20 April 2026 · 7 min read
When you need Arabic on your website and when you don't. The technical realities of RTL, the SEO case for Arabic content, and honest cost expectations.
The most common mistake Dubai businesses make with language decisions on their websites is binary thinking: either "we're English only" or "we need full Arabic and English." The right answer depends on your industry, your customer base, and your budget — and it's rarely the same for every business.
Let's work through this properly.
The UAE population is roughly 90% expatriates. A large proportion of those expats — South Asian, European, American, East African — communicate in English. For a restaurant in Dubai Marina, an e-commerce brand selling internationally, or a B2B tech company, English-only is a completely defensible choice.
Where it breaks down: businesses serving UAE nationals, Arab expats from the GCC and Levant, or industries where trust and formality matter. A clinic where the doctor will speak to the patient in Arabic. A legal firm handling UAE family law. A government-adjacent service. In these contexts, Arabic isn't optional — it signals that you understand your customer.
The decision isn't about "should we respect Arabic culture." It's about who will actually use your site and what language they're searching in.
Medical and dental clinics: DHA-regulated clinics in Dubai serve a significant UAE national and Arab expat population. Consent forms, service descriptions, and pricing should be available in Arabic. More practically, patients searching for clinics in Arabic will find your competitors first if you have no Arabic presence.
Legal services: UAE family law, property disputes, and commercial contracts frequently involve Arabic-speaking clients. A legal firm with English-only content is limiting its addressable market.
Government-adjacent services: PRO services, visa consulting, document clearing — these businesses almost entirely serve Arabic speakers in professional contexts.
Retail targeting UAE nationals: If you're selling products specifically to Emirati customers, Arabic is expected.
Restaurants in expat-heavy areas: JBR, Dubai Marina, DIFC, JLT. Your customers read English. English is fine.
International e-commerce: If you're selling globally or primarily to expats, English covers it.
B2B technology and consulting: Business decision-makers in UAE tech companies work in English. Your website can too.
Luxury brands: English carries international weight and is often deliberately used for brand positioning.
This is where conversations about Arabic websites often skip important detail. Arabic is right-to-left, and implementing RTL properly is not just flipping text alignment.
The entire layout mirrors. Navigation moves to the right side. Text wraps differently. Icons that point left now point right. Padding and margin relationships change. Forms, tables, and cards all need RTL-specific styling.
In a Next.js project, this means:
dir="rtl" and lang="ar" on the HTML element for Arabic pagesmargin-inline-start instead of margin-left)This is real development work. A proper RTL implementation takes meaningful time and testing. Estimating it at "just a few hours" is how you end up with a broken Arabic version.
If you're building a bilingual site, you need hreflang tags to tell Google which version to serve to which user. The technical choice:
hreflang="ar" — serves Arabic to any Arabic speaker, regardless of country
hreflang="ar-AE" — specifically targets Arabic speakers in the UAE
For most UAE businesses, ar-AE makes sense. You're not competing globally for Arabic search traffic — you're targeting Arabic speakers in the UAE. Using ar-AE in your hreflang implementation is more precise. For a clinic or restaurant, that precision matters.
In Next.js, this is handled in the <head> via link tags:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.ae/en/services" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="ar-AE" href="https://example.ae/ar/services" />
This distinction matters more than most people realize.
Translation is converting the words. "Book an appointment" becomes "احجز موعدًا."
Localization is adapting the content. Different phrasing for formal Arabic vs dialectal. Different visual hierarchy (Arabic readers scan differently). Different trust signals (credentials, affiliations, photos that resonate).
Google Translate on your website is worse than no Arabic at all. It produces recognizable machine output that tells Arabic-speaking users you don't actually serve them — you just added a translate button to look like you do. Native Arabic readers notice this immediately.
If you're going to add Arabic, hire a proper translator. For a clinic, that might mean AED 500–1,500 for key pages, depending on content volume. For a full e-commerce catalog, multiply that significantly.
Unless you're in one of the industries where Arabic is non-negotiable, the sensible approach is:
This staged approach is more honest than either extreme. You're not ignoring Arabic indefinitely, and you're not committing to a full RTL build before you know if Arabic search traffic is relevant to your business.
One reason to add Arabic that doesn't get discussed enough: Arabic-language search terms in Dubai are less competitive than English.
"تصميم موقع دبي" (website design Dubai in Arabic) has fewer businesses optimizing for it than "website design Dubai." The same is true across most service categories. If your clinic or restaurant produces decent Arabic content for a few key pages, you can rank for Arabic search terms that your English-only competitors aren't even targeting.
This is particularly relevant if you're starting from scratch in a competitive category. Ranking for Arabic local searches is often easier than fighting for the English equivalents.
Adding a full Arabic version to a website project increases cost by roughly 40–60% compared to an English-only build, when done properly. That includes RTL layout development, translation management, hreflang implementation, and testing.
A partial Arabic implementation — key pages only, without full RTL layout across the entire site — costs less but requires careful scoping of which pages get the treatment.
There is no cheap path to a properly done Arabic website. Anyone quoting you AED 500 to "add Arabic" to your site is either delivering Google Translate output or doing something that will need to be redone.
We scope Arabic-English implementations honestly and don't oversell the complexity. If you're deciding whether it's right for your business, /pricing shows what the investment looks like across different project types.
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