How to create a business website in Morocco, step by step

Every useful website starts with one sentence: what should a visitor do after reading it? Call you, send a WhatsApp message, book a slot, buy a product, or trust you enough to sign a contract. A dental practice in Rabat wants bookings. A furniture maker in Fès wants people to see the workshop and ask for a quote. A tour operator in Marrakech has to be understood in English and French before anyone pays a deposit. Write your sentence down; every later decision is measured against it.

Then describe your audience in practical terms. Which cities do they live in? Which language do they search in: French, Arabic, English, or the Darija they type into WhatsApp? Do they arrive on a phone over mobile data, or on an office computer? Are they individuals comparing prices, or companies checking that you exist before they sign? The answers decide the pages, the languages and even the tone of the text.

Finally, pick one or two things to count after launch, such as calls or messages per week. Nobody controls Google, but you can see whether the site is doing the job you gave it.

The domain is your address on the internet, and it is the one part of the website you should never let anyone else own. For a Moroccan business the choice is usually between .ma, which tells visitors at a glance that you are in Morocco, and .com, which reads as international. You can also register both and send visitors from one to the other. Decide from your customers, not from fashion.

How .ma works. The ANRT, Morocco's telecoms regulator, manages the .ma extension, but you do not register with it directly: .ma names are sold only through providers the ANRT accredits, and the registry publishes their list. According to the registry, any person or company may apply; the registrant must name an administrative contact who is a person established in Morocco; and the name is registered for one to five years. Each provider sets its own prices. The registry also states that a .ma can be handed to someone else through a voluntary transfer, but cannot be sold.

How .com works. Generic names such as .com are registered through registrars accredited by ICANN, or through their resellers. ICANN states that you have the right to move your domain from one registrar to another, using an authorization code, the Auth-Code, which the registrar creates to identify the holder and prevent unauthorised transfers.

Whichever you choose: check availability on the registry's WHOIS for a .ma; keep the name short and easy to spell over the phone; make sure the holder is you or your company; and use an email address you will still read in five years — the registry itself stresses that a valid email address is very important. Then write the renewal date in your calendar.

Hosting is the server that keeps your website online. The right kind depends on what you build. A static site — plain pages with no database — is light and fast and needs very little. A site on a CMS needs a server that runs its software and a database; WordPress, for instance, recommends PHP with a MySQL or MariaDB database. An online shop with customer accounts needs more again, and backups you can actually restore.

Before paying, ask four questions. Whose name is the hosting account in? Where are the servers? How are backups made, and how do you restore one? Who looks after the security certificate that gives you the padlock and https? Free certificates exist — Let's Encrypt issues them — so the certificate need not cost anything, but somebody has to install it and watch its renewal.

The server location has a legal side too. The CNDP's guidance for websites says that when personal data are hosted and stored on servers abroad, the notification includes a request for transfer abroad, which the CNDP examines only after authorising the underlying processing. If your contact form or your shop will store customer data outside Morocco, plan for that now rather than after launch.

There are three broad ways to build the site itself, and each suits a different kind of business.

WordPress is open-source software licensed under the GPL, and its download page describes it as free for anyone comfortable getting their own hosting and domain. The software costs nothing; the hosting, the setup and the upkeep are where the effort goes. Shopify, on the other hand, sells its plans as monthly or yearly subscriptions. Before choosing it for a Moroccan store, read its help page on Shopify Payments: Morocco is not on the list of countries, so a store here needs a third-party payment provider, and Shopify's pricing page says third-party transaction fees may then apply.

ROSH™ Company Labs builds both ways: a basic CMS when you need to edit content yourself, or a fast static build when speed and simplicity matter most, with no lock-in either way. Whatever you choose, make sure you can take your content and files with you if you ever change provider.

Small business sites often need fewer pages than their owners expect. A solid base is five: a home page that says what you do, where and for whom within the first screen; a services or products page; an about page with real names and photos; a contact page with every way to reach you; and a blog if you will genuinely write. That is close to what the ROSH™ Company Labs Business Website package lists: Home, About, Services, Contact and a blog setup.

Give each page one job and one main call to action. Put your phone number and a WhatsApp button where a visitor on a phone can reach them with a thumb. Name the menu items in the plain words your customers use — Services, Prices, Contact — rather than clever labels nobody searches for.

Draw the structure on paper before any design: the list of pages, what each one says, and where each one sends the visitor next. Changing a sketch costs nothing; changing a finished design costs time. This is also the moment to fix the address of every page, because changing addresses after launch leaves broken links behind.

Content is what visitors read and what search engines index, and it is often the step that delays a launch. Start writing before the design begins: what you do, for whom, in which cities, your prices or how you set them, your opening hours, and the questions customers ask you on the phone every week. Those questions, answered plainly, are some of the most useful text a small business site can carry.

