Taking on new projects
Salla developer.
I have built and launched more than 150 storefronts on Salla and Zid — for marketing agencies, for brands, and directly for store owners. If Salla's stock themes have taken your store as far as they can, this is the part where it stops looking like everyone else's.
Egypt & the Gulf · Remote
- 150+Salla & Zid storefronts shipped
- ~35%average session duration lift
- #1GitHub contributor in Egypt, 2023
What you get
Custom Salla themes
A theme built to your brand rather than a marketplace template with your logo dropped in — built on Salla's Twilight theme engine, so it stays upgradeable.
Arabic and RTL done properly
Not a mirrored LTR layout. Correct logical properties, Arabic numerals where they belong, typefaces that actually read, and icons that don't end up pointing the wrong way.
Speed and Core Web Vitals
Image and font discipline, deferred scripts, and cutting the third-party weight that quietly costs you conversions on a phone over mobile data.
The features Salla doesn't ship
Custom product options, bundles, calculators, filtered collections, landing pages for a campaign — the store logic that sits outside the settings panel.
What a Salla store actually needs from a developer
The settings panel runs out before your store does
Salla's dashboard covers a real amount of ground, and for a store finding its feet that is genuinely enough. The wall arrives later, and always in the same place: you know exactly what the store should do, and there is no setting for it. A bundle priced differently from its parts. A product option that changes the price. A collection filtered by something the platform does not think is a filter.
That is the point where a developer stops being a luxury. Not to rebuild what already works, but to add the one behaviour standing between your catalogue and how you actually sell.
Why Twilight decides whether your work survives
There are two ways to customise a Salla store. One is to paste code into whatever field accepts it. The other is to work through Twilight, the theme engine Salla actually supports. Both look identical the day they ship.
They stop looking identical at the first platform update. Pasted overrides depend on markup nobody promised to keep; a theme built on Twilight's structure receives the update underneath it. Most of the broken stores I am asked to rescue are not badly built — they are built outside the thing that was going to change.
Speed is measured on the phone your customer owns
Store speed is usually discussed as a score, which is why so little gets fixed. The useful version is concrete: how long until a shopper on mobile data, on a mid-range Android, can see a price and tap a button. That number is rarely hurt by one large thing. It is hurt by a hero image exported at desktop size, three analytics scripts loading before anything renders, a font blocking first paint, and a chat widget that costs more than the product grid.
None of those are interesting problems. All of them are worth money, because the shopper who leaves during the wait never appears in the funnel you are looking at.
RTL is not a stylesheet you switch on
Most Arabic storefronts are Latin layouts flipped, and the failures are always small and always visible: an icon pointing the wrong way, a price with the currency on the wrong side, a form that starts in Arabic and ends in English, a truncated product title cut at the wrong end.
Done properly it is mostly discipline rather than difficulty: logical CSS properties instead of left and right, icons that mirror deliberately rather than automatically, number and currency formatting that belongs to the locale, and line heights that give Arabic letterforms the room they need. I read and write both languages, which mainly means I notice when it is wrong.
Common questions
The things people actually ask before hiring.
- Do you work on existing Salla stores or only new ones?
- Both. A lot of the work is picking up a store that already sells and fixing what is holding it back — speed, a broken checkout flow on mobile, or a theme that was customised until it became unmaintainable.
- Can you keep the store upgradeable after customisation?
- Yes, and it is the main reason to do it properly. Work goes through Salla's Twilight theme structure instead of pasting overrides into the settings panel, so platform updates don't undo your build.
- Do you work with clients in Saudi Arabia?
- Regularly — Salla is a Saudi platform and most of this work is for Saudi stores. I have worked on Saudi-based projects since 2022, including enterprise work in Riyadh, so the timezone and the working week are familiar.
- How do we start?
- Send me the store link and what is bothering you about it. You will get an honest read on whether it needs a rebuild or three days of fixes — including if the answer is that you don't need me.
Related services
Tell me what you're building.
Describe the problem rather than the spec. You'll get an honest read on the shortest path to solving it — including whether I'm the right person for it.