Zoho has launched an all-new version of Zoho Sites. Zoho's product manager describes it as a completely rewritten product rather than an update, built to work well with AI and still leave you in full manual control. It lets you generate a website from a prompt, refine it in a visual builder, manage structured content in collections, turn that content into pages automatically, and drive the whole thing from AI tools through MCP. This article summarises Zoho's launch webinar.

What is new

Starting a site and the AI builder

The new start page offers three routes: the template gallery, AI creation, and a blank site. Zoho's focus is AI creation.

1. Write a prompt. In the demo, the prompt asked for a luxury real estate website for a business operating around Bangalore, with chosen colour preferences. You can include a colour palette.
2. Zoho Sites plans the site. It decides how many pages, how many sections each page has, and the purpose of each section.
3. Pages generate with a live preview. Background images take a little longer, and the demo site was ready in roughly one to two minutes.
4. Open it in the builder and carry on editing visually or with the AI chat.

Zoho says the generated site focuses first on what the business needs, such as a hero with a call to action, properties, testimonials, contact details, a map, and a newsletter, rather than on pure visual design. It also says that anything created by AI stays editable in the builder, so you keep manual control and do not need to spend more AI credits to make changes. Zoho described this as roughly 90 percent achieved so far, with more to improve.

Not yet in AI creation. AI creation currently produces light mode only. Templates already support a dark and light toggle for visitors, and Zoho took exposing dark mode in AI creation as feedback for the roadmap, with no date. Attaching PDFs or design files to the AI site creation process is in the pipeline, but it is not there yet. For now you can do it through MCP.

The visual builder

• Layers. A new layers panel lets you jump straight to any element without scrolling.
• Menus in the builder. You can add and edit the menu inside the builder, where changes show instantly. In the previous version this was in the settings page.
• Themes. The AI creates a theme, and you can change colours, font families, heading styles, and button styles, for example a border radius on every button.
• Saved elements. Save a section you use on several pages and a change in one place updates it everywhere.
• Element properties. Animations, visibility, JS events, flex options, and visual CSS settings such as backgrounds, shadows, and borders.
• AI chat in the builder. Click a section to give the chat its context, then ask for changes, such as a darker variant, added sections, or different alignment. Sections come in a default and a highlight version, the highlight having a darker background and lighter text.
• Bring your own AI key. The chat has a credit limit per plan, but if you already have an AI subscription you can use your own key instead of buying more credits.

Collections and dynamic pages

A collection holds structured data, for example fields for text, images, links, and files, with permissions that control how your team works with it. You can build one by hand or ask AI to generate it. A dynamic page then turns that data into pages:

• Listing page. Shows the items in a collection, with design elements mapped to fields such as the name, price, location, or image.
• Item page. One design is applied to every item. Zoho's example is a real estate site, where 1,000 properties would produce 1,000 pages automatically from a single layout.

Zoho says collections are the base of a CMS capability, along with permissions, versioning, and publishing controls. Workflows, approval processes, and finer control of roles and publishing are still to come, and Zoho described the product as midway to being a full CMS.

Zoho Sites MCP

• You connect Zoho Sites as tools in Zoho MCP, then link a compatible AI client. Zoho named Cursor, Claude, and ChatGPT. You authorise once, and then work by prompt.
• The tools cover creating websites and pages, updating pages, creating custom elements, and menu management, and the AI can take screenshots of its own work to check the result and correct mistakes.
• In the demo, an agent built a whole car manufacturer site, including collections, data, and dynamic pages, with little manual design change.
• You can also upload a design file, for example from an AI design tool, and ask the agent to recreate it as a site or a template.

Custom elements, connectors, and the marketplace

• Custom elements. When the built-in elements are not enough, you can ask AI to create a React-based element. Zoho showed an EMI calculator on a property page, a car pre-order configurator whose price changes as options are chosen, and a timeline element. Some properties remain editable in the builder, and the elements follow the site's theme.
• Connectors and external collections. A connector holds the API details of a Zoho or third-party service. An external collection reads its data, defined by a list endpoint, an item endpoint, and a schema, and behaves like a normal collection. Zoho's examples pulled data from Zoho Recruit, Zoho CRM products, and third-party databases (the recording garbled their names).
• Two-way use. Zoho showed a careers portal that lists job openings from Zoho Recruit and sends a candidate's application form back into Recruit, so a site can act as a presentation layer over your Zoho data.
• Marketplace. A developer area lets partners build templates and apps, with widgets such as the calculator and timeline, and publish them to an upcoming marketplace where they can price and sell them. Zoho said a contribution programme would follow in the coming weeks.

Other features shown

• File manager, forms with submission tracking, photo galleries, and code blocks for HTML, with scripts wrapped in a script tag.
• Site search, logo and icon settings, and a social sharing image.
• Draft states for pages, so a page can be reviewed and marked as reviewed before it publishes.
• Custom domain mapping, or buying a domain through Zoho Domains.
• Collaboration permissions, and portals with sign-up, designable sign-in and sign-up pages, member roles, and custom roles. A site can also be limited to an organisation, with Zoho sign-in and page restrictions.

Plans and pricing

There are four new plans, each priced per site per month. Zoho says yearly billing saves up to 50 percent compared with monthly. The figures below are the annual-billing prices Zoho quoted in US dollars.

Add-ons, so a customer does not have to move up a plan:

• 100 extra pages for $8.
• 20 extra collections, with 2,500 collection items or dynamic pages, for $12.50.
• 4,000 extra AI credits for $5, as a one-time purchase rather than a recurring add-on.

Each plan's AI credits are enough, Zoho says, to create three or four pages even on the Basic plan. How Zoho Sites will be priced within Zoho One had not been decided at the time of the webinar.

What is not there yet

What this means for UK and Ireland clients

This section is our own view, not Zoho's.

• It suits clients who want to publish listings, catalogues, or job pages from data held in Zoho CRM or Zoho Recruit, since collections, dynamic pages, and connectors are the new strengths.
• Clients who need a bilingual or multilingual site, such as English and Welsh or English and Irish, should wait for sub-sites and translation, which Zoho has promised in a few months but not shipped.
• Existing Zoho Sites customers cannot migrate yet. Recreating a site through MCP is possible, but treat it as a project to test, not a one-click move.
• Collections only start on the Plus plan, so budget for at least that tier, plus add-ons if the content is large.
• Connecting AI tools to a live site raises the same access questions as any MCP connection, so decide who can use it. See Give Users the Right Access with the New Zoho MCP and Zia Permissions for how Zoho is approaching this in CRM.