In most redesigns we price for Moroccan SMEs, the language question lands at the end of the meeting, right after the budget: “we launch in French, and we’ll handle Arabic in phase two.” It is the decision clients regret most often, and rarely for reasons of principle.
The cause is technical before it is commercial. An interface designed in French stays an interface designed left to right. Adding Arabic six months later is not a matter of filling translation fields. You have to rework layout direction, components, directional icons, usually typography and spacing too. That work costs noticeably more after launch than before the first mockup.
A single-language site, a French and Arabic site, and a three-language site are not separated by a percentage added to the “content” line of a quote. They need different skills, different timelines, and different disclosure obligations.
“French is enough”: where the assumption breaks
The assumption is not absurd. In Casablanca B2B, quotes, contracts and a good share of searches happen in French. An SME selling consulting, engineering or software to other companies can run a French-only site for years without losing a deal.
It breaks the moment the audience leaves that circle. A dental practice in Salé, an appliance distributor, a private school, a property developer: their end customers write in Arabic, search in Arabic or in transliterated darija, and leave a page they have to decode. It breaks in the other direction too, on export, where no English version means the foreign buyer has your brochure translated themselves.
Before deciding on instinct, look at your own data: the queries in the current site’s Search Console, the language of messages arriving through WhatsApp Business and the contact form, the language your sales team actually uses on the phone. Half a day of work, and the discussion stops being a matter of opinion.
Four configurations cover nearly every case:
- French only: urban B2B, professional services, subcontracting for European groups. Easiest to maintain, and often the right call in year one.
- French and Arabic: anything aimed at the Moroccan general public (retail, health, education, real estate, insurance) and anything dealing with the public sector.
- French and English: export, offshoring, SaaS, international hiring, investor material. Arabic brings little qualified traffic here.
- All three: a brand addressing the local and international markets under one identity. The most expensive configuration to keep alive, far more than to build.
Two clarifications that prevent misunderstandings. The Arabic of the Moroccan web is Modern Standard Arabic, not darija, which shows up in queries but reads poorly in long-form content. And Amazigh, an official language since the 2011 Constitution, mainly concerns projects tied to public institutions.
RTL: what breaks when Arabic arrives last
Switching to Arabic reverses reading direction, and that is where weak quotes show their edges. The dir=”rtl” attribute fits on one line. The fixes that follow fill several days if the design was never built for it.
The failure points are always the same:
- hard-coded margins and padding (padding-left, margin-left) instead of logical properties such as padding-inline-start
- directional icons: next arrows, accordion chevrons, back buttons, breadcrumbs, progress bars, carousels
- mixed strings, when a Latin brand name or a phone number sits inside an Arabic sentence and the display order falls apart
- typography: a Latin font does not cover Arabic, line height has to increase, and perceived sizes no longer match
- everything generated outside the pages: PDF invoices, transactional emails, exports, form error messages
Page builders blur the diagnosis. A serious WordPress theme has handled RTL for years, but sections hand-built in Elementor or Divi, with margins typed in pixels, do not mirror on their own. At acceptance testing, skip the homepage. Test a long form, a checkout flow, the mobile menu and a page dense with figures.
Machine translation, human review, and what Google does with it
A plugin wired to DeepL produces a mostly readable Arabic version in twenty minutes. The small remainder is exactly the part that costs you a customer: a button label, a legal sentence, the name of a service you invented, units, forms of address.
Google does not punish a translation because a machine produced it. Its spam policies target content generated at scale and published with no review and no added value. A machine translation that someone reviewed and corrected is fine. A 300-page site translated in one click and never reread fits the description rather well.
For Arabic website translation, the split that fits an SME budget: mandatory human review on the pages that commit you (offer, pricing, legal notices, privacy policy, forms, automated emails), machine translation acceptable on blog archives, and an internally approved glossary of your industry terms before anything runs. That leaves the real question to ask before signing: who reviews? If nobody in the company writes fluent Arabic, that review belongs on the budget as a line item, not handed by default to the marketing intern.
Multilingual website Morocco: 2026 price ranges by language count
A bilingual website price in Morocco depends less on word count than on when the second language enters the project. The figures below are orders of magnitude for an SME working with an established local provider. They help you read a quote rather than replace it, and the line-by-line breakdown of the single-language base sits in our guide to professional website pricing in Morocco.
- Single-language brochure site, 8 to 12 pages: MAD 15,000 to 45,000.
- Second Latin-script language (English) planned up front: 10 to 20% on top of the build budget, usually MAD 4,000 to 12,000, translation excluded.
- Arabic planned up front, including RTL, fonts and testing in both directions: 20 to 35% more, so MAD 8,000 to 25,000 on a brochure site.
- Arabic added after launch: expect 1.5 to 2 times that amount, since delivered components have to be reworked and the whole test pass repeated.
