800website builds bilingual sites in Dubai — Arabic is AED 1,000 per additional language. Whether you need it is a question worth answering with data.
Do I need my website in Arabic in the UAE?
It depends on who your customers are, and you can check rather than guess. In Dubai’s B2B, technology and professional services markets, a great deal of searching happens in English. In consumer, government-adjacent, family and healthcare services, Arabic matters considerably more.
The check: open Google Search Console and look at your query report. If Arabic terms already appear, that is direct evidence that people are finding you in Arabic — and probably leaving, since you have nothing for them. If none appear after a year of traffic, the case is weaker.
The second consideration is trust rather than search. For some audiences an Arabic option signals that you are genuinely part of this market rather than passing through, and that impression can matter even to people who then read the English.
What does Arabic actually involve?
More than translation. Arabic is written right to left, which means the layout mirrors — navigation, alignment, icons, form fields. A site that simply swaps the text and keeps a left-to-right layout looks broken to an Arabic reader.
Costs with us: AED 1,000 per additional language for the technical setup, and the Premium package at AED 6,999 is multi-language ready as standard. Translation itself is separate, and this is where the real decision sits.
The ongoing cost is the part people underestimate: every new page, every price change and every blog post now has to be produced twice. A bilingual site that falls out of sync — current English, year-old Arabic — is worse than a monolingual one, because it signals neglect in the language you were trying to show respect for.
Should I use machine translation?
No, not for published pages. Machine translation of Arabic has improved considerably and it is still readily identifiable to a native reader, particularly for anything technical, legal or persuasive. A visitor who spots it concludes the Arabic version was an afterthought, which is exactly the opposite of the intended signal.
For regulated content — financial, medical, legal — machine translation is a genuine risk rather than an aesthetic one, because nuance in the wording may carry compliance weight.
Our approach for regulated sectors is to ask the client for reviewed Arabic text rather than commissioning a translation ourselves.
What are the UAE data protection rules for websites?
The UAE has federal data protection legislation covering personal data, and if you collect anything — contact form submissions, email signups, analytics cookies, customer accounts — you should publish a privacy policy stating what you collect, why, how long you keep it, and who you share it with.
Publish it in both languages if you run a bilingual site. Confirm your specific obligations with a qualified adviser; a web agency can build the pages but should not be your source on compliance.
See how we build bilingual sites, published pricing, or talk to us.
Talk to us
800website is a Dubai web design and development agency with published fixed prices. Send the details and you get a fixed scope and a fixed price back — no hourly billing. Contact us, message us on WhatsApp, or call +971 58 578 5380.
