Building a Website for a New Business in Lebanon: A Launch Checklist

Every other marketing channel you build — search, social, word of mouth — ends up sending people to one place: your website. If that landing spot is slow, confusing, or broken on a phone, you're paying to lose the customer at the finish line. This is a practical checklist for getting the website right before you launch, not months after you notice it isn't converting.

Why speed is not a cosmetic detail

Page speed is directly tied to revenue, not just user experience. Every 100 milliseconds of added load time costs roughly 1 percent in conversions, and improving load time by just a tenth of a second can lift conversions by as much as 8 percent — small numbers that compound fast at any real traffic volume. More than half of users abandon a page that takes over three seconds to load, and sites that pass Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds see meaningfully lower bounce rates than sites that fail them.

Most sites are still failing this bar: only about 42 percent of mobile sites currently pass all three Core Web Vitals, against 63 percent on desktop — and mobile is where the gap matters most, since mobile devices now drive the majority of e-commerce traffic globally. A beautiful site that takes six seconds to load on a phone is losing visitors before they see the design at all.

Lebanon's connectivity reality: build mobile-first, not desktop-first

This isn't a generic best practice here — it's dictated by how people in Lebanon actually get online. As of late 2025, Lebanon's median mobile download speed was 43.9 Mbps, and 98.1 percent of mobile connections qualify as broadband (3G/4G/5G) — fast, reliable mobile infrastructure. Fixed-line broadband tells a different story: the median fixed connection ran at roughly 16.1 Mbps, well behind the mobile figure. In practice, that means a large share of your visitors are on a fast phone connection, not a fast home router, and your site needs to be built and tested primarily for that reality — mobile-first in layout, image weight, and load performance, with desktop treated as the secondary case rather than the default.

Choosing a domain

Decide between a .com and a .com.lb (or other .lb extension) early, since the requirements differ. A .com.lb domain requires the owner to be a legally registered business entity and typically requires submitting a current Commercial Circular, trademark certificate, or equivalent registration document as part of the request — meaning you generally need your company registration finished first. A plain .com has no such requirement and is available immediately, which is why many businesses launch on .com and add a .com.lb later once registration is complete, pointing both at the same site or using the local domain as a redirect.

The pages a new business site actually needs

Resist the urge to build ten pages before launch. A focused starter set covers: a homepage that states clearly what you do and for whom within the first screen a visitor sees; a services or products page with enough detail to answer "is this for me?"; a contact page with a working form, phone number, and WhatsApp link, since WhatsApp is a primary sales channel for many Lebanese businesses; an about page that builds trust with real information, not stock-photo filler; and, if budget allows, a handful of SEO-targeted content pages that answer the specific questions your customers are already searching. Every additional page beyond that is easier to add after launch than to justify delaying launch for.

SEO basics to build in from day one

Bake basic technical SEO into the build rather than retrofitting it later: a sitemap and robots file so search engines can find and index every page, a canonical URL on every page to avoid duplicate-content issues, descriptive title tags and meta descriptions written for the actual keyword each page targets, and schema markup (LocalBusiness, Service, FAQ) so search engines understand what your business is and where it operates, not just what the page says in plain text. Structured data won't rank a page on its own, but it's what lets Google show rich results — star ratings, FAQs, business hours — that get clicked more often than a plain blue link.

Test before you launch, not after

Before going live, check the site on a real mid-range phone over mobile data, not just on a fast office Wi-Fi connection during development — the gap between those two conditions is exactly where most Lebanese visitors will actually experience your site. Run it through a Core Web Vitals checker, confirm the contact form actually delivers a message, and check that every page renders correctly in both English and Arabic if you're running bilingual content, since layout bugs in right-to-left text are easy to miss if you only test in one language.

Where the website fits with the rest of your launch

A website only converts well when it has something worth converting: a clear go-to-market strategy that decided who it's for, and a brand identity that gives it a consistent look and voice instead of generic template styling. If you're still working through company registration, start with our guide on starting a business in Lebanon. And if you'd rather not build and test all of this yourself, a web development engagement handles the full build — speed, mobile-first layout, and SEO fundamentals included from the first wireframe.