Choose the web design company in Dubai that can show fast live sites in English and Arabic, recommends a platform based on how your team will update the site, puts the domain, hosting and code in your name, and plans redirects before design starts. A portfolio shows taste. These checks show whether the site will still work after launch.
Start with what the site has to do
Most website briefs we see in Dubai begin with a competitor’s link and “something like this, but better”. That tells an agency what you like. It says nothing about what the site is for.
Before you contact anyone, write half a page:
- The one action that matters. A booked consultation, a quote request, a WhatsApp message, an order.
- Languages. English only, or English and Arabic from day one.
- Who will edit it. Your marketing person every week, or a developer twice a year.
- What it connects to. A CRM, a booking system, a payment gateway, WhatsApp Business, stock levels.
- What exists now. The current site, its traffic, and the pages that bring in enquiries.
Send every company the same half page so you’re comparing answers to the same question. It’s also how we open our own website design and development projects, and if an agency doesn’t ask about most of these points on the first call, make a note of it.
Questions that separate a web design company from a pretty portfolio
A portfolio shows what a studio can draw. These questions show what it can build, who will build it, and what happens when something breaks six months after launch.
About their past work
- “Can I click through three live sites you launched in the last year?” Mockups and design-gallery shots show taste, not build quality.
- “Which of them has an Arabic version?” Then open it on your phone, there and then.
- “What happened after launch?” Ask whether traffic held, what broke, and who fixed it.
- “Can I speak to one of those clients?”
About the people
- Who designs, who builds, who writes the Arabic copy, and who picks up the phone after launch?
- Is any of it outsourced, and to where? Fine if they tell you up front. Worrying if you find out later.
About the process
- Will you get a staging link to click through as templates are built, or only see the site at the end?
- Who supplies the content? Late copy and photos are the usual reason launches slip, so agree who writes what, and by when.
- How many rounds of design changes are included, and what counts as a change?
After launch
- What does support cover: updates, backups, security patches, small edits?
- How fast do they respond if the contact form stops sending?
Which platform should they recommend?
A good web design company recommends a platform after asking how your team will update the site, what it must connect to, and whether you sell online. If every proposal a studio has ever sent names the same platform, that’s their comfort zone, not your requirement.
| Platform | Ask them about | Walk away if |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress | Which plugins, who updates them, how Arabic is handled (WPML, Polylang or a separate install) | They plan a page builder plus a dozen plugins and no maintenance |
| Shopify | Right-to-left support in the theme, Arabic product data, Tabby and Tamara, local delivery | The theme has no RTL support and the plan is to “fix it with CSS” |
| Webflow | How Arabic pages are built and how editors add new ones | They can’t show you a working bilingual Webflow site |
| Astro or Next.js with a headless CMS | Which CMS, how editors preview changes, who hosts it | Nobody on your team could edit content without a developer |
| Their own in-house CMS | How you would move off it | You can’t export your content or take the code elsewhere |
That last row deserves its own warning. A proprietary CMS that only one agency can maintain is the strongest lock-in in web design, stronger than any contract clause, because leaving means rebuilding from scratch.
We build on Astro, Next.js, WordPress and Shopify, and our Dubai web design page explains when we’d choose each for a local business. Stores have their own page on e-commerce website design in Dubai.
Who owns the domain, hosting and code?
You should. Every account the site depends on should be registered to your company, with the agency added as a user: the domain registrar, hosting, the code repository, the CMS, analytics, Search Console, and any paid themes, plugins or fonts. Check this before you pay the first invoice, because it’s awkward to untangle later.
| Asset | Should be | How to check |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name | Registered to your company, in a registrar account you can log in to | The registrar dashboard shows your company and you hold the login |
| Hosting | In your account, billed to you or easy to transfer | You can log in and see the server or project |
| Code | In a Git repository your organisation owns | You’re an owner on GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket |
| CMS | You hold the top administrator login | Not an “editor” account they made for you |
| Theme, plugin and font licences | Registered to your company | Licence emails arrive at your address |
| Analytics, Tag Manager, Search Console | Owned by a company account | You can add and remove users yourself |
| Design files | Shared with you in Figma or similar | You can open and duplicate them |
Fonts catch out bilingual sites. Good Arabic typefaces often need a commercial web licence, and a licence bought in the agency’s name doesn’t pass to you. Ask who holds it.
