Emirates · United Arab Emirates

Web developer in Dubai

Websites, online stores and technical SEO for Dubai businesses — built remotely from Islamabad, quoted in AED, scoped in writing before anything starts.

Businesses in Dubai usually come to me after a site has already been built once and disappointed. That is a useful starting point, because it means the requirements are no longer theoretical — you know exactly which parts failed. Rebuilding from a list of specific complaints produces a far better result than rebuilding from a mood board.

What working with a Emirati client actually changes

These are the terms that differ by country rather than by town. They apply to every business in United Arab Emirates, Dubai included, and they are the substance of what this page is claiming.

Quoted and invoiced in AED — never a converted figure presented at the end
Tax position VAT at 5%; my invoices are imported services under the reverse charge
Your customers' data sits under Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021, plus DIFC or ADGM rules if you are in a free zone
Lawful transfer mechanism a DPA that names the processing location, which the DIFC regime in particular expects to see
Checkout can realistically use Stripe, Network International, Telr, and Tabby for instalments
My day, in Dubai time 08:00–17:00 — about 8 hours inside a normal working day

One thing worth knowing about building for United Arab Emirates

Arabic and English side by side is the norm rather than the exception here, and retrofitting right-to-left layout after a build is far more expensive than planning for it on day one. I scope UAE sites bilingual from the start or not at all.

The performance budget every Dubai build is held to

Pages are built to a hard weight limit rather than optimised afterwards, because retrofitting speed onto a heavy site is several times the work of not making it heavy. In practice that means no framework runtime on a content page, fonts subset to the characters actually used, and images generated at the sizes actually displayed.

For United Arab Emirates specifically this is a commercial number, not a vanity one. A visitor on mobile data who waits four seconds is frequently a visitor who is gone, and the analytics will record it as a bounce rather than as the lost sale it was. Core Web Vitals is simply the name Google gave to noticing this.

Trades and field services in Dubai

Builders, electricians, plumbers, roofers and installers share one problem: the customer is deciding on their phone, often standing in the room with the problem, and they will call the first firm that looks like it will pick up. Three things decide it — the phone number tappable in the header, a coverage list naming their town, and photographs of your own finished work rather than stock.

The thing trades sites most often get wrong is the quote form. Asking for a full address, a project budget and a preferred start date before anything else is a form built for your admin convenience, not for the customer. Two fields and a photo upload will produce more enquiries than eight fields ever will, and the rest can be collected on the call you just earned.

Images shipped at ten times the size they display

A hero photograph exported at 4000 pixels wide and displayed at 400 is the most common single cause of a slow page. The browser downloads all of it and then discards most of it. On a phone over mobile data that is several seconds spent waiting for pixels nobody will ever see.

The fix is generating each image at the sizes actually used, serving AVIF or WebP with a fallback, and setting explicit width and height so the layout does not jump while they load. It is mechanical work with a directly measurable result, which makes it the first thing worth doing on almost any Dubai site.

Hiring a developer who is not in Dubai

Distance costs you two specific things and I would rather name them than let you discover them. The first is spontaneous communication: you cannot walk in. The second is legal recourse, which is genuinely harder across borders. The first is handled by a fixed weekly call and a shared board you can read without asking. The second is handled by milestones — you pay for work already delivered and reviewable, never for work promised.

What I build for Dubai businesses

Fixed-scope, fixed-price, quoted in AED. The full list is on the services page.

E-commerce website development I build online stores end to end — catalogue, cart, Stripe checkout, order emails and the technical SEO that gets them found. Six of the fifteen sites I have shipped are e-commerce builds, and every one of them takes real payments. From $150 · 7 days Technical SEO audits and implementation Most SEO audits hand you a 60-page document and an invoice. I am a developer first, so I find the problems and then fix them in the codebase — crawlability, indexation, schema, Core Web Vitals, and whether AI answer engines can read your site at all. From $80 · 3 days Business website development Most small business websites fail at one job: turning a stranger who searched for your service into a phone call. I build the version that does — three days, mobile-first, live on your own hosting, with the enquiry form tested before anybody sees it. From $80 · 3 days Custom website development A template is the right answer more often than developers like to admit. This page is about the times it is not — when the thing your business does has a shape no theme author anticipated, and forcing it into one costs more in permanent workarounds than building it properly would have cost once. From $200 · 10 days Web application development A website presents information. An application does work — it holds state, enforces rules, and produces something at the end. Most businesses that need the second one are running it on a spreadsheet nobody is allowed to sort, and paying for that in errors rather than in software. From $200 · 10 days

Priced for Dubai specifically

What I am not claiming about Dubai

A location page is the easiest place on a website to imply something untrue, so here is the other side of it plainly:

Dubai web development — common questions

Do you actually work with businesses in Dubai?
Yes, remotely. I work with Emirati clients from Islamabad, quoting in AED and invoicing in AED. I have no office, address or phone number in Dubai and will not pretend otherwise. If your project needs someone physically present, hire locally — I will say so in the first reply rather than after a deposit.
How much does a website cost in Dubai?
A business website starts from AED290 and goes live in about three days. An e-commerce build starts from AED550 in around seven days, and a custom application from AED730 in ten. Those are starting figures — the exact number is fixed in writing once scope is agreed, and it does not move after that.
Can you migrate my Dubai site without losing rankings?
Yes, and the redirect map is the whole job. Every existing URL is mapped to its new equivalent with a 301 before launch, and anything with no equivalent goes to the closest relevant page rather than the homepage. Sites lose rankings in migration because that mapping was skipped, not because migration is inherently risky.
Do I need to provide the content and images?
Content, yes — you know your business and I do not. I will restructure and edit what you send so it reads for the web, and I will tell you where a section is missing. Photography is worth paying a local photographer for; stock images of people in offices are recognisable as stock and quietly cost you credibility.
What happens if I am not happy with the result?
Work is delivered in milestones against a written scope, and you review each one on a staging URL before it is paid for. If the delivered milestone does not match the scope, it gets corrected before anything moves forward. That structure exists so disagreement is resolved at the stage it happens rather than at the end when it is expensive.
Do you build on WordPress or something custom?
Whichever the project justifies. WordPress when you need to edit content constantly and want a familiar admin. A static build when speed and security matter more than a plugin ecosystem. Custom PHP and MySQL when the logic is genuinely yours. The choice is explained in the quote with its trade-offs, not presented as a foregone conclusion.
Do you provide ongoing maintenance after launch?
Thirty days of snag fixes are included after launch at no extra cost — anything that does not work as specified gets fixed. Beyond that there are monthly plans for updates, backups, monitoring and small changes. They are optional and cancellable; a site handed over properly does not require a retainer to keep running.

Also covering Emirates

Same terms, same currency, same process — these are the other Emirates towns with a page here.

Where this page sits

This page covers Dubai. Every other town in United Arab Emirates is listed on the United Arab Emirates coverage page, and the full worldwide list is at all locations.

Before you enquire: pricing is published rather than quoted on request, how I work covers the process end to end, the work page lists live client sites you can open, and vendor information answers the procurement questions.

Building something in Dubai?

Send the brief and you get a reply within one business day — questions or a scoping call, quoted in AED. If it is not a project I should take on, I will say so then rather than after a deposit.

Response
Replies within 1 business day
Hours
Mon–Fri, 09:00–18:00 PKT — overlaps 05:00–14:00 UK, 00:00–09:00 US Eastern
Booking
Booking projects from October 2026
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