Photos matter as much as words. Real pictures of your premises, your team and your work build trust in a way stock images cannot: someone choosing a caterer in Casablanca wants to see the actual dishes. A recent phone in good daylight is enough for most needs. Compress the images before they go online so the pages stay fast, and give each one a short description, which also helps visitors who use screen readers.

If you do not have time to write, say so early and plan for it. A site full of placeholder text looks unfinished, however good the design.

Choose languages from your customers, not from habit. A company selling to other Moroccan businesses may start in French; a service for the general public may need Arabic first; tourism, export and foreign investors call for English. Starting with one or two languages and adding the third later is perfectly reasonable, provided the site is built to accept it.

Each language is a full version of the site, not a translation widget. Google recommends a separate address for each language version, hreflang annotations linking the versions together, visible links to switch language, and no automatic redirect from one language to another. Each version needs its own page titles and descriptions, written for what people type in that language.

Arabic adds right-to-left layout. Following the W3C, the page declares its right-to-left direction on the html element rather than through CSS; menus, icons, arrows and forms are then mirrored, and mixed text such as prices or brand names in Latin letters must be handled so it stays in place. Test every Arabic page on a phone before launch, because that is where problems show.

In the ROSH™ Company Labs price list, multi-language work belongs to the Custom / Advanced Build. The page you are reading exists in English, French and Arabic, with right-to-left Arabic pages, if you want to see how a trilingual site behaves.

Design the phone version first and the desktop second. Google says it uses the mobile version of a site's content, crawled with its smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking, and it recommends responsive web design — one site that adapts to every screen — as the easiest pattern to implement and maintain.

Speed is mostly discipline: compressed images, few heavy effects, fonts loaded with care, and no pile of extensions nobody uses. Test on a mid-range phone over mobile data, not on office Wi-Fi. Google's PageSpeed Insights reports on the user experience of a page on mobile and desktop and suggests improvements; run it on your home page and on your most important service page.

Then check the details a phone user notices at once: buttons large enough for a thumb, phone numbers that dial when tapped, forms that open the right keyboard, text readable without zooming, and nothing that slides over the content and hides it.

This section summarises what Moroccan law and the CNDP publish. It is not legal advice: for your own situation, read the texts on the CNDP's website or ask a lawyer.

Morocco's personal-data law is Law 09-08 of 18 February 2009, on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data. It defines personal data broadly, as any information about an identified or identifiable person, including sound and image. A contact form, a newsletter sign-up, a booking or an online order all collect it.

The CNDP, the national commission that supervises this law, publishes guidance for websites. It says that any website operator who collects and processes personal data must notify the CNDP before starting: an authorisation request when the data include the national ID card number or sensitive data such as health information or religious beliefs, a prior declaration in the other cases, and a request for transfer abroad when the data are hosted on servers outside Morocco. The CNDP's website provides the forms, including a normal and a simplified prior declaration.

According to the same guidance, a site that collects personal data should:

• tell visitors who runs the site, why the data are collected, who receives them, which answers are compulsory, and that they have the rights of access, rectification and, for legitimate reasons, objection;
• ask for the visitor's consent to the processing;
• collect only the data strictly needed for the purpose;
• protect the data with security and confidentiality measures, and keep them no longer than necessary;
• use them for marketing messages only with consent given at collection, or for a person who already received a similar product or service from the same site, and let people object free of charge;
• ask for consent before placing cookies that use personal data, say what those cookies are for, and explain how to refuse them.

The CNDP also gives a model clause for your legal notice or terms, ending with a line that quotes the number of the CNDP receipt or authorisation, and a short model mention for forms. On a typical small site, that means a privacy or legal-notice page carrying the clause, the short mention under each form, and a consent step before any cookie that uses personal data.

If you sell online, a second law applies: Law 31-08 on consumer protection, which covers distance selling. The Ministry of Industry and Trade summarises it as giving consumers the right to all necessary information before a sale and, in certain cases, a withdrawal period of 7 days. Read the text, or ask a lawyer, before you write your terms of sale. One more point to be clear on: notifying the CNDP is the obligation of the person or company responsible for the site, and filing it is not part of any ROSH™ Company Labs package.

If customers will pay on the site, sort out the payment side early, because it depends on a contract, not only on code. Two routes are common in Morocco, and many shops use both.

Cash on delivery. Many Moroccan shoppers prefer to pay when the parcel arrives. It needs no card contract, but the site must capture clean orders — name, phone, city and address — and you need a routine for confirming orders and following up refused parcels with your delivery company.

Card payment on your own site. This requires a merchant agreement with an acquirer. The CMI's e-commerce page describes its online card-payment platform, refers merchants to its partner acquirers, and lists a merchant website among what a merchant needs. Since 1 May 2025, payment institutions and the banks' acquiring subsidiaries have been authorised to operate on the card-acquiring market, after the Conseil de la concurrence made binding the CMI's commitment to transfer its merchant contracts. Ask your bank what it offers for online payment and what it needs from you.

