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Launching a business website in the UAE involves more than design and code — there are trade licence considerations, hosting rules, and platform requirements that catch newcomers off guard. This checklist walks through everything to verify before your site goes live, in the order it should happen.
Legal and regulatory
Trade licence alignment: your website’s stated activity — ecommerce, services, content — should be covered by your licence. Ecommerce in particular requires the relevant activity on your trade licence; verify with your setup agent or the relevant free zone authority.
Ecommerce specifics: online stores typically need an electronic payment gateway agreement and clear consumer policies. Payment gateway providers in the UAE require your licence and bank documents during onboarding — start this early, it takes weeks.
Privacy and data protection: the UAE’s Personal Data Protection Law (PDPL) applies to how you collect and process visitor data. Publish a clear privacy policy, collect only what you need, and disclose usage. If you serve EU visitors, GDPR basics apply as well.
Terms of service: define payment terms, delivery terms (for ecommerce), liability limits, and governing law. Have a legal professional review — it is cheaper than a dispute.
Technical
Domain and hosting: register the .ae or .com domain under the company name, and choose hosting with strong UAE/regional performance — or a CDN with Gulf edge presence. Test load speed from Dubai before launch day, not after.
SSL certificate: mandatory — browsers flag non-HTTPS sites as ‘Not Secure’, and payment gateways refuse to work without encryption. This is table stakes.
Email deliverability: set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records for your domain so invoices and notifications reach inboxes instead of spam folders. Configure a professional mailbox — free email addresses on a business site destroy trust.
Backups and monitoring: automated daily backups with tested restore, plus uptime monitoring that alerts you when the site goes down. Cheap insurance.
SEO and analytics
Indexability: remove ‘noindex’ tags from launch, submit your XML sitemap to Google Search Console, and verify robots.txt blocks only what it should.
On-page basics: unique title tags and meta descriptions per page, one H1 per page, descriptive alt text on images, and correct canonical tags. These 30 minutes of work compound for years.
Structured data: LocalBusiness or Organisation schema, plus product schema for ecommerce, so Google understands and displays your business correctly.
Analytics: install analytics with conversion tracking — form submissions, calls, purchases — and define what ‘success’ looks like numerically before launch, so the data means something from day one.
Content and UX
Contact details: a UAE phone number, physical address, professional email, and ideally WhatsApp Business — UAE customers expect reachable, real businesses.
Mobile check: test every page and form on a real phone. The majority of your traffic will be mobile; a form that breaks on iOS is a lead-generation outage.
Bilingual readiness: even if you launch English-only, decide your Arabic roadmap now — the CMS, fonts, and layouts should be RTL-ready so adding Arabic later is a content project, not a rebuild.
Print this checklist and work through it before launch — every item has silenced at least one UAE launch day. DeLemon Studio builds and launches business websites with all of this handled as standard. Need a launch-ready site? Get in touch.
