Over-the-shoulder view of a young Arab businesswoman in a teal hijab comparing a site layout on her Android phone with the mobile preview on her laptop, a checklist and pen beside her, while hiring a WordPress designer.

هذا المقال متوفر باللغة العربية — اقرأ بالعربية

Search “hire WordPress designer” and you will find thousands of freelancers, agencies and marketplace profiles, all with nice screenshots and five-star badges. For a business owner in Cairo, Riyadh, Jeddah or Dubai, the hard part is not finding someone. It is telling the difference between a designer who will hand you a fast, editable, bilingual site that you fully own, and one who will hand you a pretty homepage, a pile of unlicensed plugins and a hosting account in their own name. This guide walks you through what a WordPress designer actually does, what affects the price of a project, the questions to ask before you sign, and the practical checks that show you how good a portfolio really is.

I build and maintain WordPress sites for companies across Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and many of my projects start as rescues of sites another team built. The checks below are the ones I would run myself, and every technical point comes from the official WordPress documentation, Google’s developer documentation or the W3C. If you would rather talk to a team that handles design, development and Arabic content in one place, you can hire WordPress designer and development help from us directly. Either way, the checklist works for any provider you are considering.

What a WordPress designer actually does

The title “WordPress designer” covers very different jobs. Some designers only produce mockups in a design tool and expect someone else to build them. Some take a ready-made theme, change the colors and fonts, and add your content. Others design and build custom templates, write code when the theme cannot do what you need, and set up the plugins, forms and analytics around it. All three can be the right choice. The problem starts when you think you are buying the third and you get the first or second.

Ask early which of these the person will deliver:

  • Design only: page layouts, a style guide (colors, type, buttons) and mobile versions, delivered as design files.
  • Theme setup and customization: an existing theme adapted to your brand, with your pages and content added.
  • Custom design and build: templates designed for your business and built as a custom theme, a child theme, or a block theme with custom patterns.

One detail matters more than most owners expect: how you will edit the site later. The WordPress Site Editor lets you edit the header, footer and templates with blocks, but the documentation is clear that it is only available when you use a block theme. If your designer builds on a classic theme or a page builder, editing works differently. Neither path is wrong, but you should know which one you are getting, and you should see the editing screen before launch, not after.

Designer, developer or agency: who do you need?

Whether you are looking for a WordPress designer in Egypt or you typed “WordPress developer Saudi Arabia” because your customers are in Riyadh, the same question comes first: how much of the work can one person carry? The table below compares the common options for a small or mid-sized business site.

Option Usually fits Watch out for
Freelance designer Company sites with a clear scope and a ready theme Limited coding, one person for everything
Designer plus developer Custom layouts, integrations, bilingual sites Two people to coordinate, unclear responsibility
Small studio or agency Stores, multi-language sites, ongoing support Junior staff doing the work, long contracts

Location matters less than it used to, but it still matters in three ways: the designer’s real understanding of Arabic typography and right-to-left layouts, their working hours relative to yours, and whether they know the payment gateways and invoicing your customers expect in your country.

What affects the price of a WordPress site

I will not give you numbers here, because any range quoted without seeing your scope is a guess. For a fuller picture of what drives the WordPress website cost, see our dedicated guide. What I can give you are the factors that move the effort up or down. When two quotes look very different, it is almost always because the two providers understood the scope differently, so use this list to make sure they are quoting the same project.

  • Number of unique templates. A site with ten pages that share three layouts is much less work than a site with ten pages that each need their own design.
  • Custom design or adapted theme. Designing from scratch takes more time than adapting a well-built theme, and building that design as a theme takes more again.
  • Languages and direction. A bilingual Arabic and English site needs a multilingual setup, translated menus and forms, and testing of every template in both directions.
  • Online store features. WooCommerce, local payment gateways, shipping rules and invoices add setup and testing time.
  • Integrations. CRM, booking systems, WhatsApp buttons, ERP or custom APIs.
  • Content. Who writes the copy, who translates it, who supplies photos, and how many products or posts must be entered.
  • Premium licenses. Paid themes, page builders and plugins, and whose account they are bought on.
  • Quality targets. Agreed speed results in PageSpeed Insights and accessibility basics take time to reach and to test.
  • Timeline and revisions. Tight deadlines and unlimited revision rounds both cost effort.
  • Support after launch. Whether updates, backups and fixes are included, and for how long.
Factor Lower effort Higher effort
Design Adapted, well-built theme Fully custom templates
Languages One language Arabic and English, RTL and LTR
Features Pages and a contact form Store, bookings, integrations
Content You supply final text and photos Designer writes, translates, sources

Questions to ask before you hire a WordPress designer

Send the same short brief to two or three candidates, then ask each one these questions. The answers tell you more than the portfolio.

