a new section, you can simply click the Plus icon and drop it into place.
2. Ready-to-use templates
Zoho Sites offers over 40 ready-to-use templates that can help get your website up fast. These templates are fully customizable, so I could change them to match my brand. It was easy for me to change your theme while editing and not lose any old content, a somewhat rare – but very useful – feature in a website builder.
Zoho Sites templates are pre-designed and divided into different sections. Some are Single Page templates only available with the Pro Plan.
3. Zoho apps to help manage other parts of your business
Zoho Sites integrates with its other products, like Zoho CRM and Zoho Mail. Instead of having to use expensive third-party apps like with many of its competitors, you can use Zoho apps to manage different parts of your website from one platform. The Zoho suite of apps is comprehensive enough to provide real value for those users who need more from their website than just the basics.
Zoho Apps are the most cost-effective option on the market: for only $4 per month, you get your own hosted email workspace that comes with 30GB of space. Adding an extra $3 per month gives you 50GB of space and 1TB of shared storage space. The email workspace comes with additional features like Zoho Meeting.
Most of the Zoho App plans come with a free trial. If you want to test all of the apps at the same time, you can sign up for a 30-day trial for Zoho One plan. This gives you access to all of the Zoho products, including Zoho Sites.
4. Additional tools to make your site stand out
Zoho Sites offer a wide range of additional website features that can help you take your website to the next level.
Some of these tools include:
- Communication tools to help boost customer engagement: Get your visitors involved with your website using tools including comment boxes, a blog, and different kinds of forms such as a contact form.
- SEO tools to help boost your site visibility in web searches: You can optimize your site by adding meta titles, tags, and robots.txt. But Zoho Sites don’t offer you the SEO depth that other alternatives like WordPress and Wix.com offer. When looking for robust SEO features, it is recommended to go with a proper content management system (CMS) platform.
- Site map to help search engines read your website: This gives search engines a better understanding of your website structure, and Zoho Sites makes it easy to import a site map.
- Traffic analytics to help optimize your website content: Zoho Sites analytics allows you to track, measure, and analyze customer behavior. Also, you can integrate Google Analytics with Zoho Sites to get even more data.
5. Free hosting with advanced security options
Zoho Sites offers a free hosting option with every website plan. This comes with a Zoho subdomain, and you can integrate your own domain with Zoho.
On top of hosting the site, Zoho is also responsible for website security.
You get a secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate that encrypts the connection between your website and the visitor’s web browser, which will help to protect your visitors’ information.
In addition to the SSL certificate, you can also create data backups, so if something goes wrong, your website will be automatically restored.
Different pages on your website can be password-protected, so only those with the password can access them.
What Are Some Good Alternatives to Zoho Sites?
After extensive research, we believe Zoho Sites is a great low-cost website builder, but some notable alternatives are Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, and WordPress.com.
We researched and looked closely at all the top website builders, spent time testing them, and talked to dozens of customers. To help you find the best website builder for your needs, we’ve compiled our findings into this list of the best alternatives for Zoho Sites.
Check out how Zoho Sites compares to other website builders recommended by the team at Digital.com:
Frequently Asked Questions About Zoho Sites
What kind of support does Zoho Sites offer?
Zoho Sites support is available 24 hours a day on weekdays. Apart from weekends, the support team is quick to respond and helpful. It provides support only in English; if you prefer another language, you might want to consider other alternatives, like Wix, that offer multilingual support.
Compared to its competitors, it lacks proper customer service with no phone support, live chat, or 24/7 email support.
What are the Zoho integrations?
Zoho Sites is not the only solution offered by Zoho. It offers a whole suite of business applications designed to work together seamlessly.
This means you can easily integrate your Zoho Sites account with all the company products. The benefit is that you can manage everything from one place, and you don’t need to worry about data loss or compatibility issues.
Zoho Sites is different from similar products and mainly popular due to the ease and cost-effectiveness of these integrations.
What are the best alternatives to Zoho Sites?
How I Rated Zoho Sites
We rate the services based on a comprehensive approach. To determine how Zoho Sites compares to other services, we examine all the different features offered. Both direct and third-party testing are performed to ensure we get the most accurate results.
Although we evaluated every aspect of Zoho Sites’ features, certain aspects were more weighted than others. Among the most important factors are the security features of the platform, the level of customer support available, ease of use, and the overall customization features.
Zoho Sites offers a wide range of features, including a great customization tool, an easy-to-use interface, and a wide range of integrations. The company lacks customer support, with only English support and no live chat or phone support available.
