What's New in Zoho Sites

The cookie consent bar plugin on Zoho Sites will make your website GDPR compliant. The feature helps you display a cookie consent banner to your site visitors and allows them to make an informed choice when giving or revoking consent.

Zoho Sites now integrates with Bigin webforms. Create webforms in your Bigin account and add them to your Zoho Sites website. Webforms can help you instantly capture information submitted by your potential customers by automatically adding them as contacts in your Bigin account.

You can now enable your website visitors to sign in to your Member Portal without having to enter their email address and password. Members of your website can access your Member Portal without being prompted to enter individual login credentials. Visitors can simply log in using either their Facebook or Google accounts. You can also enable SAML authentication for visitors in your organization to access. 

Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) is a system for exchanging authentication data between applications. Now, you can create an account on any identity provider (IDP) and configure SAML-based single sign-on (SSO) for members to access your websites' Member Portal.

Linking your SAML account to your website not only enables you to manage your visitors' login credentials but, also enables members of your website to access your Member Portal without being prompted to enter individual login credentials.

Social Preview Images are displayed when you share a URL of your website or web page through any platform. You can set a site-level image, which will be displayed when the URL of your site is shared. You can also set page-level images which can be set to give visitors context of what the page is about when that particular URL is shared.   

Note: Even if you have set a site-level social preview image, you can set individual page-level images as well. The page-level image is what will be displayed when you share your website on social media.

We provide you with a monthly report of your website traffic statistics. This report will give you insight into your website's recent performance. With this information, you can determine which pages are performing well and which have room for improvement.

We've taken the need for customization and pushed it one step further by creating the Advanced Visual Editor. This tool combines the functionalities of the customization tool box with the ease of application of the Visual Editor. You can now implement customizations that would usually require extensive coding—all with just the click of a button. 

The customizations you apply to the Element and Header properties will appear site-wide.

Effectively convey your brand's key message with sticky content. By fixing certain sections and elements on your page so that they follow as the user scrolls, you can keep important information in front of your visitors.

Build websites quickly and easily with Zoho Sites' pre-designed templates. Now, you can achieve the look of a professionally designed website instantly, with no design experience required. The template gallery is stocked with over 35 fresh and attractive designs, and sorted by industry to help appeal to your specific audience.

The Visual Editor now enables you to change the way your blog lists and posts appear. You can choose from various layouts to display your listed posts. You can also choose how you would like individual posts to be displayed.

You can embed Google Maps directly on your website. Simply drag and drop the map section and enter the location you wish to display.

Every element you add to your website now comes with a visibility option. You can choose to either show or hide various portions of your website on different devices. 

This tool comes in handy if you would like to display an element on the desktop version of your website that you would not like to portray on the mobile version on your website. 

Zoho Sites' new integration with Unsplash, one of the world's leading stock image suppliers, means you can add beautiful, professionally photographed images to your website for free. 

Access over one million high quality photos right from your Zoho Sites website builder, which allows you to add them inline, as section and hero slide backgrounds, and more.

Upload the forms you create with Zoho Forms on Zoho Sites. Previously you could either create forms via the Zoho Sites builder or embed your form from Zoho Forms. This integration makes adding forms to your website so much simpler.

Zoho Sites now provides website password protection, one of our most sought-after features. Now you can prevent access to pages and files by simply enabling passwords for them. Password protection is a convenient way for website owners to prevent access from anonymous users viewing their site. This feature comes in handy if you run a personal or confidential site.

We have integrated with stock image providers such as Google, Pixabay, and Unsplash to bring you the image library. You can add beautiful, professionally photographed images to your website for free. 

Access over one million high quality photos right from your Zoho Sites website builder and add them inline, as section and hero slide backgrounds, and more.

Restrict visitors from accessing certain pages and files by creating user-specific menus. You can customize which items can be accessible by whom. Now visitors can only access pages that are allotted to them. This eliminates the chance of users coming across a page they cannot access.

When a visitor signs up for the member portal, their email address and user name gets automatically stored in your leads and contacts modules in Zoho CRM and can be managed from there.

Your website can support content of any language, but the default text for certain modules—Comment Box, Member Portal, Menu, Gallery, Forms, etc.—will remain in English by default. Now you can create sites and set the language of these modules in Ukrainian to cater to that audience.

Your website now integrates with Zoho Marketing Automation. Once you connect, you can bring in leads through signup forms and pop-ups on webpages and webinars. Analyze these leads and run targeted campaigns. The leads can be further tracked and monitored to assess your visitors' engagement. With all this information at your disposal, you can understand your web visitors' behavior better and set various goals for them to achieve.

You can now increase or decrease the spacing for both sections and the elements within those sections. Sections can adjust both the top and bottom spaces and Elements can adjust the top alone.

Customizing your website just got simpler. Every element now comes with its own style editor. These tools can be found in each element's property box and allow you to individually customize the background, typography, border, shadow, and spacing of every element on your page.

Note: Each tool is equipped with a reset button, so feel free to experiment with various combinations.

Earlier, only the site owner could create and edit forms. Now, contributors who are assigned the admin and developer roles can edit them as well. 

Now you can optimize your blog page, categories, and tags with our in-built SEO tools. These tools include the provision to add titles and descriptions to your blog.

