Your business’ site, very likely, doesn’t work in China. No, I’m not a soothsayer, that’s just the reality for the +90% of foreign sites. When it comes to internet and how this space is regulated, China is not just another country. China is another universe.

Speed vs User Engagement

3 seconds is what it takes for your visitors to get impatient and leave your website. Chinese users generally expect a site to load within 5 seconds, but websites from overseas usually takes around 20-50 seconds. According to Deloitte, a 0.1 second improvement can help increase funnel conversion rates by 20~40%.

What is the issue? (tl;dr: there are many issues)

CSL (In short, China’s own GDPR), poor connectivity with the outside and a lot of unfamiliarity with Chinese cloud providers makes the perfect recipe for failure. Even if your website is not blocked by the CSL, many resources it depends on are likely stopped. Resources like videos, stylesheets, scripts or fonts are probably coming from companies like Google, Amazon and the likes. Companies completely or largely not compliant with the CSL.

Having vital resources not loading means your website will look horrible to the end user, will take a lot of time to load, or it will just time out and show a blank result. This translates to the worst ROI in the history of your business.

Guess what, I’ve fixed that for you

If the stones that I walked on could talk, they would surely tell you a good story. Avoid spending hundreds of hours researching and failing on your journey to China and let me help you to efficiently achieve the goal: A fast and performing site.

Speed

When I talk about speed, I don’t talk just about CDN networks. I will give you more than that. I’m a cloud computing nerd and love to find the limits of what can be achieved by optimising. Compression, replication, co-location, you name it.

Partnering with the “crème de la crème”

Teaming up with the best of the best in China, companies like Alibaba or Huawei recommend my services to their own customers around the globe and collaborate closely with me in developing/testing products. After some years of trial/error, we came up with a series of unique formulas to speed up sites even without the need of ICP licenses, giving you a comprehensive first-class, one-stop solution.

Compatibility

You can improve speed greatly by using CDNs, near-china solutions and various compression methods. But my experience will take you further. Welcome “to the other side”, the world is increasingly becoming somewhat a multiverse and not a monolith. Users around the world do daily life stuff by using a myriad of different apps, webs and services.

Youku, Weibo, Wechat, Baidu… We live in a multiverse

Is not enough to make the site resources load faster… if half of them won’t even load. Developers take many of the dependencies for granted, to later discover not everywhere in the world is like home.

The classic: It works on my machine!

One of the most tricky barriers to continuous flow in software delivery is the works-on-my-machine incident. Anyone who has worked on a software development team or an infrastructure support team has experienced it.

The spin-off: It works in my country!

The expression “testing locally” here just got a whole new meaning. The anglo/euro-centric approach to web development is not valid anymore and more variables should be taken care of. When testing a website you should test on different devices, web browsers, networks and even regions. What works flawlessly in Barcelona doesn’t necessarily need to work the same way in, let’s say, Sydney.

Sites are made up of dozens (sometimes hundreds) of resources (stuff like fonts, scripts or icons) that together make the page look as you want. And you want it to look the same everywhere, don’t you? This problem intensifies when browsing from China, resources working fine in Barcelona but slow in Sydney may just not work at all in Shanghai.

“New world, new problems”

Resource replacement

One example would be to upload to YouTube your videos in your original site but to Youku on the Chinese version. Instead of linking your Twitter/X account, you can direct your visitors to Weibo. Instead of doing Google SEO, focus on Baidu. These are just a few examples of the complexities arising when deploying in China and the APAC/ASEAN in general.

This is where I can help

Sites are made up of dozens (sometimes hundreds) of resources (stuff like fonts, scripts or icons) that together make the page look as you want. And you want it to look the same everywhere, don’t you?

I will help you scan, identify, and update the needed code on your site to ensure it’s compliant in China. After that, it will be a piece of cake for your team to keep updating the site as they usually do.

Also, I offer a Business VPN for China if you are planning some stay in there.