A well-designed website is one of your most powerful business assets. A poorly designed one actively costs you customers. Here are the most common website design mistakes Saudi businesses make, and exactly how to fix each one.
Mistake 1: No Prominent WhatsApp Button
Saudi customers want to contact businesses via WhatsApp, not email forms. A website without a clearly visible, easy-to-tap WhatsApp button is missing the most important conversion element for the Saudi market.
Fix: Add a floating WhatsApp button visible on every page, especially on mobile. Make it immediately visible without scrolling. Pre-fill the WhatsApp message with a greeting to reduce friction.
Mistake 2: Slow Load Speed
Images not optimized, heavy themes, and poor hosting cause slow pages that lose visitors before they see your content. This hurts both user experience and Google rankings.
Fix: Compress all images before upload, use quality hosting, and test speed monthly with Google PageSpeed Insights. See How Website Speed Affects User Experience for a full guide.
Mistake 3: Not Mobile-Optimized
Given that 90%+ of Saudi web traffic is mobile, a website that doesn't work well on smartphones is failing most of its visitors. This includes small text, tiny buttons, and layouts that break on phone screens.
Fix: Test your website on multiple phone sizes. Ensure text is readable without zooming, buttons are easily tappable, and the layout flows naturally on a small screen.
Mistake 4: No Arabic Version
An English-only website serves only a portion of your potential Saudi audience. Many Saudi customers prefer to browse in Arabic and will choose a competitor with an Arabic website over an English-only option.
Fix: Build a proper bilingual website with a genuine Arabic translation, not machine-translated content, with correct RTL layout and appropriate Arabic typography.
Mistake 5: Generic or Stock Photography
Websites filled with generic stock photos look impersonal and fail to build trust. Saudi customers can tell the difference between authentic business photos and free stock images used by a thousand other websites.
Fix: Invest in professional photography of your actual business, team, and services. Authentic photos dramatically outperform stock images in building trust and conversions.
Mistake 6: Unclear Navigation
Visitors who can't find what they need within two clicks leave. Complicated navigation with too many options, buried important pages, and unclear labels cause frustration and lost conversions.
Fix: Simplify your navigation to 5–7 core items. Put your most important pages (Services, Contact) prominently. Test with someone unfamiliar with your business and watch where they struggle.
Mistake 7: No Clear Value Proposition
Many Saudi business websites don't clearly answer the question a visitor has within the first few seconds: "Is this business right for me?" If a visitor can't immediately understand what you do, who you serve, and why you're the right choice, they leave.
Fix: Put a clear, specific headline on your homepage above the fold that communicates your core value in Arabic and English. Don't make visitors read three paragraphs to understand what you do.
If you'd like a professional website built to avoid all these mistakes from the start, our Website Design & Development service creates fast, bilingual, mobile-first websites specifically designed for the Saudi market.
For more on what great Saudi business websites look like, read our main guide: What Makes a Website User-Friendly?
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Designing for the Owner Rather Than the Customer
The most common mistake is a site that describes the business as the owner sees it (history, values, ambitions) rather than answering what a customer arrived to find out.
Customers want three things quickly: what you do, whether you serve them, and how to make contact. A homepage leading with a mission statement delays all three.
The correction is usually a rewrite rather than a redesign. Most sites judged to look wrong are actually saying the wrong things in the wrong order.
Hiding the Contact Details
Contact information buried on a separate page, or at the foot of a long homepage, costs enquiries continuously and invisibly. Visitors do not hunt; they leave.
On mobile, where most Saudi traffic arrives, the phone number or WhatsApp button should be visible without scrolling and tappable without zooming.
Repeating contact details at the end of each page costs nothing and catches visitors who read to the bottom and then have nowhere obvious to go.
Slow, Heavy and Beautiful
Large hero images, video backgrounds and multiple font families produce designs that look impressive in a presentation and lose visitors on mobile data.
Speed is a design constraint rather than a technical afterthought. A page that takes six seconds to render has failed regardless of how it looks once it arrives.
The fix is rarely dramatic (correctly sized images, fewer fonts, deferred scripts) but it needs deciding at design time rather than being retrofitted.
Right-to-Left as an Afterthought
Arabic layout is not a setting. Navigation, alignment, iconography, form fields and reading order all invert, and a left-to-right design flipped afterwards reads as exactly that to an Arabic-speaking visitor.
The tell-tale signs are misaligned icons, numbers and dates in the wrong position, and forms whose labels sit on the wrong side of their fields.
Ask to see an Arabic site the team has previously built, on a phone. That single check eliminates most providers who claim bilingual capability without having it.
Building Something Nobody Can Update
Sites built so that every change requires a developer stop being updated, and a site that stops being updated stops working. Prices go stale, services disappear, and nobody notices for a year.
Whoever runs the business should be able to change a phone number, add a service page and update prices without help. That single capability decides whether the site stays accurate.
Establish before the project starts who owns the domain, the hosting and the files, and what you can take elsewhere. Projects built on platforms that cannot be exported are cheap to begin and expensive to leave.
Launching and Walking Away
A site is not finished at launch. The first month usually reveals which pages people actually use, where they leave, and which questions the copy failed to answer.
Look at the data once a month for the first quarter and fix what it shows. Most of the available improvement in a new site is found in that period and never acted on.
After that, an annual review against what the business currently sells is enough to prevent the slow drift that makes a site less relevant without anything visibly breaking.
Copying a Competitor Without Understanding It
Businesses frequently brief a site by pointing at a competitor's, which copies the visible layer and none of the reasoning. The competitor's structure reflects their services, their customers and their constraints, not yours.
It also guarantees you look like an imitation of an established business rather than an alternative to it, which is a poor position from which to win a comparison.
Study what a competitor answers rather than how it looks. The useful lesson is usually in what questions they resolve and in what order, and that can be applied honestly to a different business.