This new restriction option allows you to enable only people who are a part of your member portal to access your entire website. 

We have introduced a Multiple Menu feature. With this element, you can have more than one menu on any page to allow quick navigation. You can choose to replicate your default menu on different areas of your page. Or, you can create a menu with new menu items. These menus can be individually customized with the style, alignment, and label options.

Two new social platform icons have been introduced in the social share feature. Now your visitors can share your page via Whatsapp and Telegram too.

We have provided a redo and undo button to help you reverse your previous edits. Use the redo and undo button while you work to remove or include your customizations. This tool also comes in handy if you have deleted your work by accident.

The newest addition to our builder is the logo resizer. This tool eliminates the need for an external image resizer. All you need to do is upload a logo of any size and then use the resizer in the builder to make the logo larger or smaller.

Shapers are design layouts that you can add to the top, the bottom, or both areas of your page sections. You can also customize the height and color to get really abstract designs, so no two sections have to be the same ever again.

The vertical menu can now accomodate more items, as opposed to the previous five item limit. The menu loading time has also become faster.

The newest addition to the site builder is our "Getting to know your site builder" video. We've included this video as soon as you open the builder, to help you get started with Zoho Sites.

Individual blog posts can be redirected to any location you choose. Use this tool when you'd like to redirect posts from any external blogging platforms to a URL you prefer. You can also make a page redirect to a specific post.

The carousel element is like a slide show which isn't restricted to images—you can add any element you want to the carousel. These slides will change automatically based on the number of seconds you specify.

The message bar allows you to display announcements and important information at the top or bottom of your website. You can also use the message bar to display cookie notice messages.

Our support engineers can now clone your site. You can request this service if you'd like to create multilingual websites or to test out your code.

We've now included a debug access feature on the site builder. When facing a problem, our support engineers may request debugging access, which allows them to access your website. You can enable access if you like or decline the offer.

Each post on your blog now comes equipped with a comment box. These post-specific comment boxes increase interaction between you and your readers and help you maintain conversations on specific posts.

You can now set your blog as your home page. This option enables bloggers to create a website just for blog posts. Once you set your blog as your home page, you can delete your other pages and your blog site is ready to go.

We've included a confirm dialog box to prevent your elements from getting deleted accidentally. Even if you click the delete icon by mistake, a dialog box will ask you if you're sure.

You can now download your site content to your computer. These files will be in zip format, and are now password protected to ensure security and GDPR compliance. 

We've now integrated with Zoho PageSense. You can track key website metrics, analyze visitor behavior, and optimize your user experience to increase conversions. You can also gain insight on placement, content, and formatting for each element on your page. 

We now provide custom class names for elements. We've added this feature as customizing the CSS will cause changes site wide—editing the custom class name for specific elements will ensure that the style of that particular element alone gets modified.

Buttons come in three types, primary, secondary, and link. Primary and secondary denote the theme color—primary will be the first color of your theme and secondary will be the accent color. Link makes the button appear as a link.

The contributors feature lets you invite friends, family, colleagues—pretty much anyone—to help you create your site. The standard roles we provide are Admin and Author with the newest additions: Developer and Guest. These two new roles enable you to invite guests who aren't a part of your organization. Developers and Guests can also make guest blog posts.

Heading and text can now be added alongside your images. This element, once added to your page, allows you to add text in line with your image. You can apply your own customization from settings in the pop-up tool box.

The visual editor is now equipped with custom colors and fonts to choose from. You can set up to 6 colors for your color scheme and use our font library to select and set base and secondary fonts.

When clicked, images with the light box option appear to pop out of the screen. Light boxes also add emphasis by making your images appear full screen with the background dimmed out. 

Bring your elements to life with animation. This feature enables you to apply animation such as slide, bounce, and fade to your content. Animation helps your content stand out and brings something different to the website game. 

Images that you add to your website are now automatically optimized to ensure a quick loading time. Optimizing images also saves bandwidth usage for both the site creator and the site visitor.

Every edited version of your page is saved and listed. Page versions are created whenever you publish or save manually. You can view various versions of your page and revert, even after you've published your site. Reverting comes in handy, especially when you accidently delete content.

You don't have to manually moderate spam comments anymore. Entries in your comment box are now automatically moderated, and suspect contents is classified as spam.

Developers can create website template files and upload them as a home page. These websites can be hosted using our service but can't be further edited using our site building tools.

Display your images like a photo gallery. Create multiple photosets and add them to your pages. Photosets work like individual albums where you can add titles and captions for each image. You can also display images in your gallery like a slideshow.

The Clone page option allows you to create a copy of a page. Use the clone page option when you would like to repeat a page design and make changes only to minor elements. like text and images.

The member portal is now SSL encrypted to ensure security while logging in.

This tool allows you to duplicate any element on your page. It eliminates the need to add multiple elements or sections manually. Simply, create a section with elements of your choice and click Clone. Clone also comes in handy if you're creating a repetitive design scheme.

Spacers help you increase the space between elements and sections on your page. This tool provides clutter-free site design by allowing you to adjust the space between your content. Spacers can also increase the background image display area.

The Box element enables you to highlight and display important content. All you need to do is add your content to the box and apply a background color or image. You can also apply the fixed setting to your background image to make your content stand out even more.