An Arabic site is not an English site with translated strings. The layout mirrors, the numbers do not, and mixed sentences change direction mid-line.
Right-to-left is a structural property, and it breaks in places a translated site never reveals until somebody reads it.
Margins, icons, progress and navigation all reverse. A stylesheet built left-to-right and pointed at Arabic content produces a page that reads inside out.
An Arabic sentence containing a Latin product name or a price changes direction twice. Content is delivered so the browser resolves that rather than guessing.
Both are used commercially across the Gulf. Each gets its own URLs, direction and cache entry rather than one being a switcher on the other.
Signed-in and transactional pages reach the origin, and from Dubai a European one adds a fixed cost to every one of them.
Arabic webfonts carry contextual letter forms, which makes them larger. They are subsetted rather than shipped whole.
The usual failure is a site whose words are Arabic and whose layout is English — icons pointing the wrong way, forms aligned left, and a sentence that reads backwards where a price appears.
Arabic faces are large because each letter has several contextual forms, so the same subsetting argument that applies to CJK applies here.
Text direction is structural, so it touches layout, fonts and caching rather than only translation.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Layout direction | Direction-aware properties rather than fixed left and right | A stylesheet written with left and right margins produces a mirrored-content page with unmirrored spacing, which reads as broken rather than translated. |
| Bidirectional text | Delivered so the browser resolves mixed-direction runs | An Arabic sentence containing a Latin name or a numeral changes direction twice, and left to guess the browser puts the punctuation in the wrong place. |
| Language versions | Arabic and English cached separately with direction declared | Both are used commercially across the Gulf, and serving one from the other's cache entry sends a reader a page in the wrong direction entirely. |
| Font delivery | Arabic subsetted rather than served whole | Arabic letters have several contextual forms, so a complete face is far heavier than a Latin one covering the same text. |
| Origin region | Placed in Asia for Gulf reach | Cached pages are served locally either way, but every signed-in request travels to wherever the origin actually is. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Move the site to an Asia origin — migration is free, RTL handling checked.