The contract should say that design and code become yours on payment, and list any third-party parts that come with their own licence terms.
Bilingual and RTL checks before you sign off
A bilingual site is only as good as its Arabic version on a phone. Before you approve the design, and again before launch, open every template in Arabic on your own handset and run through this list. Most problems show up in the first five minutes.
- Direction set in the HTML. View the page source:
dir="rtl"should sit on the html element, as the W3C advises, rather than in a stylesheet. - A layout that mirrors. Menus, columns and breadcrumbs flip. Arrows and “next” buttons point the right way. Logos and video controls stay as they are.
- Numbers in the right order. Phone numbers, prices and dates inside Arabic sentences read correctly, with the plus sign where it belongs.
- Forms that accept Arabic. Type a name and a mobile number on an Arabic keyboard and submit. Plenty of validation scripts reject Arabic-Indic digits.
- A readable font. Arabic body text at small sizes, on a mid-range phone, outdoors in daylight. Headings shouldn’t drop to a system font because the brand typeface has no Arabic glyphs.
- A language switch that keeps your place. Switching on a service page should land on the same service in the other language, not on the home page.
- Separate URLs with hreflang. Each language has its own address, linked with hreflang, and nobody is redirected automatically by location or browser language.
- A native speaker read every page. Not only the home page.
Our guide to Arabic SEO goes further into hreflang codes, Arabic URLs and keyword research.
How to test a web design company’s speed claims yourself
Run two or three of their live client sites through PageSpeed Insights before your second meeting. Look at the Core Web Vitals assessment at the top, which comes from real Chrome users, rather than the lab score underneath. The “good” thresholds on web.dev are LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP of 200 milliseconds or less and CLS of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of page loads.
Smaller sites often don’t have enough visitors for field data. In that case use the mobile lab result, then open the site on an ordinary phone over mobile data and see how it feels. If their own portfolio is slow, yours will be too.
Then ask what they do about speed during the build:
- How images are sized, compressed and lazy-loaded below the first screen.
- How the Arabic and English fonts load. Arabic font files are large and should be subset.
- Which third-party scripts run before the page is usable: chat widgets, heatmaps, tag managers.
- Whether they agree a weight limit for the first screen before the design is approved.
“We’ll optimise it at the end” usually means installing a plugin the week before launch.
What should an SEO-safe handover include?
An SEO-safe launch carries every URL that earns traffic, links or enquiries over to the new site with a 301 redirect, and leaves the new site open to Google on day one. Ask for the redirect map before design starts, a password-protected staging site, and a launch checklist someone signs off.
Launches go wrong in boring, predictable ways:
- Staging gets indexed. A staging site blocked only in robots.txt can still appear in Google; Google notes that URLs disallowed in robots.txt may still be indexed without their content. Put staging behind a password.
- Noindex stays on. The “discourage search engines” setting gets ticked during the build and never unticked.
- No redirects. Old URLs return 404 errors, and every link pointing at them is wasted.
- Tracking disappears. Form, call and WhatsApp events stop recording, so nobody can see the drop when it comes.
Your handover pack should include logins for every account in the ownership table above, the redirect map as a spreadsheet, a list of plugins or packages with their licences, the analytics events being tracked, and a short guide to editing pages. For a redesign or platform change, our step-by-step migration checklist lays out the whole sequence.
Red flags in a web design proposal
- No questions about your business before the proposal arrived.
- A template presented as custom design.
- “We’ll host it for you” with no word on whose account it sits in.
- Arabic “available on request”, which usually means machine translation.
- No mention of redirects when the site you’re replacing already ranks.
- Forms that collect personal data with no privacy notice. The UAE’s Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on personal data protection applies to what your forms collect, and the agency should raise it before you have to.
- Portfolio sites that are slow, broken on mobile or no longer online.
Where to go from here
Shortlist two or three companies, send each the same half-page brief, and compare how they handle the questions above. The one that asks you the sharpest questions back is usually the one worth hiring.
If you’re also choosing someone to grow traffic once the site is live, the same approach works there: see how to vet an SEO company in Dubai. For an example of the kind of build we do, we built the e-commerce site for HAMAC, a swimwear and resort wear brand in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and run its SEO. And if you already have a proposal and want a second opinion on it, send it to our Dubai team.