  1. Will you design only, customize a theme, or design and build a custom theme?
  2. Which theme or builder will you use, and why that one for my site?
  3. Can I edit the header, menus, pages and forms myself after launch? Can you show me how?
  4. Have you built bilingual Arabic and English sites? Can I see live links to both language versions?
  5. Which premium themes or plugins will the site need, and whose account will the licenses be on?
  6. Will the hosting, domain, email and analytics accounts be in my name?
  7. What speed results will you aim for in PageSpeed Insights on mobile, and will you show me the report before launch?
  8. How do you handle accessibility basics, like color contrast, keyboard focus and alt text?
  9. How many revision rounds are included, and what counts as a new request?
  10. Will you work on a staging copy, or directly on the live site?
  11. What happens after launch: updates, backups, fixes, and for how long?
  12. What will I receive at handover: logins, files, license keys, a backup, short training?

Good designers ask you questions too: who your customers are, which pages bring you leads, what your competitors do, and what you want visitors to do on each page. If the first call is only about their package, take note.

How to check a portfolio properly

Screenshots and design mockups show taste, not quality. You need live sites, and you need about fifteen minutes per site. Ask for three live links that are similar to your project, ideally at least one in Arabic.

1. Open the live sites, not the images

Click through the menu, open a few inner pages, submit the contact form if it is safe to do so, and look at the footer. Check that the site is still online, that it uses HTTPS, and that the content has not been replaced by another team. If every link in the portfolio is a mockup, ask why.

2. Test the site at 360px on mobile

Google uses the mobile version of a site for indexing and ranking, and it recommends responsive design. So the phone view is not a detail. Open the site on your own phone, then on a computer open Chrome DevTools, turn on the device toolbar, choose Responsive and type a width of 360. Look for text that runs off the screen, tables that break the layout, buttons too close together, and menus that do not open. Chrome’s documentation calls device mode a first-order approximation, so always check on a real phone as well. For reference, the WCAG 2.2 Reflow criterion asks that content work at a width equivalent to 320 CSS pixels without scrolling in two directions, so 360 is not an extreme test.

3. Check the Arabic RTL quality

Open the Arabic version and read it like a customer. The W3C advice is simple: when the page is right-to-left, the dir="rtl" attribute belongs on the html tag, and the base direction should not be set with CSS. Spacing and alignment should use CSS logical properties (for example margin-inline-start instead of margin-left) so they follow the text direction. In practice, look for these signs:

  • Menus, breadcrumbs and arrows point the right way, and icons sit on the correct side of the text.
  • Numbers, phone numbers and prices inside Arabic sentences display in the right order.
  • The Arabic font is readable at body size and is not an English font with Arabic fallback.
  • Forms, sliders and pop-ups also flip, not only the main content.
  • The Arabic text reads like it was written for people, not machine translated.

If you see mirrored problems on their own portfolio, they will likely appear on your site too. Our guide to the RTL bugs we fix most often on Arabic sites shows what each one looks like and how it is fixed.

4. Run PageSpeed Insights on two or three pages

Paste the homepage and one inner page into PageSpeed Insights. It reports on both mobile and desktop, and it shows two kinds of data. Field data comes from real Chrome users over the previous 28 days, and it only appears when a page or site has enough visits. Lab data comes from Lighthouse, which simulates a mid-tier phone on a mobile network. In the lab score, 90 or above is considered good. For the field data, Google’s Core Web Vitals targets are a Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, an Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of visits.

Do not reject a designer over one orange number, since scores change from run to run. But if every portfolio site is red on mobile, ask what they would do differently for you. To understand the usual causes, read our notes on why Arabic WordPress pages load slowly and what helps.

