Ask three agencies in Dubai what a business website costs and you will get three numbers an order of magnitude apart. That is not because anyone is lying. It is because “a website” describes anything from a five-page brochure to a booking platform with payment and inventory, and because a large part of the price is not the build at all — it is what happens in the two years afterwards.
This guide breaks the cost into its actual components, gives realistic ranges for the UAE market, and — more useful than any number — explains what makes a quote go up, what makes it worth paying more, and the specific things that make a cheap website expensive later.
Quick Answer
A business website in the UAE has four separate costs. The build is a one-off project fee, ranging from a few thousand dirhams for a simple template-based brochure site to five figures for custom design and functionality. The running costs are ongoing and small: domain, hosting, SSL, business email — typically a few hundred to a couple of thousand dirhams a year. Content — copywriting, translation, photography — is routinely underestimated and frequently the reason projects stall. And maintenance — updates, backups, security, small changes — is the cost most quotes omit entirely and the one that determines whether the site still works in two years. Budget for all four, or the fourth will arrive as an emergency.
The Four Costs
1. The build
This is what people mean by “how much is a website”, and the range is genuinely wide because the work is genuinely different.
Template-based brochure site. Five to ten pages on a commercial theme, your content dropped in, light customisation. The cheapest legitimate option and entirely adequate for many businesses. What you are buying is speed, not originality — the layout will resemble other sites using the same theme.
Custom-designed site. Designed for your brand rather than adapted from a template, with layouts built for your content. Costs several times a template build, and is worth it when your website is a primary sales channel rather than a business card.
E-commerce. Adds product catalogue, cart, payment gateway integration, shipping rules, tax handling and order management. Substantially more than a brochure site, and the ongoing work is higher too.
Web application. Booking systems, portals, anything with user accounts and business logic. Priced as software development, not as a website, and quoted per project after a proper scope.
The single biggest driver of cost is how much is custom. The second is how many revision rounds the contract allows — open-ended revisions are how fixed-price projects become unprofitable, which is why good proposals bound them.
2. Running costs
Small, predictable, and unavoidable:
Domain. A modest annual fee. A .ae costs more than a .com and is worth it for a UAE-facing business — local visitors trust it and it signals you are actually here.
Hosting. From very little for shared hosting to considerably more for a VPS or dedicated server. Most business brochure sites are entirely happy on good shared hosting; the reason to spend more is traffic, or software that needs isolation.
SSL certificate. Usually free and included. Do not pay for one unless you have a specific reason.
Business email. Per mailbox per month, and worth paying for. A business running on a free consumer email address is leaving trust on the table with every message it sends.
Together these are a small annual figure for a typical business. Anyone quoting a large “annual platform fee” for a standard WordPress brochure site should be asked precisely what it covers.
3. Content — the cost everyone forgets
This is where projects die. The design is finished, and the site sits unlaunched for three months because nobody wrote the About page.
Copywriting. If you supply the text, this is free and slow. If you buy it, it is priced per page and it is usually money well spent, because most business-supplied copy is a paragraph about how customer-focused the company is.
Arabic translation. Not optional for a UAE business, and not a job for machine translation. A visibly machine-translated Arabic site damages credibility with exactly the audience it was meant to reach. Budget for a native writer, and note that good Arabic is usually written rather than translated.
Photography. Original photos of your actual premises, team and work outperform stock images by a wide margin. A half-day shoot is one of the highest-return line items in the whole project.
Product data. For e-commerce, someone has to write descriptions, take photos and enter specifications for every product. On a large catalogue this dwarfs the build cost, and it is almost never in the quote.
4. Maintenance — the cost that decides everything
A website is not a printed brochure. WordPress core, plugins and themes update constantly; abandoned sites accumulate vulnerabilities; PHP versions reach end of life. The choice is not whether to spend on maintenance but whether to spend it deliberately or in an emergency.
A maintenance arrangement typically covers updates applied and checked, tested off-server backups, security monitoring, uptime monitoring, and a small allowance of content changes. Priced monthly, it is a fraction of what a hacked-site recovery costs — and recovery is priced by the hour, arrives without warning, and comes with the reputational damage of a site serving malware.
The pattern we see repeatedly: a site is built well, handed over with no maintenance, and eighteen months later it is running an ancient PHP version with eleven outdated plugins and an administrator account belonging to someone who left the company.
What Makes a Quote Go Up
When comparing proposals, these are the variables that actually move the number:
Custom versus template design. The largest single factor.
Number of unique page layouts — not the number of pages. Twenty pages on three layouts is a small job; five pages each individually designed is not.
Bilingual delivery. A properly bilingual site is meaningfully more work than a single-language one: two sets of content, a language switcher that maps every page to its counterpart, and layouts that survive right-to-left text.
Integrations. CRM, payment gateway, booking system, accounting, ERP. Each is a separate piece of work with its own failure modes.
Migration. Moving an existing site with its content, URLs and search rankings intact is real work, and skipping the redirects is how a redesign loses a company its traffic.
Speed. Compressed timelines cost more everywhere, and web work is no exception.
Where Cheap Gets Expensive
Not an argument against a modest budget — an argument against specific false economies:
A nulled premium theme. Saves a few hundred dirhams and installs a backdoor. We clean these up regularly, and the cleanup costs many times the licence.
No maintenance plan. Saves a monthly fee, and buys a compromised site at some unpredictable future date.
Machine-translated Arabic. Saves translation cost, and quietly loses the Arabic-speaking customers the page was built for.
Hosting chosen purely on price. Saves a little every month, and costs you speed, uptime and the support call you actually need.
No written scope. The most expensive omission of all. Without a defined scope, “just one more small change” continues until someone is unhappy — and it is usually both parties.
Not owning your own assets. Make sure the domain is registered to you, the hosting account is in your name, and you have administrator access. Businesses regularly discover they cannot move their site because a former contractor owns the domain.
How to Get a Quote You Can Compare
Ask every proposal to state the same things and the differences become obvious:
1. How many unique page layouts, and how many total pages?
2. Template or custom design?
3. Who writes the content, and is Arabic included?
4. How many revision rounds are included, and what happens after that?
5. What is the monthly cost after launch, itemised?
6. Who owns the domain, the hosting account and the design files?
7. What happens if the site breaks in month three — is that included, hourly, or not covered?
8. Is maintenance included, and what exactly does it cover?
A proposal that answers all eight clearly is usually from someone who has done this before. One that quotes a single number with no breakdown is asking you to trust it — and the gap between the number and reality will appear later as extras.
Where We Fit
BIGBANG ITS builds, hosts and maintains business websites across the UAE, in Arabic and English, on our own infrastructure in the region. We quote the four costs separately — build, running, content, maintenance — because a single number hides exactly the information you need to make a decision.
If you have a quote in hand and want an independent read on whether it is reasonable and what it leaves out, send it to us. We will tell you plainly, including when someone else is offering you a better deal than we would.
