Building a bilingual site is not designing one version and flipping its direction. Right-to-left layout has its own visual and functional rules, and ignoring them produces a site that feels machine-translated even when the translation itself is excellent. This guide collects the most recurring mistakes in this type of project and how to avoid them.
Author: Raghdan BakhshPublished: Updated:
Some icons must mirror with the page direction, such as "next" and "back" arrows, while others must stay unchanged regardless of direction, such as a play icon, a clock, or a phone number. Mirroring everything automatically without distinction produces odd visual details that the eye notices even without fully understanding why.
The decision to use Eastern Arabic numerals or Latin numerals in the Arabic version must be deliberate and consistent across the whole site, not random from one page to the next. Date order also differs by local convention, and mixing formats within a single page confuses readers more than a language mistake would.
Sentences containing an English word or number inside Arabic text need careful handling so word order does not flip visually. This is common with brand names or technical terms inside Arabic copy, and it shows up clearly in headings and buttons if not handled with the correct text-direction markup.
A font designed primarily for Latin script often looks weak or unbalanced when used for Arabic without a carefully paired Arabic typeface. Arabic text also typically needs slightly more line-height than English to stay comfortable to read, and ignoring this difference makes long paragraphs visually tiring.
An input field in an Arabic form should start typing from the right, with its label and icon on the correct side, or the user will feel the form is "backwards" even if the translation is perfectly correct. This includes phone and email fields, which usually stay in Latin characters and numerals within an Arabic form and need special alignment handling.
The same sentence can be noticeably longer or shorter in Arabic than in English, and designing a fixed-size text space for both languages produces awkward truncation in one of them. A button or heading that looks perfect in English may break or get cut off in Arabic if the space isn't tested with real bilingual copy rather than placeholder text in only one language.
Every page should have a clear, independent URL for each language, with correct technical linking between the two versions so search engines understand this is the same page in another language, not duplicate content. Missing this linking weakens the site's search visibility in both languages over the long term.
It is not enough to test the site in one language and assume the other will work equally well. Every screen, from the homepage to the contact form to the error page, should be opened and fully reviewed in both languages before launch, because direction bugs often only appear during actual browsing, not when looking at a static design.
Send your site's link and I'll point out the key direction and Arabic issues that need fixing.
