How to Choose a Shopify Theme for an Arabic Store, and When to Customise It

RTL quality: more than flipping the page

In October 2026 Shopify announced improved support for Arabic, Urdu and Hebrew in the admin and on storefronts. The support covers checkout, customer accounts and the Horizon family of themes (1). That makes Horizon a sensible baseline. It does not mean every theme in the Theme Store handles Arabic equally well, so test the one you are considering yourself.

RTL support also does not translate your content. Product pages and other content you own appear only in the languages you have enabled, and you can translate product pages with the Translate & Adapt app (2). A theme can be perfectly mirrored and still show half-English pages if the content work has not been done.

When you preview a theme in Arabic, check the following:

• Fonts: only about 0.7% of web fonts on desktop and 0.9% on mobile support Arabic script (3). Confirm that the theme's fonts actually render Arabic and that the theme does not fall back to a system font that clashes with the design.
• Direction-sensitive elements: arrows, sliders, breadcrumbs, the cart drawer and the menu should open from the right and move in the right direction.
• Mixed text: product names that combine Arabic with Latin model numbers or sizes should read in the correct order. The same applies to prices with currency and to phone numbers.
• Forms: address and phone fields should align correctly at checkout and in customer accounts.

Writing modes were one of the focus areas of the cross-browser Interop 2025 project (4). Test on more than one browser, especially Safari on iPhone and Chrome on Android.

Mobile speed before anything else

Test a theme's speed on mobile first. The median Lighthouse performance score for Shopify sites was 55 on mobile against 71 on desktop (5). A theme that looks fast on your laptop can feel slow on your customer's phone.

The platform starts from a reasonable position. On mobile, 76% of the 567,932 Shopify origins analysed had good Core Web Vitals, with 86% good LCP, 90% good INP and 92% good CLS (6). Across the whole web, only 48% of mobile sites reached that result (7). LCP is the weakest of the three for Shopify, and the Web Almanac identifies it as the biggest differentiator between platforms (8).

In practice:

• Run the theme demo and your own preview through a mobile test, not only a desktop one.
• Look at what loads first on the product page. A large hero image, an autoplay video or a heavy slider at the top usually hurts LCP.
• Check how the theme loads Arabic fonts, since a custom Arabic font adds weight to every page.
• Repeat the test after installing your apps, because the score of a clean demo is not the score of your real store.

Product page and collection layout

A theme's demo homepage sells the theme. The product and collection pages sell your products. One of Baymard's 2025 studies on homepage and category navigation is titled with the finding that 67% of mobile sites perform mediocre to poor (9). Its study on product lists and filtering is titled with the finding that 80% of sites have serious issues (10). A theme will not fix these problems on its own, but a poor layout makes them harder to fix.

On the product page, check on a phone that:

• the price, the variant choices and the add-to-cart button are visible without long scrolling;
• size and colour selectors are clear in Arabic and do not break when the labels are long;
• the image gallery swipes in the expected direction;
• there is a natural place near the button for delivery details, payment methods (including cash on delivery) and the returns policy.

On collection pages, check that filters and sorting work in Arabic and that the filter panel opens from the correct side. Product cards should also show enough information to compare items without opening each one.

App compatibility

Once the store is running, you will probably add apps for reviews, bundles, upsells, WhatsApp chat or subscriptions. Each one can add its own scripts and widgets to the storefront. The Web Almanac notes that platforms that ship fast themes and keep their app ecosystems tightly controlled tend to score better (8). The same logic applies inside a single store.

Before committing to a theme:

• List the apps you already know you need and check that each one supports the theme you are considering.
• Install them on the preview and look at their widgets in Arabic. An app can translate its text without mirroring its layout, which leaves stars, carousels and pop-ups left-aligned inside an Arabic page.
• Prefer apps that work through the theme's blocks over apps that inject code into theme files, because they are cleaner to remove later.
• Test mobile speed again with the apps switched on.

When a free or paid theme is enough

Shopify's Horizon themes are a strong free starting point for an Arabic store. They are covered by the new RTL support (1), and Shopify announced more than 250 improvements to them in its Winter '26 Edition (11). Horizon is also built on Shopify's Theme Blocks and is the first public theme to adopt that modular approach fully (12). In practice, the modular approach means you can rearrange and add sections without touching code.

A free theme is usually enough when:

• your catalogue is small or medium and your product pages follow a standard layout;
• you have not yet confirmed which features your customers actually use;
• your priority is launching and testing ads, not design.

A paid theme makes sense when it includes a feature you would otherwise need an app for, such as advanced filtering, mega menus or bundles. It still has to pass the same RTL, mobile speed and app compatibility checks. Paying for a theme does not guarantee better Arabic support, so test a paid theme as strictly as a free one.

When custom theme work pays off

Since the Winter '26 Edition, Sidekick can create custom blocks in any theme from the Shopify Theme Store, so some small customisations no longer need a developer (13). Try that route, and the theme's own settings, before hiring anyone.

Custom theme work pays off when:

• a specific problem repeats across many product pages and costs you sales, such as a broken RTL layout in the variant picker or a cart drawer that misbehaves on mobile;
• your offer needs a page layout the theme cannot produce, such as a product configurator or a bundle builder tied to your stock;
• apps are slowing the store down and the same function can be built more lightly into the theme;
• you sell at a volume where a small improvement in product page conversion covers the development cost.

It usually does not pay off when the aim is only a different look, when the store has not yet found products that sell, or when the real problem is traffic quality rather than the page. Remember also that heavily modified theme files are harder to update when Shopify ships improvements like those in its Winter '26 Edition (11). To judge any change, measure it against the numbers you run the store by, not against how the page looks.

Sources

1. (1) Shopify · 2026-10-02
2. (2) Shopify · 2026-10-02
3. (3) HTTP Archive (Web Almanac 2025) · 2026-01-15
4. (4) Google (web.dev) · 2025-02
5. (5) HTTP Archive (Web Almanac 2025) · 2026-01-15
6. (6) HTTP Archive (Web Almanac 2025) · 2026-01-15
7. (7) HTTP Archive (Web Almanac 2025) · 2026-01-15
8. (8) HTTP Archive (Web Almanac 2025) · 2026-01-15
9. (9) Baymard Institute · 2026-01-27
10. (10) Baymard Institute · 2026-01-27
11. (11) Shopify · 2025-12
12. (12) Codrops · 2025-05-21
13. (13) Shopify · 2025-12