Web design · Riyadh
Web Design Company in Riyadh
Arabic-first websites for Riyadh companies that sell to institutions, government entities and a domestic market that researches thoroughly before it contacts anyone. Fixed prices in riyals, written quotes, no hourly billing.
SAR 4,800
bilingual site, from
Five pages in Arabic and English, custom design, first year of hosting included
SAR 9,900
business site
Fifteen pages with service and sector pages planned around what Riyadh searches
15%
VAT, where it applies
Prices shown before VAT; ZATCA e-invoicing configured if you are registered
Arabic
first, not translated
Written in Saudi business Arabic, with English as the second version
What matters in Riyadh
Key takeaways
- Riyadh buyers document their decisions. A website here is frequently read by a committee, not one person, and has to survive being forwarded.
- Arabic is the main version. English exists for suppliers, partners and expatriate staff.
- Credentials matter more than in any other Gulf city: registration details, certifications, named projects, a downloadable company profile.
- Service and sector pages beat a single services page, because procurement searches are specific.
- If you sell to consumers, the platform decision (Salla, Zid, WooCommerce, Shopify) comes before the design decision.
- ZATCA e-invoicing applies once you are VAT-registered, and it is cheaper to build in than to bolt on.
What is on this page
Why Riyadh is its own market
Riyadh is the administrative and corporate centre of Saudi Arabia, and that shapes every brief that comes out of it. Government entities, semi-government bodies, headquarters of national companies, banks, consultancies, contractors bidding for large projects, and a fast-growing services sector built around all of them.
The practical consequence is that a website in Riyadh is usually read by more than one person. A procurement officer checks whether you are credible. A technical person checks whether you understand the work. A decision maker skims the summary. Somebody forwards a link, or saves a PDF, to a group who were never on your site at all. That is a different job from a website that has to charm one buyer in a single visit.
It also means the content has to stand up to scrutiny. Vague claims about excellence do nothing here; registration details, certifications, named projects, sector experience and a downloadable company profile do. The businesses that win institutional work in this city tend to look boringly substantial online, and that is not an accident.
Compare that with Jeddah, where relationships open the door and the website’s job is to prove you are real and reachable before a WhatsApp conversation begins. Same language, same payment rails, different emphasis: Riyadh rewards documentation, Jeddah rewards reachability. Building both cities the same way is the most common mistake we are asked to fix.
Sectors we build for in Riyadh
What each kind of Riyadh business needs from a website, and what that implies for the build.
| Sector | What the website has to do | What that means in the build |
|---|---|---|
| Government suppliers and contractors | Prove capability and compliance to people who will never call first | Project pages, certifications, downloadable profile, precise service scopes |
| Corporate headquarters | Present divisions, leadership and reporting credibly in two languages | Structured corporate site, careers, media and investor sections |
| Professional services and consultancies | Demonstrate expertise before the first meeting | Service pages per practice area, insights, consultant profiles |
| Retail and D2C brands | Sell directly with local payment habits respected | Salla or Zid store, Mada, Apple Pay, Tabby or Tamara, cash on delivery |
| Clinics and healthcare | Build trust and make booking effortless in Arabic | Pages per treatment, practitioner profiles, WhatsApp and online booking |
| Technology and startups | Explain a product clearly to investors and customers at once | Product pages, documentation, demo booking, bilingual from day one |
If your business sells to both institutions and consumers — which is common in Riyadh — those are two different audiences on one site, and the structure has to keep them apart without hiding either.
Riyadh by district: what we see
Riyadh is large enough that the business districts behave like separate markets. Which one you are in usually predicts what the website needs to do.
| Area | Typical businesses | What the website usually needs |
|---|---|---|
| King Abdullah Financial District | Finance, professional services, regional offices | Corporate structure, credentials, insights, careers |
| Olaya and King Fahd Road | Headquarters, consultancies, agencies, hospitality | Service pages per practice, case work, bilingual contact routes |
| Al Malaz and the older centre | Trading, clinics, education, established family firms | Credibility, plain Arabic, directions and opening hours |
| Al Nakheel and northern districts | Clinics, retail, private schools, services | Local service pages, booking, reviews, mobile-first speed |
| Second Industrial City and Exit 18 | Manufacturing, logistics, contracting, distribution | Capability pages, catalogues, company profile, procurement contact |
| Diplomatic Quarter and government belt | Institutions, associations, suppliers to public bodies | Accessible, Arabic-first, document-heavy, rigorous structure |
No competitor page we reviewed in this market breaks the city down this way, which is odd, because it is the first thing a buyer recognises about their own business.
