Arabic & English Websites: The Real Cost and Technical Traps of Going Bilingual

Short answer: a properly built bilingual website costs 30% to 40% more than the same site in one language — the figure we quote in our website pricing guide — but the number that actually matters is not the price, it is whether the extra 30-40% went toward real bilingual engineering or toward a plugin that flips text direction and calls it done. Most "bilingual" Jordanian websites are the second kind, and it shows in both the user experience and the Google rankings.

We build bilingual sites for a living, and this is the part of the process almost nobody explains before the invoice arrives.

Why Arabic is not "English with translated text"

A website built for English and then adapted for Arabic is not one design with swapped words. Arabic reads right to left. That single fact touches nearly every visual decision in the interface:

Margins, padding, and alignment. A "left margin" in English CSS needs to become a right margin in Arabic, and if the site was built using literal left and right instead of logical start and end properties, every single spacing rule has to be manually re-flipped, which is why retrofitting Arabic onto an English-only site afterward often costs more than building bilingual from day one.

Icons and directional cues. Arrows, back buttons, progress indicators, and breadcrumb trails that point left in English need to point right in Arabic, or they now point the wrong direction relative to the reading flow.

Numbers and mixed content. Prices, phone numbers, and dates inside Arabic sentences behave differently, and a site that does not handle this correctly produces sentences that visually scramble on the screen.

Forms and tables. Input fields, table headers, and dropdown alignment all need mirroring, and this is where a huge share of "bilingual" sites visibly break — a form that looks perfect in English and subtly wrong in Arabic.

None of this is cosmetic polish. A Jordanian visitor lands on a site with slightly-off Arabic spacing and reads it, correctly, as a site that was built for English speakers first and Arabic added as an afterthought — which damages trust in exactly the market segment the Arabic version was supposed to reach.

The SEO side nobody explains

This is the part with real business consequences, and it rarely comes up until traffic numbers look wrong six months in.

hreflang tags. Google needs to be told explicitly that your /en/ and /ar/ pages are language versions of each other, not duplicate content. Get this wrong and Google may index only one language properly, show the wrong language version to the wrong searchers, or in the worst case, treat one version as duplicate content and suppress it from search results entirely.

URL structure. Separate paths (/en/ and /ar/), a subdomain (ar.yoursite.com), or a query parameter (?lang=ar) all work technically, but they are not equal for SEO. Clean language-prefixed paths are generally the strongest choice and the easiest for both Google and users to understand.

Two keyword strategies, not one. Arabic search behavior in Jordan is genuinely different from English search behavior for the same business — different phrasing, different question formats, sometimes entirely different intent. A site that simply translates its English keyword strategy into Arabic is usually targeting terms nobody actually searches for in Arabic.

Content that reads as translated. Google's systems, and human readers, can tell the difference between content written for Arabic and content translated into Arabic. The second one under-performs in rankings and in conversion, even when the grammar is perfect.

Sitemap and metadata duplication. Every meta title, meta description, and structured data field needs its own Arabic version — not a shared one, not an auto-translated one. This is invisible to a site visitor and directly visible to Google.

What proper bilingual engineering actually costs

Item | Added cost over single-language build

CSS built with logical properties from the start (no retrofit needed later) | Included in the 30–40% premium if planned from day one

Retrofitting RTL onto an existing English-only site | Often 50%+ of the original build cost — usually more expensive than building bilingual originally

Proper hreflang and URL structure setup | 100 – 400 JOD if done as a discrete technical task

Native Arabic copywriting (not translation) | 40 – 120 JOD per page, same range as English content writing

Bilingual technical SEO audit | Included in a full SEO audit; ask specifically if hreflang is covered

The pattern across every line item: doing it right from the start is meaningfully cheaper than doing it twice.

Three traps we see constantly

Google Translate widgets presented as a bilingual site. A JavaScript translate widget is not a bilingual website by any SEO or usability standard — Google generally does not index machine-translated overlay content as a real language version, so the site effectively does not exist in Arabic search results no matter how it looks to a visitor.

One CMS, two disconnected content sets that drift apart. Without a CMS structured to keep language versions linked, the Arabic and English content quietly diverge over months — a price updated in one language and not the other, a product removed from English but still live in Arabic — and nobody notices until a customer does.

Testing only in English. A site tested exclusively in its English version and shipped will reliably have broken spacing, overlapping elements, or misaligned forms in Arabic that were never caught because nobody who signed off looked at that version.

When single-language is actually the right call

If your entire realistic customer base searches and reads only in one language — a genuinely narrow B2B niche, for instance — building bilingual adds real cost for a version almost nobody will use. Build well in the one language your customers actually use, and revisit bilingual when you have evidence, not assumption, that you need it.

Warning signs your "bilingual" website is not actually bilingual

The Arabic version was delivered noticeably later and looks like an afterthought bolted onto finished English pages.

Nobody ever asked you about hreflang, or you have never heard the term from your developer.

Your Arabic pages have generic auto-generated meta titles instead of ones written specifically for Arabic search terms.

Spacing, icons, or form alignment look visibly "off" in the Arabic version compared to the English one.

Frequently asked questions

Should I build English first and add Arabic later, or both together?

Both together, if budget allows. Planning bilingual from day one means the CSS, content structure, and SEO setup are built correctly once. Adding Arabic later almost always costs more than the premium would have been originally.

Do I need separate content managers for each language, or can one person handle both?

One capable bilingual content manager can handle both, but they need real fluency in both languages' marketing register, not just conversational ability — literal translation of marketing copy reliably underperforms.

Does a bilingual site really rank differently on Google than a single-language one?

Not inherently lower or higher — but a badly configured bilingual site (missing hreflang, thin translated content) will underperform a well-built single-language site. A properly built bilingual site reaches two separate search audiences instead of one.

Is RTL support only about Arabic, or does it matter for other things?

For a Jordanian business, Arabic is almost always the relevant case, but the same logical-properties approach also future-proofs the site if you ever add another RTL language.

The bottom line

A bilingual site done properly is not translation with extra steps — it is effectively two coordinated products sharing one backend, and the 30-40% premium reflects real engineering, not padding. The expensive version of "bilingual" is not the one built right from the start; it is the one retrofitted after launch, or the one that looks bilingual but is invisible to half its intended audience in Google search.

CS-Aspirations builds bilingual Arabic/English sites as a core part of our website development work, including for government and corporate clients where getting this wrong is not an option. If you have an existing English-only site and are weighing whether to add Arabic now or rebuild bilingual from scratch, get in touch — we can tell you honestly which one actually costs less for your specific site.