Z-Shell is a powerful alternative to Bash, but some of the details can take time to get use to, and some things just have to be changed. For example, the key binding for cursor and other special keys. Using CTRL + arrow keys to skip words might give funny characters like ";5D" and ";5C" instead. As pointed out by Luke Wilde, these keys have to be set up manually. In my case, I had to include the semi-colon in the bindkey command as well.

These should go in ~/.zshrc.

bindkey ';5D' emacs-backward-word
bindkey ';5C' emacs-forward-word
 
export WORDCHARS=''

Only funny thing about setting it up like that, is that if the actual character sequence ";5D" is pasted into the terminal, it will be taken as if the CTRL+LEFT key was pressed. I'm not aware of a work-around for that.

The Zsh wiki lists a few other possible key bindings, including for the Home and End keys:

bindkey "${terminfo[khome]}" beginning-of-line
bindkey "${terminfo[kend]}" end-of-line