A content management system is the part of a website your team lives inside for years after launch, and it is usually chosen in an afternoon. For a bilingual Egyptian site the decision is narrower than the general comparisons suggest, because one requirement eliminates most candidates before the rest of the feature list matters.
The question that actually decides it
Ask whether the CMS treats Arabic as a first-class language or as a translation of an English original. The difference is not cosmetic. In a system built translation-first, every Arabic page is a child of an English parent: the URL structure, the editorial workflow and often the layout all assume English is the source. That works until you need an Arabic page that has no English equivalent, or an Arabic URL slug, or a page where the Arabic version is the primary one — which on an Egyptian site is most of them.
What breaks in practice
- Direction is per-field, not per-site. A page can be Arabic while an embedded code sample, a phone number or a product SKU must stay left-to-right. Systems that set direction globally force editors to fight the editor.
- Slugs. Some systems transliterate Arabic slugs into unreadable ASCII, others percent-encode them into unreadable URLs. Decide which you want before launch, not after the pages are indexed.
- Editorial preview. If the editor renders left-to-right while the site renders right-to-left, your team is proofreading a layout that does not exist.
- Search. Arabic search needs normalisation — alef variants, taa marbuta, diacritics. A CMS whose search is built for English will return nothing for queries a user considers identical.
Headless versus traditional
Headless systems separate content from presentation, which suits bilingual sites well: the same content can render into a right-to-left layout and a left-to-right one without duplicating it. The cost is that you need a front end built for you, so it fits organisations that already have — or are commissioning — custom development. A traditional CMS gets you further faster if your site is mostly standard pages, and hits its ceiling sooner when you need anything unusual.
What to check before committing
- Create an Arabic-only page with no English equivalent. If the system resists, that tells you its model.
- Put an English product code inside an Arabic paragraph and confirm it does not reorder.
- Export the content. If you cannot get it out in a usable format, you do not own it.
- Give a non-technical colleague the editor for ten minutes without instructions. Whatever confuses them will confuse your team every week for years.
The right answer depends on who maintains the site after launch. A system that is powerful for developers and hostile to editors will quietly stop being updated, and an out-of-date site costs more than a slightly less capable one that people actually use.
Abdulrahman Sayed
EdTech & HealthTech Insights