How to Choose a Web Design Company in Egypt or the Gulf (2026)

Choosing a web design company is one of those decisions that looks simple until you are six months in, the site is late, nobody can edit the homepage, and the agency holds the hosting login. In Egypt and the Gulf the market is crowded: freelancers, template resellers, mid-sized studios and full-service agencies all quote for the same brief, and the prices can differ tenfold. This guide gives you a practical way to compare them in 2026, what to check before the first call, what to ask during it, and what to put in the contract so the website you pay for is genuinely yours.

Start with your own brief, not their portfolio

Before you contact anyone, write one page that answers four questions: what the site must achieve (leads, bookings, online sales, credibility with investors), who it is for, which languages it needs, and what has to connect to it (a CRM, a payment gateway, WhatsApp, a booking system, an ERP). Add a realistic budget range and a launch date driven by a business reason, not a guess.

This lets you compare quotes like for like, and it quickly separates companies that ask good follow-up questions from those that send a price list within the hour. If you are still unsure what a business website should include, our guide on website design for business is a good place to start.

What to check in a web design company's portfolio

A portfolio of screenshots proves very little. Ask for links to live websites, ideally launched in the last two years, and then test them yourself.

Live sites, not mock-ups

• Open three or four of their projects on your phone, on mobile data rather than office Wi-Fi. Do they load quickly? Do menus, forms and sliders actually work?
• Check that the client still uses the site. Expired domains, or sites since rebuilt by someone else, tell their own story.
• Look for variety. Identical layouts in different colours usually mean one theme being resold.

Speed, SEO and accessibility of their own work

You do not need to be technical to run a basic check. Paste a few portfolio URLs, and the agency's own website, into Google PageSpeed Insights. Google's Core Web Vitals define a good experience as a Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, measured on real users at the 75th percentile, according to Google's web.dev documentation. A company whose own sites fail badly on mobile is unlikely to do better for you.

Check the basics too: unique page titles, a sensible heading structure, readable URLs and descriptive image text. For accessibility, the current reference is the W3C's WCAG 2.2. Ask whether they design to it, and whether they check colour contrast, keyboard navigation and form labels. Our technical SEO audit checklist lists further points you can test on any site.

Arabic and RTL quality

For most businesses in Egypt and the GCC, the Arabic version is not a translation exercise; it is often the version most customers see. Weak Arabic is one of the fastest ways to spot a company that does not really work in this market. Check their Arabic pages for:

• A properly mirrored right-to-left layout, including icons, arrows, sliders and form fields, not just right-aligned text.
• A good Arabic typeface with comfortable line height, rather than a default system font that looks cramped.
• Copy that reads as if it were written in Arabic, not machine-translated from English.
• Separate, crawlable URLs for each language with language tags set up, so both versions can rank.

Process: how they get from brief to launch

A serious company will describe a clear process and show you what each stage produces. Typically that means a discovery phase (goals, audience, competitors, content inventory), a sitemap and wireframes, visual design, development on a staging site, content entry, testing, and launch with analytics and redirects in place.

Ask who does each stage. Is the designer in-house or outsourced? Who writes the content, and is that included or assumed to be your job? Content is the most common cause of delayed launches, so agree early who supplies text, photos and product data, and by when. Ask how many revision rounds are included.

Ownership: code, domain, hosting and content

This is where many businesses get caught. Get written answers to these points before you sign:

• Domain: it must be registered in your company's name, with the registrar account under your email. Never let the agency own it.
• Hosting: you should either hold the hosting account yourself or have full admin access and the right to move it at any time.
• Code and design files: on final payment, you should receive the source code, theme or custom plugin files and design files, with the right to use and modify them.
• Licences: premium themes, plugins, fonts and stock images should be licensed for your business, and you should know which renew annually and at what cost.
• Content and data: all text, images, customer records and analytics accounts belong to you, and you should be an owner, not just a viewer, on Google Analytics and Search Console.

