Arabic and English Website Checklist: Building a Bilingual Site That Ranks in Qatar

In Qatar, a website that only works well in English is leaving a large part of its audience behind. Many decision-makers read English comfortably but search in Arabic, and many customers prefer Arabic entirely. Building a bilingual site properly is not a translation task; it touches design, engineering and SEO. This is the checklist we use on every bilingual website project.

Design and layout

• Design both directions from the start. Review Arabic mockups alongside English ones, not after development. Some layouts that look balanced in English feel wrong when mirrored.
• Use logical CSS properties. margin-inline-start and padding-inline-end instead of left and right, so components flip automatically with dir="rtl".
• Decide what should not mirror. Phone numbers, code, product codes, media player controls and some icons (such as a play button) should stay left-to-right. Directional icons like arrows and chevrons should flip.
• Allow for text length differences. Arabic and English copy rarely have the same length; buttons, menus and cards need room in both.

Typography

• Choose a dedicated Arabic web font designed for screen reading, rather than relying on the fallback the browser picks.
• Arabic usually needs a slightly larger font size and more generous line height than Latin text to read comfortably.
• Load the Arabic font only where Arabic is displayed, so English pages do not pay the performance cost.
• Never apply letter-spacing to Arabic text; it breaks the connected script.

Content

• Write or adapt Arabic copy with a native writer rather than machine translation, particularly for headings, calls to action and SEO pages.
• Keep terminology consistent across the site with a short bilingual glossary of product and service names.
• Localise, do not just translate: currency in QAR, Qatar phone formats, local addresses and the Sunday to Thursday working week.

Bilingual SEO

This is where most bilingual sites in the region lose traffic.

• Separate URLs per language, for example /ar/services/web-development. If the language changes only through a client-side toggle, Google will usually index just one language.
• Server-rendered Arabic content. The Arabic text must be in the HTML that the server returns, not injected later by JavaScript.
• hreflang annotations linking each English page to its Arabic equivalent (en-QA and ar-QA), declared on both pages.
• Separate titles and meta descriptions in Arabic, written for Arabic search behaviour.
• Arabic keyword research. People do not search with literal translations of English keywords. Research Arabic terms separately, including common spelling variations.
• The lang and dir attributes set correctly on the html element of each language version.

Our SEO team handles Arabic and English keyword research as separate workstreams for exactly this reason.

Forms and data

• Accept Arabic and English input in all fields, including names and addresses.
• Validate Qatar mobile numbers with the +974 prefix, and accept Arabic-Indic digits as well as Western digits.
• Make sure confirmation emails and PDFs render Arabic correctly; this is a frequent failure point.
• Search inside the site should handle Arabic normalisation, such as different forms of alef and taa marbuta.

Testing

• Test the Arabic version on real phones, not only in a desktop browser with the direction switched.
• Check every page template in both languages, including error pages, empty states and emails.
• Check page speed for both languages separately; Arabic fonts and images can change the result.

Content management

Editors need to see clearly which content exists in which language, and nothing should publish half-translated. A CMS with linked language versions and per-language SEO fields saves a great deal of manual checking.

If you have an existing site and want to know how it measures up against this checklist, our Doha team can run a bilingual audit as part of a free consultation.