Dubai · Web Development
WordPress development company in Dubai — themes written, not assembled.
Custom themes and editor blocks written by hand, so a page is assembled from your own components rather than from a builder's widget menu. You finish with the theme in your repository, a plugin list short enough to account for, and editors who can publish without emailing a developer.
- No page builders
- The theme in your repository
- Editor training at handover
What's included
What is actually built, and what is deliberately not.
Most of the value on a WordPress project is in what gets left out. Every item below is something you can open, inspect and hand to another developer.
A theme written for this site
Templates for every content type the site actually has, built from the design rather than bought and overridden. No options panel with four hundred settings in it — every setting in a theme is a decision somebody can undo by accident, usually at 6pm.
Editor blocks, not a builder
Each component in the design becomes a block in the WordPress editor, carrying only the controls it should have. Editors arrange them freely; what they cannot do is change the type scale, the spacing or the palette one page at a time.
A content model, not a pile of pages
Whatever the business keeps a list of — properties, consultants, courses, case studies — modelled as post types with real fields and taxonomies. That is what lets a listing be filtered, reused and corrected once, instead of copied onto four pages and forgotten on three of them.
Arabic and right-to-left
A mirrored layout, a typeface chosen for Arabic rather than a system fallback, and templates that never assume text starts on the left. Editors get the admin in the language they think in. It sits in the Growth tier and is planned alongside the content model, because retrofitting it later costs more.
Speed treated as a build constraint
Assets bundled and versioned, images resized on upload, third-party scripts counted and questioned, caching configured rather than assumed. The same performance budget applies here as to everything else we build — it does not get relaxed on the grounds that it is WordPress.
A plugin list you can defend
Every plugin is a dependency, a renewal and a way in, so each one has to earn its place and is written down with what it does. Roles are set to the least an editor needs, which is also why nobody can quietly add another one on a Friday afternoon.
Who it's for
Three briefs where WordPress is the right purchase.
And one where it is not. If the list includes logins, roles or records that have to stay in step with another system, you would be buying a publishing tool to run software — custom development is the honest starting point for that.
A team that publishes every week
Campaigns, news, vacancies, events — content arriving faster than any developer's queue can absorb it. The editing model is the actual product here, and it is the platform you will have the least trouble hiring for afterwards.
Every new page currently starts with an email to a developer.
A site that has become a plugin estate
Thirty plugins, three of them doing the same job, two abandoned upstream, and a licence renewal nobody can find the receipt for. The rebuild is mostly subtraction: what the design needs goes into the theme, and whatever is left has to justify itself one plugin at a time.
You cannot say what half the installed plugins do.
Pages, not software
Everything on the requirements list is content — services, locations, a careers section, a few forms, a blog nobody has written yet. Nothing calculates, nothing syncs, nothing is personal to a signed-in user. A custom build here buys headroom you will never reach.
Nothing on your list needs a user account.
How we deliver it
Five stages, and the content model comes first.
On WordPress the order is the method. Templates written before the content model is settled get written twice.
01
Content model
What the site keeps a list of, and what an editor is allowed to change. Post types, fields, taxonomies and roles, agreed before a template exists — including which parts of a page are structured content and which are free-form. That single decision is what keeps a site tidy three years in.
02
Theme and blocks
Built locally, kept in version control, deployed to staging weekly. Nobody edits a file on a live server at any point. You review blocks inside the editor, where you will actually use them, rather than in a screenshot of them.
03
Migration and redirects
Posts, pages, media and users moved across, the taxonomy tidied on the way, and every old URL mapped to its new one before launch. Where the old site was built in a page builder, its markup is unpicked into real content rather than carried over as shortcodes nobody can edit.
04
Hardening and the update routine
Plugin audit, roles and capabilities, backups that have been restored at least once to prove they work. Then the routine, written down: updates land on staging first, then production, and there is a way back. Along with the rest of the checklist — stale admin accounts, file permissions, XML-RPC left open.
05
Editor handover
Roles assigned, a walkthrough recorded, and your team publishing a real page before launch rather than after it. If a block confuses somebody in that session it is a block problem, and it gets fixed while fixing it is still free.
Stack
Boring technology, chosen so the next developer recognises it.
Nothing here is exotic. That is the point: an unusual stack is a lock-in mechanism dressed up as innovation.
- CMS & commerce
- WordPressShopifySanityPayloadWooCommerce
- Infrastructure
- VercelAWSCloudflareGitHub ActionsSentry
Deliverables
What lands in your accounts.
All of it at handover rather than on request, and none of it licensed to us.