CMS, training and handover

Ask which content management system they will use and why. WordPress, Shopify, Salla or Zid, a headless CMS or a custom build can all be the right answer, but the choice should follow your needs and your team's skills, not the agency's habit. A custom system you cannot edit without a developer becomes an ongoing cost.

Make training part of the scope: a recorded session showing your team how to add pages, update products, change banners and publish posts, plus a short written guide. At handover you should receive every login, a list of installed plugins or services, and backup locations.

Support, maintenance and security

A website is not finished at launch. Updates, security patches, backups and small changes continue for its whole life. Clarify what is included after launch and what is billed separately:

• A free warranty period for fixing bugs in the delivered work, and how long it lasts.
• Monthly maintenance options: core and plugin updates, uptime monitoring, backups and their frequency.
• Response times for urgent issues, such as the site being down, versus routine requests.

Also ask how they handle SSL, form spam, admin access and personal data collected through forms. If you sell in Saudi Arabia, the UAE or Egypt, your site will collect personal data covered by local data protection rules, so the company should at least be able to explain where data is stored and who can access it.

Contract and payment milestones

Avoid paying everything upfront, and be wary of a single-number quote with no breakdown. A fair structure ties payments to deliverables you can see, for example:

1. A deposit on signing to start discovery.
2. A payment on approval of the design.
3. A payment when the site is complete on a staging link for your review.
4. The final payment at launch, released together with the handover of files and access.

The contract should list the pages, features, languages and integrations in scope, the number of revisions, the timeline with your own responsibilities, what counts as a change request, the warranty period, ownership terms, and how either side can exit if the project stalls.

Red flags to watch for

• A cheap template sold as custom design. Templates are fine if you know you are buying one and the price reflects it.
• No analytics or tracking plan. If nobody mentions Google Analytics, Search Console, conversion events or redirects from your old URLs, you will launch blind and may lose existing search traffic.
• Locked-in hosting. The agency insists you must host with them and will not give you access, or charges a fee to release your site.
• Vague timelines and no named contact. You should know who manages the project and how often you will hear from them.
• Promises of guaranteed first-page rankings. No one can guarantee positions in Google; a good company talks about technical foundations and content instead.

Questions to ask in the first call

1. Which of your recent live projects is closest to ours, and what did it achieve for the client?
2. Who will actually work on our project, and are they in-house?
3. Which CMS or platform do you recommend for us, and why?
4. How do you handle Arabic and right-to-left layouts, and who writes the Arabic copy?
5. How do you test mobile speed before launch?
6. Who owns the domain, hosting, code and content at the end?
7. What is included in support after launch, and what does maintenance cost per month?
8. How do you protect our existing search rankings if we are replacing an old site?

A quick comparison checklist

Score each shortlisted company from 1 to 5 on each row after your calls, so you compare on substance rather than price alone.

Criterion	What good looks like
Portfolio	Recent live sites in your sector or of similar complexity
Performance	Their own sites pass or come close to Core Web Vitals on mobile
Arabic and RTL	Fully mirrored layouts, native Arabic copy, separate language URLs
Process	Discovery, wireframes, staging site and testing explained clearly
Ownership	Domain, hosting, code and content in your name, in writing
CMS and training	Platform suited to your team, recorded training and documentation
Support	Defined warranty, maintenance plan and response times
Contract	Itemised scope and payments tied to visible milestones

If you would like a second opinion on a brief or a proposal you have received, the team at OBELIX builds bilingual websites for businesses across Egypt and the Gulf; you can see how we work on our website and app development page.

Key takeaways

• Write a one-page brief first so every quote answers the same question.
• Judge companies on live sites you can test for speed, SEO, accessibility and Arabic quality.
• Get ownership of the domain, hosting, code and content written into the contract.
• Tie payments to visible milestones and agree support terms before launch.
• Walk away from locked-in hosting, missing analytics and guaranteed rankings.