Apart from not loading things like reCaptcha, Google Fonts or avatars from Google or WordPress.com servers, the actual speed of the website is another important factor that will determine the success of your website in Mainland China.
This article discusses point by point what you might want to do to improve your website’s loading speed. This should get you 80% there. To get to 100%, you’ll most likely have to talk to a developer like me to customize your setup for your specific needs.
Google Page Speed
The easiest way to get started to see what can be improved on your website is to go to Google’s Page Speed tool.
Put in your website, ideally not just the homepage but also try with articles, your about page and even your privacy policy page.
This will then tell you, what the biggest problems on your website are and you can use it as a benchmark to check whether or not the measures below help speeding up your site.
Why check the privacy policy? That’s mainly because that page usually has no images or media in general on it. Therefore, it’s a great way to see how quick the theme itself is.
Once you know what’s wrong, here’s what you can do about it:
Caching
To get good loading speeds, your server response time is critical. That should be 1-2 seconds max.
To achieve that, you should use a caching plugin. I personally like to go with the paid plugin WP Rocket.
Depending on your hosting provider, they might already have some sort of caching built in or suggest using other caching plugins.
Any of the more popular ones are fine, as long as you use one.
CSS and Javascript files
Google will most likely complain that some CSS or Javascript is loaded that’s either not needed or that’s not optimized.
Your caching plugin should have settings to improve that situation. Play around with that and see how far you can improve your website without breaking design or functionality.
Minimizing is definitely something you should do and that should work regardless.
You can try to merge files together (done automatically by most caching plugins) or get rid of unused CSS (also done by some).
This should speed up the loading time particularly in Mainland China, every file less is saved time.
Serve images in next-gen formats
Images should be loaded as AVIF or WEBP. Those two formats are optimized images with smaller size but same or similar quality when compared to the original JPG or PNG images.
I usually use the Imagify plugin to create those versions of any uploaded image + enforce the usage of those images.
There also other plugins like Shortpixel or even CDNs which do that for you. Just make sure it’s done.
Lazy loading images
Another thing your caching plugin should allow you to do is lazy load images.
This means that images are only loaded when they become visible on the screen.
If you, for example, have an image that is not visible when the website is first loaded, the image won’t be loaded until the user scrolls down.
This makes the initial loading of the website a lot quicker.
The server
Make sure you use a WordPress specialized hostling provider. I personally use Kinsta, but there are plenty out ther that work.
Just don’t use a shared hosting provider, those servers are slow and not super secure.
What else?
There’s more that can be done, but the above should get you 80% there. If you need more help, get in touch with me or contact a developer specializing in technical SEO or website performance.