5. Try the accessibility basics

You do not need to be an expert to spot the basics. The W3C Easy Checks list a few tests anyone can do: image alt text, page titles, headings, color contrast, a skip link, visible keyboard focus, the page language, zoom, and form labels. Try pressing the Tab key on a portfolio site: you should see where you are on the page at every step. WCAG 2.2 asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text. Light gray text on a white background is a common failure. The WordPress theme directory also requires skip links and visible keyboard focus in the themes it accepts, which shows how basic these features are.

Ownership, licenses and handover

This is where most disputes between owners and designers start, usually months after launch. Settle these points in writing before the work begins.

Hosting, domain and accounts

The domain should be registered with you as the registrant, in an account you control. ICANN reminds registrants that they are responsible for their domain registration, must keep their contact details accurate and their registrar account data current, and must respond to registrar inquiries within fifteen days. You cannot do any of that if the domain sits in your designer’s account. The same goes for hosting, business email, Google Search Console and analytics: they should be in your name, and the designer gets a user account. On hosting, WordPress recommends PHP 8.3 or greater, MySQL 8.0 or greater (or MariaDB 10.11 or greater) and HTTPS support, so ask the designer to confirm the plan meets that.

Licenses for premium themes and plugins

WordPress is released under the GPLv2 (or later), and WordPress.org’s position is that themes and plugins are derivative works that inherit the GPL. Themes in the official directory must be 100% GPL compatible. That does not mean you should accept “nulled” copies of paid themes from unknown sources. A paid license usually gives you updates and support from the vendor, and a pirated copy gives you neither. Ask for a list of every premium product on the site, with the license registered to your email or handed over to you.

Maintenance after launch

WordPress applies minor and security updates automatically on most sites, but themes and plugins still need updates, and the official documentation recommends a backup before you update. A full backup has two parts, the database and the files, and you need both to restore a site. Agree who does this after launch and how often. If you want a starting point, here is the weekly and monthly upkeep we run on client sites.

Contract and handover checklist

  • A written scope: pages, templates, languages, features and who supplies content.
  • Revision rounds, payment stages and what happens if the timeline slips.
  • Your own Administrator account, since WordPress describes the Administrator as the role with access to all administration features on a site. Give contributors lower roles, like Editor, when that is enough.
  • All logins, license keys and design files handed to you.
  • A full backup at launch, plus an export of the content from Tools, then Export, which WordPress saves as a WXR file containing posts, pages, comments, categories, tags and more.
  • A clean Site Health screen (Tools, then Site Health), or a note explaining any remaining warnings.
  • A short training session or video on editing pages and menus.

Red flags to walk away from

  • The domain or hosting will be “included” but registered in the designer’s name.
  • No live links, only images, or every live link redirects to a different site.
  • No answer about licenses, or an offer of premium plugins “for free”.
  • The Arabic version is promised “later” or handled by machine translation.
  • Work happens directly on your live site with no backup or staging copy.

Frequently asked questions

Is a freelancer or an agency better for a business site?

Neither by default. A focused freelancer is often the better fit for a company site with a clear scope. A studio makes more sense for stores, integrations and sites that need several skills at once. Judge the answers to the questions above, not the size of the team.

How long does a WordPress site project take?

There is no standard timeline. It depends on the number of templates, the languages, the features and, very often, how fast the content is ready. Ask each candidate for a schedule with stages, and note which stages depend on you.

Can I move my site to another developer later?

Yes, if you own the domain, the hosting and the licenses, and you have an Administrator account. That is why the handover list matters. With a full backup of files and database, any competent developer can take over.

Should my designer also handle SEO?

A good designer should build a clean, fast, mobile-friendly site with proper headings and page titles, since that is part of the build. Ongoing keyword research, content and reporting are separate work, so ask whether they are included or not.

Your next step

Write a one-page brief with your goals, languages, pages and features, send it to two or three candidates, and compare their answers using the questions and checks above. If you would like a team that designs, builds and supports bilingual sites under one roof, see how we plan and build business sites on WordPress. And if you already have quotes on the table and want a second opinion, talk it through with us in a free call before you sign.

References