What works in Riyadh
Six decisions that consistently make a difference in this city.
Arabic-first
Written in Saudi business Arabic rather than translated from English. Arabic search results here are thinner than English ones in most commercial categories, so the same effort buys a better position.
Documentation, not adjectives
Registration details, certifications, named projects, sector experience and a company profile people can download and forward. Institutional buyers circulate documents, not impressions.
A page per service
Procurement searches are specific. One “services” page cannot rank for six different scopes of work, and cannot be sent as a link about one of them.
Bilingual contact routes
A form for the procurement officer, WhatsApp for everyone else, and a phone number that is answered. Different buyers use different doors.
Speed on mobile data
Riyadh browses on phones like everywhere else in the Kingdom. A slow site raises the price of every advertising click you buy.
Built to be updated
Projects, certifications and team changes should be editable by your team without calling an agency. We hand over training and videos as standard.
Riyadh is building, and websites are behind
Riyadh is in the middle of the largest construction and services expansion in its history. New districts, new entertainment and tourism capacity, new headquarters requirements for companies that want government work, and a steady inflow of firms opening Saudi offices for the first time.
For a web project that has two practical consequences. First, an enormous number of Riyadh companies are younger online than they are as businesses: a firm with twenty years of trading behind it may have a five-page site built in 2016 and no Arabic version worth the name. The gap between the quality of the business and the quality of its website is wider here than in Dubai, and it is visible to every buyer who checks.
Second, competition for attention is rising faster than competition for search. Plenty of Riyadh categories still have thin Arabic results, while the same categories in English are crowded with regional agencies and directories. A company that publishes properly in Arabic now is competing against a field that has not arrived yet.
Neither of those is a reason to rush. It is a reason to build something that can grow: a structure that accepts new services and sectors without a rebuild, content your own team can extend, and a platform that will not need replacing the first time you add a language or a store.
Selling to institutions and government suppliers
A large share of Riyadh business involves selling to entities that buy through a process. That process has a shape, and a website can either fit it or fight it.
What the people running that process actually look for: evidence that you exist as a registered entity, evidence that you have done this work before at a comparable scale, a clear statement of what you do and do not do, named contacts, and documents they can attach to an internal recommendation. They rarely want a sales pitch — they want enough material to justify shortlisting you to somebody else.
So on these projects we build for forwarding. Every service has its own page with a stable address. A company profile is downloadable without a form, because forcing a form on a procurement officer who is preparing a shortlist is how you get removed from it. Projects are described with scope, sector and role rather than adjectives. Certifications and registrations appear as facts, not badges in a carousel.
None of this conflicts with selling to ordinary customers. It simply means the site has a documented layer underneath the persuasive one, and the documented layer is what wins the work nobody told you was being decided.
How a Riyadh corporate site is structured
The structure we use for companies that sell to institutions and to customers at the same time.
Most Riyadh websites we audit have the top row and nothing underneath it. They read well and lose tenders, because the person who actually decides never saw anything they could use.
Online stores for Riyadh
If you sell to consumers, the platform decision comes before the design decision. Most Saudi merchants sell through Salla or Zid rather than WooCommerce or Shopify — local payments, Arabic-first storefronts, ZATCA integrations and Saudi couriers built in. Shopify Payments is not available in Saudi Arabia, which surprises merchants who assumed otherwise.
What a Riyadh store needs configured properly:
- Mada as a first-class payment method, tested with a live transaction before launch
- Apple Pay and STC Pay, plus Tabby or Tamara where your basket size makes instalments relevant
- Cash on delivery with a confirmation step, because refused deliveries are the cost of doing it carelessly
- Arabic product content written the way Saudis search, not translated from a supplier datasheet
- Shipping zones and rates that reflect what delivery across Riyadh and the Central Region actually costs you
- ZATCA e-invoicing connected once you are VAT-registered, so compliant invoices are issued from the first order
Our e-commerce service covers the build on any platform, and the Saudi cost guide compares what each route costs over three years.
