Self-check

Is Your Site Ready for China? A 10-Point Readiness Check

Engineering leads usually learn about China performance problems from a Shanghai colleague's complaint or a support ticket — not a dashboard alert. This page turns that anecdote into a China readiness checklist you can run yourself. It is the same map our Phase 1 audit fills in professionally: "Map your stack, China traffic paths, blocked dependencies, and compliance gaps."

Work through the ten items below. Answer yes or no for each. A yes means the symptom exists on your stack today. It does not mean you need to rebuild anything — but it tells you where the first conversation should start, and whether the problem is a tuning item or a launch gate.

The 10-point China readiness checklist

Print this checklist

1. 1. Does your site take 15 seconds or more to first render from a mainland connection?

   Offshore-hosted sites commonly load in 15–30+ seconds in China. Congested cross-border transit and DNS resolution outside the country add latency before the first byte arrives. Users bounce before they see your content.

   Fix path: Infrastructure service · Why your website is slow in China

2. 2. Is the origin your China visitors hit hosted outside mainland China?

   When the origin sits outside the mainland, every request — HTML, API calls, assets — crosses the same congested international path. Time to first byte from China typically runs 2–8+ seconds on a global-only setup, compared with under 1 second with mainland hosting and tuning.

   Fix path: Infrastructure service (mainland hosting on Alibaba Cloud or Tencent Cloud) — or compare paths to reach China without an ICP filing

3. 3. Does your CDN serve China visitors from edge nodes outside the mainland?

   Caching assets on offshore CDN nodes does not touch the cross-border hop. The edge must be inside the country to cut that hop. Offshore CDNs and image compression alone do not fix the problem.

   Fix path: Infrastructure service · Why your website is slow in China

4. 4. Do your domains resolve through nameservers outside China?

   Nameservers located outside China add lookup round trips before the first request even fires. Every visitor's browser must resolve your domain before it can open a connection, and cross-border DNS queries add latency on top of the transit delay. This is an avoidable round trip that compounds with everything else.

   Fix path: Infrastructure service · Why your website is slow in China

5. 5. Do you embed Google Maps, YouTube, or Vimeo?

   The site itself is not blocked — a dependency is. Google Maps, YouTube, and Vimeo embeds fail or time out from China, leaving blank map tiles and dead video players. The fix is a dependency audit: identify every blocked endpoint and replace or proxy it.

   Fix path: Infrastructure service (dependency audit) · Why your website is slow in China · Blocked APIs in China playbook · Great Firewall definition · China dependency checker

6. 6. Do login, checkout, chat, fonts, or tag-manager flows call endpoints that time out from China?

   Global font hosts, icon libraries, tag-manager endpoints, and authentication or payment APIs can all fail behind the firewall. These are architecture decisions, not performance tweaks. A dependency audit maps which flows break and defines replacements.

   Fix path: Infrastructure service · Why your website is slow in China · Blocked APIs in China playbook · Great Firewall definition

7. 7. Can China customers pay with WeChat Pay, or only global gateways?

   Global payment gateways fail behind the firewall. WeChat Pay is the canonical China-accessible replacement and is often expected at checkout. If your checkout offers only global gateways, China customers may be unable to complete payment.

   Fix path: WeChat ecosystem service · Why your website is slow in China · Blocked APIs in China playbook · the three WeChat Pay acceptance paths

8. 8. Is your mobile experience built for in-WeChat use (Mini Program or H5 with WeChat Pay)?

   Discovery, social proof, and payment converge inside WeChat for many China consumers. Mini Programs — lightweight apps inside WeChat — offer better in-WeChat performance, native sharing to Moments, and template messages. H5 mobile web ships fastest if you already have a responsive site. The right choice depends on your acquisition channels.

   Fix path: WeChat ecosystem service · WeChat Mini Program vs H5 vs App

9. 9. If you host (or plan to host) on mainland servers, is your ICP filing done — and is the number displayed on-site?

   ICP filing (Bei'an) is mandatory for most websites hosted on mainland servers. Filing typically takes 2–4 weeks with complete documentation and a qualified entity. Operating without a filing risks domain blocking and enforcement action. Mainland hosting triggers the requirement.

   Fix path: ICP & compliance service · ICP filing vs ICP license · ICP filing timeline · Bei'an definition

10. 10. Do you have a mainland entity (typically a WFOE) to hold the filing — or are you assuming a Hong Kong entity is enough?

    The ICP filing holder must be a mainland company or qualifying partner, typically a Wholly Foreign-Owned Enterprise (WFOE). A Hong Kong entity alone does not satisfy this requirement. Teams often discover this late, stalling launches that were otherwise ready.

    Fix path: ICP & compliance service · ICP filing vs ICP license · ICP filing timeline · Bei'an definition

Scoring your answers

Count your yes answers. Any yes in items 1–6 means China visitors are having a materially worse experience than everyone else — the site is slow or partially broken on their networks. A yes in items 9–10 is a launch gate, not a tuning item: no amount of front-end optimization ships around a missing ICP filing. If most of your answers are yes, that is exactly what Phase 1 of our process maps in detail. The provider decision that follows a clean checklist has its own framework: the five-criteria provider framework.

What happens after the China readiness checklist

If the checklist surfaced problems, Phase 1 of our engagement produces a stack map and a risk report — a concrete picture of which dependencies fail, which traffic paths degrade, and where compliance gaps sit. You see every blocked endpoint, every slow path, and every compliance gap.

Phase 2 then defines the target architecture: hosting, CDN, entity and ICP route, and API replacements. The deliverables are concrete: an ICP roadmap and an architecture diagram your engineering team can execute against. You can review the full process on our homepage or jump straight to the infrastructure service page.

Frequently asked questions

How do I test my site from China?

Ask a colleague on a mainland connection to load your site and report what they see. In browser developer tools, check the Network tab for requests that time out or return errors — those are your blocked or degraded dependencies. Run a DNS lookup to confirm where your nameservers resolve. Then classify what you find: everything slow points to a transit problem; specific parts missing points to blocked dependencies.

For a structured walkthrough, see Why your website is slow in China. For the full measurement procedure — mainland test-point services, per-run recording, and benchmark numbers — see how to test your website from China.

Is my site blocked in China or just slow?

Two failure classes. If everything loads but takes 15–30+ seconds, the problem is congested cross-border transit and offshore hosting — the site is slow, not blocked. If specific parts are missing — blank map tiles, dead video embeds, login forms that never return — the site itself is not blocked; a dependency is. Compliance is its own risk: operating a mainland-hosted site without an ICP filing risks domain blocking and enforcement.

Do we have to re-platform our global site?

No. Most brands keep their global website and add a China path — a China-facing edge layer. Your international CMS, APIs, and workflows stay where they are, and your global site continues unchanged for the rest of the world. Hybrid is also the quicker route to a first result: the China path can go live while entity and filing work progress in parallel.

We're B2B — do we still need WeChat Pay and a Mini Program?

Not always, but Mini Programs and WeChat Pay are often essential for discovery, sharing, and checkout inside WeChat. The decision depends on how your China customers find you and how they expect to transact. If acquisition runs through WeChat channels — Official Account followers, chat shares, Moments posts — a Mini Program with native WeChat Pay checkout is the strongest vehicle. If your traffic comes from search engines, external ads, or QR codes, H5 is the right starting point: ship the responsive site, add WeChat Pay if a transaction path exists, and evaluate a Mini Program later.