Before launch, make a real test payment on a phone, including the 3-D Secure step in which the buyer enters a secret code, as the CMI's page describes it. Check what the customer sees when a payment fails, and how you will handle a refund with whoever processes your payments.

The ROSH™ Company Labs E-commerce package, at $499 / MAD 4990, lists a cart and checkout with payment integration and shipping presets; the payment method itself depends on the agreement you obtain. For the cost side of this decision, see the website price guide linked at the end of this page.

Plenty of customers would rather send a WhatsApp message than fill in a form, so offer both, plus a phone number that dials when tapped. WhatsApp's own help centre explains click to chat: a link made of https://wa.me/ followed by the full number in international format, without the 00 or + prefix, brackets or dashes. For a Moroccan number, that means starting with 212, as in the WhatsApp buttons on this page, which also open with a first message already written.

Whoever answers, answer quickly. A fast, polite reply does more for a small business than any design detail, and a WhatsApp button that nobody watches is worse than none.

The contact page should carry everything: phone, WhatsApp, email, address or service area, opening hours, and a short form for people who prefer writing. If the form collects personal data, put the short CNDP-style mention under it, as described in step 9.

SEO starts during the build, not after it. Each page needs a unique title and description written with the words customers type, one clear main heading, text that answers real questions, descriptions on images, and links between related pages. Google says it primarily finds pages through links from pages it has already crawled, and that you can also submit a sitemap. Its Search Console is a free service that helps you monitor and troubleshoot how your site appears in Google Search.

Be realistic about timing and promises. Google says no one can guarantee a #1 ranking, warns against anyone who claims a special relationship with Google, and notes that some changes might take effect in a few hours while others could take several months.

If customers visit you, or you travel to them, set up a Google Business Profile. Google says creating one is free, and it shows your business on Google Search and Maps with your hours, photos and reviews. Eligibility rests on having a location customers can visit or on serving customers where they are; a virtual office or a P.O. box does not qualify. Use your real-world business name, verify the profile — the methods offered depend on your business and region — keep your hours accurate, and add real photos.

Google says local results depend mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, and that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. Ask satisfied customers for reviews, but never buy them or offer anything in exchange: Google's policies remove paid or incentivised reviews, and also forbid discouraging negative reviews or asking only happy customers. For the longer game, read the Google ranking guide linked below.

Before you announce the site, go through this checklist on a phone and on a computer:

1. Every page loads over https, with no security warning.
2. Every link, button and phone number works, including the WhatsApp button.
3. Every form sends to an inbox someone reads, and shows the notice described in step 9.
4. Titles and descriptions are filled in on every page, in every language.
5. The language links open the same page in the other language.
6. Images are compressed and have descriptions.
7. The site is added to Search Console and a sitemap is submitted.
8. Your Google Business Profile links to the website.
9. You hold the logins for the domain, the hosting and the CMS, and a copy of the files.
10. The domain renewal date is in your calendar.

After launch, the site needs a routine: software updates and backups if it runs on a CMS, a regular look at Search Console, fresh photos and prices when things change, and a yearly check of the domain, the hosting and the certificate. A short routine kept every week beats a big repair once a year. If you want help with visibility later, the ROSH™ Company Labs growth plans start at $149 / MAD 1490 — with no promise of positions, because nobody honest can make one.

Doing it yourself makes sense when the site is small, the budget is tight, you enjoy learning, and a template is acceptable. A free CMS or a hosted builder will get you online; keep the domain and every account in your own name, and follow the steps above in order.

Hiring makes sense when your time is worth more than the fee, or when you need Arabic right-to-left done properly, online payment, or a design that has to earn the trust of companies and banks. Judge any provider by sites they have really built, a written scope with a price, and a clear answer on who owns the domain, the hosting account and the files.

ROSH™ Company Labs builds websites in four packages: Landing Page (1–2 sections) at $149 / MAD 1490, Business Website (4–6 pages) at $299 / MAD 2990, E-commerce (Catalog + Checkout) at $499 / MAD 4990, and Custom / Advanced Build at $799 / MAD 7990. Every build includes SEO fundamentals; at launch the site is deployed and checked, clean files are handed over, and you keep full ownership of what is built. The full contents are on the website design page, and the running costs are explained in what a website costs in Morocco.

If you already have a site, the free website audit reviews speed, mobile experience, SEO basics, trust and technical health by hand, usually within 24 hours. Developers who are building their own toolkit can read the guide to software for web developers in Morocco.

Be clear about who you would be hiring. ROSH™ Company Labs is an independent brand in Morocco, not a registered company. It issues no tax invoice, orders are at the client's own risk, and it is not affiliated with Google, the ANRT, the CNDP, the CMI or any platform named on this page. To ask a question or get a quote, use the contact page or WhatsApp.