Arabic-first, and what that actually means
Almost every agency claims bilingual capability. Very few build Arabic-first, and in Riyadh the difference is commercial rather than cosmetic.
Arabic-first means the Arabic copy is written, not translated — the terms a Saudi buyer would use, the questions they would ask, in the order they would ask them. It means right-to-left is designed in from the first sketch, so navigation, filters, forms, sliders and directional icons mirror properly. It means Arabic typography is set deliberately, and that numbers, dates and currencies behave correctly inside right-to-left sentences, which is where automated conversions break.
The commercial argument: Arabic search results in Saudi Arabia are thinner than English ones in most commercial categories, because agencies keep building English-first and translating. A company that publishes forty genuinely useful Arabic pages competes against fewer serious rivals than the same company would in English. That gap is narrowing, and it is still the cheapest advantage available to a Riyadh business.
The test for any agency, including us: ask for two live Arabic sites they built and have an Arabic-speaking colleague read them for five minutes.
Five mistakes we see on Riyadh websites
We audit a lot of sites in this city before rebuilding them. The same faults recur.
- Arabic added last. The English site is built, then translated, and the Arabic version inherits an English layout, English search assumptions and machine-translated phrasing. It is visible within one screen to a Saudi reader.
- One services page. Six scopes of work described in six paragraphs on a single page, unable to rank for any of them and impossible to send as a link about one.
- No document anyone can forward. No company profile, no project descriptions with scope and role, nothing a procurement officer can attach to a recommendation.
- A contact form as the only route. It suits procurement and nobody else. Without WhatsApp and a phone number that is answered, the faster half of the market goes elsewhere.
- A rebuild without redirects. A redesign that changes every address and silently discards years of accumulated search relevance. It is the most expensive mistake on this list and the easiest to prevent.
None of these are exotic. They are the predictable result of treating a website as a design deliverable rather than as a sales and credibility system that happens to look like a design deliverable.
Being found in Riyadh
Ranking for “web design Riyadh” in English and ranking for “شركة تصميم مواقع الرياض” are different problems, and most Riyadh businesses need the second more. What we set up:
- A Google Business Profile with your real address, categories, hours and photographs — the highest-return local task for any business with premises
- Arabic page titles and descriptions written as search phrases rather than translated from English
- A page per service and, where it is genuine, per sector — procurement searches are specific and deserve specific pages
- District and area relevance where it is real: Olaya, King Fahd Road, KAFD, Al Malaz, Al Nakheel, the industrial cities
- Structured data so search engines understand the business type, the services and the areas served
- Consistent name, address and phone number everywhere the business is listed
What we will not do is invent a Riyadh address. We are an Istanbul studio working Gulf hours. Two competitor pages we reviewed in this market carry addresses from other cities inside their markup — it is visible, and it is the kind of detail a procurement officer notices.
What a website costs in Riyadh
Published prices, in riyals, identical whether you are in Riyadh, Jeddah or Dammam. Every quote is fixed in writing before work starts.
| What you need | Price | Timeline | Included |
|---|---|---|---|
| Five-page bilingual site | SAR 4,800 | 2–4 weeks | Custom design, Arabic and English, first year of hosting |
| Fifteen-page business site | SAR 9,900 | 4–6 weeks | Service and sector pages, blog, lead tracking |
| Salla or Zid store | SAR 5,500 | 2–4 weeks | Branded theme, 50 products in Arabic, payments tested |
| Online store | SAR 16,800 | 6–8 weeks | Up to 100 products, Mada, instalments, cash on delivery |
| Custom platform or portal | From SAR 29,600 | 3–6 months | Booking, member areas, ERP or CRM integrations |
| Care and hosting | From SAR 299 / month | — | Hosting, backups, updates, an hour of changes monthly |
| SEO | From SAR 2,200 / month | — | Arabic and English search work with monthly reporting |
Saudi agencies commonly quote SAR 5,000–22,000 for a company website, with entry-level template packages from around SAR 1,500 and custom platforms well beyond SAR 30,000. Prices here are before VAT, which is 15% where it applies. The Saudi cost guide explains what moves a quote, and the pricing page lists every package.
