Dubai websites in Arabic and English built for UAE rules

Dubai's economy leans on trade. In Dubai government figures for the first nine months of 2025, wholesale and retail trade was the largest single contributor to GDP, followed by financial and insurance services, real estate, construction, and information and communications. For a web agency those sectors turn into recognisable briefs: developers and brokerages launching projects, retailers selling online, trading and logistics firms that need portals, and finance and advisory firms whose website is part of the due-diligence check a counterparty runs.

The audience is unusually mixed. Arabic is the UAE's official language, English is the most used language in business, and large communities speak Malayalam, Hindi, Urdu, Tagalog and other languages. A good Dubai brief decides early which audience each page is for, instead of translating everything line by line in the final week. Payment data for the UAE shows more than 60 percent of online purchases are made on a mobile device, so the mobile layout in both languages is the primary design, not an adaptation of the desktop one.

Our closest proof comes from the Gulf and from property. In Qatar we built The Closet, a fashion storefront shaped around product discovery and a short path to purchase, and GWC Directory, a platform that makes a large logistics ecosystem searchable. Our real estate launch sites, including Serene Tower in DHA Multan and 360 The Residences, were built for developers in Pakistan. A Dubai launch uses the same patterns: construction storytelling, unit journeys and enquiry routing.

For consumer sales, Arabic is a legal requirement as well as a marketing choice. The executive regulations of the UAE Consumer Protection Law took effect on 14 October 2023. Under them, advertising, contracts, invoices and the information e-commerce providers display on their websites must be in Arabic as a minimum, with other languages allowed alongside it. An English-only storefront selling to UAE consumers carries a risk that is easy to avoid.

We deliver Arabic and multilingual websites. The right-to-left layout is mirrored properly, including navigation, icons, sliders, form fields and checkout steps, rather than being an English template with Arabic text poured in. We pair Arabic and Latin typefaces so both languages carry the same visual weight, give each language its own URLs and hreflang tags so search engines show the right version, and set up the CMS so your team can edit both languages without touching code.

Some of the Arabic will be legal text, such as returns policies, terms or product warnings. We recommend that your legal adviser signs that text off before launch, and we structure the site so the sign-off is a content step rather than a redevelopment.

VAT-registered businesses must display prices inclusive of VAT, and the Federal Tax Authority has described tax-exclusive consumer prices as misleading. The administrative penalty for failing to display tax-inclusive prices is AED 5,000. We set up storefronts to show VAT-inclusive AED prices on product, cart and checkout pages, and we check that the price a customer sees is the price the invoice charges. On a trade portal selling to VAT-registered buyers, prices may be shown excluding VAT if they are clearly marked, so we label them that way.

UAE shoppers pay in more ways than cards. PPRO's market data notes that they use cash and digital methods rather than cards for almost half of e-commerce purchases. The Central Bank has regulated buy now, pay later providers since December 2023, and Tamara received a restricted finance licence from it in October 2025. Jaywan, the national card scheme launched in 2024, is accepted on e-commerce platforms. We choose a payment gateway that covers the methods your customers use. Cash on delivery is more than a checkout setting: it is a decision about couriers, returns and failed deliveries.

The UAE's e-invoicing system covers business-to-business and business-to-government transactions; consumer sales are excluded. Businesses with revenue of AED 50 million or more must appoint an accredited service provider by 30 October 2026 and go live on 1 January 2027. Smaller businesses go live on 1 July 2027. If your site runs trade accounts, wholesale ordering or a supplier portal, we keep invoice issuing out of the website: the order flow passes clean data to your ERP and your service provider, which issue the e-invoice.

Real estate companies in Dubai must obtain a Dubai Land Department (DLD) permit, through its Trakheesi system, before publishing a property advertisement, and the permit number belongs in the ad. The permit covers electronic advertising as well as print and outdoor. Since April 2023, real estate companies have been expected to carry the Madmoun QR code on print and audiovisual ads so buyers can check them against DLD records. On developer and brokerage sites we build project and listing templates with fields for the permit number and QR code, so your marketing team can publish pages that show both without waiting for a developer.

Companies on the Dubai mainland and in most free zones fall under the federal Personal Data Protection Law, in force since January 2022. It makes consent the default basis for processing personal data, with listed exceptions, and sets conditions for sending data abroad. Companies incorporated in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) follow the DIFC Data Protection Law instead, and since July 2025 that law has let individuals take damages claims to court without first going to the Commissioner. We map every form, cookie and integration on the site: where an enquiry is stored, which CRM receives it and which country the server sits in. The privacy notice your adviser writes can then describe what the site really does.

On accessibility, the UAE has set a clear public benchmark. The National Digital Accessibility Policy guides federal government entities to WCAG 2.1 AA. Dubai's 2022 law on the rights of people with disabilities requires government entities to provide information in accessible formats and tasks its higher committee with building partnerships with the private sector. Both are aimed at government services, but WCAG 2.1 AA is a sensible standard for a private site too, and we use it as our working checklist: sufficient contrast, keyboard access, labelled forms, and readable text sizes in Arabic and English.