arArabic scriptRight-to-leftHow to translate WordPress to Arabic
Arabic (العربية) reaches roughly ~380 millionspeakers. Here's what's actually involved in translating a WordPress site into it — the technical setup, the Arabic-specific gotchas, and the SEO.
What's specific to Arabic
Most of translating WordPress is the same in any language, but each language has quirks that break layouts or SEO if you ignore them. For Arabic:
- Right-to-left — this is the big one. Your whole layout mirrors: nav, icons, alignment, progress bars. Set dir="rtl".
- Arabic script is cursive and connects letters — needs a proper Arabic font, not a fallback.
- Numbers and embedded English stay LTR inside RTL text (bidi) — test mixed content.
- Formality: Modern Standard Arabic for formal/web; dialects vary.
Step by step
1. Add Arabic as a target language
Set your source language, then add Arabic (ar) as a target. With an automatic plugin you don't create a translated copy of every page by hand — it translates on the fly.
2. Translate — automatically or by hand
Machine and AI translation get you Arabic coverage in minutes; review the strings that matter (navigation, calls to action, legal) for the right register. Estimate the cost with the translation cost calculator.
3. Serve it under a clean URL
Publish Arabic under a language-prefixed path like /ar/. Give pages readable slugs with the slug generator — important for Arabic, since Arabic characters otherwise become percent-encoded in URLs.
4. Get the Arabic SEO right
Add reciprocal hreflang pointing at your ar version (with x-default), set <html lang="ar" dir="rtl">, and translate titles and meta descriptions. Build the tags with the hreflang generator and verify with the hreflang checker.
Because Arabic is right-to-left, budget time to mirror your layout: set dir="rtl", flip horizontal padding/margins, mirror icons and navigation, and test mixed LTR content (numbers, English brand names) for correct bidi behavior.
Doing it the easy way
Gloty translates your whole site into Arabic automatically with the AI provider you choose, stores it in your own database, and emits the correct hreflang and lang/dir attributes for you. See how it stacks up against Weglot and WPML, or read the pillar guide on making WordPress multilingual.
Add Arabic to your WordPress site in minutes — automatic AI translation, stored in your own database.