What happens, week by week
A fixed price is half of what you are buying. The other half is knowing when things happen and what we need from you.
The step that slips is content and approvals. Institutional clients often need an internal sign-off round we cannot compress, so we schedule it explicitly rather than discovering it in week four.
What we build for Riyadh businesses
Every service is delivered in Arabic and English, priced in riyals, and quoted fixed before work starts.
Web design
Custom bilingual websites built around how Saudi buyers search and decide. Web design service.
Online stores
Salla, Zid, WooCommerce and Shopify stores with Mada, instalments and cash on delivery. E-commerce development.
UI/UX design
Interface and journey design for platforms and portals, tested right-to-left. UI/UX design.
SEO
Arabic and English search work with monthly reporting on rankings, traffic and enquiries. SEO services.
Google Ads
Campaign setup, bilingual ads and conversion tracking, managed monthly. Google Ads management.
Digital marketing
Content and campaign work for companies selling across the Kingdom. Digital marketing.
“In Riyadh the website is rarely read by one person. Build it so it survives being forwarded.”
Related reading
If you are pricing or planning a project:
- What a website costs in Saudi Arabia — SAR ranges, platform subscriptions, VAT and ZATCA e-invoicing
- Web design in Jeddah — how the commercial capital differs from Riyadh in practice
- Salla store design and Zid store design — the two Saudi store platforms compared
- SEO services — how Arabic search is won in this market
- A multilingual case study — Arabic-first done properly, with measured facts
- Our published prices — fixed packages in riyals
For the technical standards we build to, Google’s Core Web Vitals guidance sets the speed thresholds every site of ours is measured against.
Riyadh questions
How much does a website cost in Riyadh?
Our bilingual packages start at SAR 4,800 for five pages and SAR 9,900 for a fifteen-page business site, with stores from SAR 16,800 and Salla or Zid stores from SAR 5,500. Saudi agencies commonly quote SAR 5,000–22,000 for a company website.
Do you have an office in Riyadh?
No. We are a studio in Istanbul working Gulf hours, and we say so rather than publishing an address we do not have. Everything runs on scheduled calls and WhatsApp, and the domain, hosting and site stay in your name.
Can you work with government or semi-government entities?
We build the kind of site their suppliers need: documented services, named projects, downloadable profiles and accessible Arabic-first pages. Contracting directly with a public entity usually requires local registration, which is a question for your legal advisers.
Do you build online stores for Saudi Arabia?
Yes — Salla, Zid, WooCommerce or Shopify, with Mada, Apple Pay, STC Pay, Tabby or Tamara and cash on delivery configured and tested before launch.
Is Riyadh different from Jeddah for SEO?
The language and payment fundamentals are the same. Riyadh buying is more documented and often involves committees, so the content carries more evidence; Jeddah runs on relationships and reachability.
Will my site be in Arabic or English?
Both, with Arabic as the primary version. English exists for suppliers, partners and expatriate staff rather than as the master copy.
Who writes the Arabic content?
We can, or you can supply it. What we advise against is machine translation from English — it reads as translated to any native speaker and ranks poorly.
Do you handle ZATCA e-invoicing?
For stores, yes: once you are VAT-registered we connect the platform’s ZATCA integration so compliant invoices are issued from the first order. The tax registration itself is yours to hold.
Can you rebuild our site without losing our rankings?
Yes, and it is planned first. We map every existing address to its replacement and put permanent redirects in place before launch.
How long does a Riyadh project take?
Two to four weeks for a small site, four to six for a fifteen-page business site, six to eight for a store. Internal approval rounds are the usual variable.
Do you offer maintenance?
Yes, optionally, from SAR 299 a month: hosting, backups, updates and an hour of content changes. Many clients take the site only and add support later.
Can you work alongside our in-house or marketing team?
Yes. Everything we build is standard WordPress or a mainstream store platform, documented at handover, with no proprietary lock-in.
What do you need to start?
A short brief: what you do, which services or sectors matter, any sites you like, and a deadline. We return a fixed written quote within three working days.
Do you work with companies outside Riyadh?
Yes — across Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf, and in Türkiye. Prices are quoted in your currency.
Building in Riyadh?
Tell us what you do and who you sell to. We will map the structure, the content and a fixed price in riyals.