- The theme as a Git repository in your account, with a README that installs it onto a clean WordPress and runs the build
- A block for every component in the design, with its editor controls labelled in plain English
- The content model written down — every post type, field and taxonomy, and which role may edit it
- A plugin register: what is installed, what it does, what it renews at, and what breaks if it is removed
- A database and uploads export that restores onto any standard WordPress host
- The redirect map from the old site as a file, rather than rows inside a plugin only that plugin can read
- Staging and production environments, plus the written routine for taking an update through both
- A recorded editor walkthrough, and the session where your team published a page themselves
There is no licence key anywhere in it and nothing that phones home to us. If you moved to another developer next month, the only thing they would want from us is the walkthrough recording — and you already have that.
Pricing
What a WordPress build costs.
AED 16,000
from
That is the Launch tier — five to eight pages, roughly four weeks. A larger page set, a custom content structure, Arabic or a CRM integration sits in the Growth tier from AED 48,000. A large store is scoped on its own rather than priced by page count. Prices exclude 5% VAT, and payment runs in milestones.
What changes the priceWhat that covers
- A custom theme, not a bought one
- Editor blocks for the components in the design
- Content migrated from the current site, old URLs redirected
- Schema and analytics connected at launch
- Editor training, with the walkthrough recorded
- The repository in your account from the first commit
Clinics and healthcare
The site changes weekly without anyone opening a template: a consultant joins, a branch opens on a Saturday, an insurer is added or dropped. Doctors, services, locations and accepted insurers work as records rather than paragraphs, because the same consultant appears on four pages and should only ever be corrected once. Copy about treatment is signed off before it goes out, so drafts, named reviewers and roles belong in the build rather than in somebody's inbox.
Real estate
Listings are structured records with a life cycle — available, reserved, gone — and an agent roster that turns over faster than the website usually does. A property should be described once and appear wherever it qualifies, in English and in Arabic, instead of being pasted into a page and left there after it sells. Where the inventory already lives in a portal or a CRM, the site has to take a feed from it rather than have somebody retype it, because keeping the same listing current in two places is how listings go stale.
WordPress is one of the platform choices under the wider web development service and the comparison there is worth reading before you commit, because it says plainly where WordPress is the wrong purchase. If the requirement turns out to be software rather than pages, custom development is the closer fit.
Questions
Asked before a WordPress project starts.
A WordPress build starts at AED 16,000 for five to eight pages, which is the Launch tier. A larger page set, a custom content structure, Arabic or a CRM integration moves it into Growth from AED 48,000, and a large store is scoped on its own. Prices exclude 5% VAT and are paid in milestones. What moves the number is the content model and the integrations rather than the page count alone.
Yes — that is what the block set is for. Editors compose a page from your own components, reorder them, and add or remove sections without asking anyone. What they cannot do is change type, spacing or colour page by page, because those live in the theme. If the site genuinely needs a new kind of section a year later, that is a small piece of development, not a redesign.
The text and the media survive; the layout does not, and that is usually the improvement. Builder pages store their layout as shortcodes and nested markup inside the post content, so migrating them means unpicking each page into real blocks rather than importing it. Budget for that page by page — it is the one part of a WordPress rebuild that scales with page count rather than with complexity.
As few as the requirements allow, and every one of them is named in the handover with what it does and what it renews at. Forms, backups, security, custom fields and commerce usually earn a plugin. Page layout, components and anything shaping the front end are written into the theme instead. The real cost of a plugin is not the licence — it is that its release schedule is now yours.
Yes, with one caveat: the usual way in is an outdated plugin or theme, an admin account with more privilege than it needs, or hosting nobody patches — rather than core itself. So the build controls those three. A short plugin list, least-privilege roles, updates rehearsed on staging, and backups that have been restored once to prove they work.
Yes, and it is a build decision rather than a plugin you bolt on at the end. Slow WordPress sites are usually slow for three reasons: a page builder shipping markup and CSS the page never uses, images uploaded at camera size, and a stack of marketing scripts nobody has audited. A hand-written theme removes the first, the upload pipeline handles the second, and the third is a conversation worth having.
It does, provided the site is planned bilingually from the start. Right-to-left support is in the platform; the work is in the theme — mirrored layouts, a typeface chosen for Arabic, templates that do not assume text begins on the left. Each piece of content gets a translated counterpart rather than a machine-translated copy, and editors get the admin in their own language. Arabic sits in the Growth tier.
Yes, and it is the same theme discipline applied to a catalogue. WooCommerce earns its place when the store is one part of a larger content site, or when the pricing, tax and delivery rules are yours rather than a platform's. If the shop is the whole business and the requirements are conventional, a hosted platform will cost you less to run — the e-commerce page sets out that comparison honestly.
Ready to build something that lasts?
Tell us what you need. You will get a scoped response with an indicative price — from an engineer, not a salesperson.