Building a bilingual French–Arabic website: why and how.
Your customers in Algeria search in French and in Arabic. Here is why your site should speak both, and what doing it properly means in practice.
Published
Why one language is not enough in Algeria
In Algeria, your customers do not all search in the same language. French is still everywhere in business, trade and technical fields, while Arabic is the official language, the language of the administration and of much everyday reading. A site in only one of them quietly turns away part of the people looking for you.
The gap widens outside the big cities. In mid-sized towns, among families and in sectors that deal with public institutions, people often expect to find an Arabic version. Offering one also tells visitors that you are speaking to everyone, not only to a French-reading audience.
Each language also brings its own searches. Someone who types a query in Arabic will mostly be shown pages written in Arabic, so a French-only site simply does not appear for them.
What doing it properly means technically
For multilingual sites, Google recommends giving each language its own URL, for example yoursite.dz/fr/ and yoursite.dz/ar/. Each version then becomes a real page that Google can crawl, index and show on its own.
The versions are linked with hreflang annotations, placed in the page head or in the sitemap. They tell Google where each version lives, so it can show each person the right one. Every page must list all the versions, itself included, and the links must go both ways, otherwise Google may ignore them.
Each page also declares its language in the code: lang="fr" for French, lang="ar" with dir="rtl" for Arabic. Browsers, screen readers and translation tools rely on these attributes, and dir="rtl" is what turns the whole page to right-to-left reading.
A real right-to-left layout
Changing the text direction is only the start. In Arabic the whole interface reads from right to left: the logo and menu move to the right, and "next" and "back" arrows point the other way. Icons that show a direction, such as a chevron or a send icon, are mirrored as well.
Not everything flips, though. Your logo stays exactly as it is, and so do phone numbers, prices, dates in digits, email addresses and brand names in Latin letters: they keep reading left to right inside the Arabic sentence. These details are what separate a careful right-to-left build from a mirrored copy.
Typography matters just as much. Arabic needs a web font designed for screens, with enough size and line height, because a font that looks fine in French can make Arabic cramped and hard to read on a phone. And the copy itself should be written or reviewed by a fluent person, not pasted from a machine translator.
Common mistakes to avoid
The most frequent mistake is a single URL with a button that switches the language in JavaScript. Google usually sees only one version, and the other language is almost absent from search results. Google Translate widgets have the same problem: the translated text is not part of your pages, and you do not control its quality.
Other mistakes are obvious to visitors. A mirrored logo, a form with translated labels but error messages still in French, or French paragraphs left inside the Arabic version all send the same message: the second language was an afterthought.
A last trap is redirecting visitors automatically based on their location or browser language. Google advises against it, because it can stop both people and crawlers from reaching every version; a visible language switcher is safer.
Organising translation and keeping both versions in sync
Choose a reference language from the start, then write the other version as a text in its own right rather than translating sentence by sentence. A good Arabic page often says the same thing with a different structure, and that is fine as long as the facts, prices and offers match.
Manage both languages in the same system, with a field per language for every page, product or article. When a page changes in French, its Arabic version should be flagged for an update, and nothing should go live half translated.
English can come later as a third language, for export, partners abroad or the diaspora. With separate URLs and hreflang already in place, adding /en is mostly a matter of content. This is how Neodott builds sites in French, Arabic and English, with a separate address per language and a real right-to-left layout, as on its own site: neodott.com, /fr and /ar.
A short checklist before launch
Go through each point on both versions before you publish.
- One URL per language, such as /fr and /ar
- hreflang tags on every page, linking all versions both ways
- lang and dir="rtl" set on Arabic pages
- Menu, arrows and directional icons mirrored in Arabic
- Logo, numbers and Latin brand names left as they are
- A readable Arabic web font, tested on a phone
- Forms, error messages and emails translated
- No machine-translated copy and no translation widget
- A visible language switcher, with no forced redirect
Questions
Should my site start in French or in Arabic?
Start with the language most of your customers use to contact you, but plan for both from day one. Building the structure for two languages at launch costs far less than adding Arabic to a site that was never designed for right-to-left reading.
Isn't a translation plugin enough?
An automatic widget translates on the fly, so the text is not indexed as your own page and its quality is unpredictable. For search and for credibility, each language needs real written pages at their own address.
Does a bilingual site create duplicate content?
No. A translated page is not treated as duplicate content, and with hreflang tags Google understands that the pages are language versions of the same content.