- Professional translation: billed per word, roughly MAD 0.60 to 1.50 depending on technicality. A 5,000 to 7,000-word site means MAD 3,000 to 10,000 per language.
- Licences and tooling: a serious WordPress multilingual plugin costs the equivalent of MAD 1,000 to 3,000 a year, while Shopify translation apps run on monthly subscriptions.
- Maintenance: every language adds update and QA time. A bilingual maintenance contract lands 20 to 30% above a single-language one.
The CMS weighs as much as the language count. WordPress with Polylang or WPML stays the cheapest and most predictable option, RTL included. Shopify handles markets and languages cleanly, but RTL quality depends on the theme and needs checking before purchase. A Next.js or Laravel build gives you full control over routing and per-language URLs at a higher development cost. If you are choosing a commerce stack at the same time, bring languages into that comparison early: our review of ecommerce platforms for Moroccan retailers treats it as a selection criterion.
Multilingual SEO: one URL per language, and the auto-switcher mistake
The technical structure comes down to very little, and that is exactly where traffic leaks. Each language needs its own address, in subfolders (/fr/, /ar/, /en/), which is almost always right for a single Moroccan entity. Each page declares its equivalents with hreflang tags, x-default included, and the sitemap lists all versions. Without distinct URLs there is nothing to index: a JavaScript overlay that swaps text on the fly without changing the address leaves Google with one version, in French.
The most common mistake is automatic redirection based on browser language or IP address. It irritates the Moroccan visitor who wants to read in French on a phone set to Arabic, and it stops the crawler from seeing anything beyond a single version. A visible switcher that leads to a real URL and keeps the current page beats any detection logic.
On the content side, multilingual SEO in Morocco needs keyword research per language, not a translation of the French list: Arabic queries are not a mirror of francophone ones, and the intent behind them often differs. Two details that are expensive to fix later are titles and meta descriptions, routinely forgotten in translated versions, and the weight of Arabic font files, which need subsetting to keep Core Web Vitals intact.
CNDP: the language your visitor consents in
Law 09-08 requires you to inform the data subject clearly before collecting their data and to declare your processing activities to the CNDP. There is no mandatory language list for a private website. The underlying logic is harder to argue with: if your quote request form is in Arabic and the privacy policy attached to it exists only in French, the consent you collected is fragile.
In practice, once a page exists in a language, its surroundings have to follow: cookie banner, consent checkbox, notice under the form, legal notices, privacy policy, confirmation email text. Plenty of providers translate the showcase pages and leave these in French, because they are long and thankless. That is precisely where a complaint takes shape. The detail of required notices and declarations sits in our article on website CNDP compliance in Morocco, and current wording should always be checked against the CNDP’s own site.
Three questions before you lock the language count
- What language do your prospects already write to you in? Your inbox and your business WhatsApp answer this better than any market study.
- Who maintains the Arabic version in six months? A frozen version, with last year’s prices and a news feed that stopped, damages your image more than having no Arabic version at all. If nobody is named, cut the scope: ten pages kept current beat a full site left to rot.
- Is RTL inside the quoted scope? Ask for the explicit line, and ask to see two Arabic pages the provider has already shipped, on mobile. An integrator who has never produced RTL will discover the problems on your budget.
If those three answers do not come easily, start with one language done properly while laying the groundwork: logical properties in the CSS, subfolder URLs from version one, a content structure that can be duplicated. The second language will then cost what it should cost. It is one of the heaviest calls in a web project, on par with the classic website redesign mistakes we have written about elsewhere.
Frequently asked questions
Do you need an Arabic site to work with the Moroccan public sector?
No text obliges a private company to have an Arabic website in order to bid. What counts is the submission file and the tender rules, which specify the language of the documents required. That said, correspondence with some entities happens in Arabic, and a French-only site sends a signal when references are being checked.
Can a machine translation plugin be enough?
As a first pass on low-stakes content, yes. Not on offer and pricing pages, not on legal pages, not on titles and meta descriptions. The main risk is not a Google penalty, it is awkward Arabic phrasing that undermines your credibility with the exact reader you were trying to reach.
Subfolder, subdomain or country domain?
Subfolder in the large majority of cases for a single Moroccan entity: domain authority stays concentrated and operations stay simple. A subdomain makes sense when versions are run by separate teams on separate hosting. A country domain assumes a subsidiary and a local address in each target market.
How much time does an extra language add to the schedule?
With Arabic planned at the scoping stage, allow one to two extra weeks on a brochure site (RTL mockups, fonts, double test pass), with translation running in parallel. If Arabic arrives after delivery, plan on three to five weeks instead, testing included.
Arrowlancer designs and rebuilds websites and web applications in French, Arabic and English, with RTL that has actually been tested, per-language URLs and tags, and legal pages translated to the same standard as the showcase pages; the full scope of our web work is listed on our services page. If you are still weighing two languages against three for your next site, write to us through the contact form with your two main markets, and we will tell you what each option changes in the quote and the schedule.