WordPress was founded by Matt Mullenweg as an open source project. This version of WordPress can be found on WordPress.org.
He then founded Automattic, a for-profit company running WordPress.com and other free, freemium and paid services.
In short – China, for whatever reason, does not like them.
There are 3 services in particular that you should avoid and move away from if you want your website to load quickly in Mainland China:
WordPress.com
If your website is running on WordPress.com, consider moving to an independent server provider. I personally like and use Kinsta (affiliate link), but you’re free to move to any server as long as it’s not WordPress.com
Jetpack
I’m not a big fan of Jetpack as it is, but if you want to break into the Chinese market, you have to stop using this plugin.
If you are using the CDN, images and other files served through the CDN won’t load in Mainland China.
Even if you are just using the statistics or the backup, the plugin will still insert and load files from servers China blocks.
As a result, unfortunately, the plugin has to go.
How to replace it:
- For backup and security, try Blogvault
- For statistics, any third-party tool will work, even Google Analytics (ironically). If you want to have analytics on your website directly, Independent Analytics is a great way to get that done.
- For the CDN, it’s best to first not use a CDN at all, have all files be loaded from your server directly. Once that works, you can add any CDN other than Jetpack
Removing Jetpack should be a big step towards a quicker website in Mainland China.
Gravatar
Gravatar is a service to provide avatar pictures for yourself and your users. You probably know it from the grey pictures appearing next to comments.
Again, those are loaded from WordPress.com servers which China doesn’t like.
To get rid of this is fairly easy. Simply go to Settings / Discussion, scroll to the very bottom and where it says Avatar Display make sure the checkbox Show Avatars is not ticked.
That should do the trick.
What about WooCommerce, Akismet, etc.?
The other plugins Automattic has that are commonly used are mostly fine as they usually load files from your server or only work in the background – so no need to remove those.