Social Media & Sharing in Mainland China

Written By Wolfgang Geiger

WordPress developer in Hong Kong specializing in making websites work in Mainland China. More information on the About Me page

This article describes how to implement social media sharing without loading files and scripts from those social media companies that will slow your website down when loaded from within Mainland China.

If you are interested in Chinese social media itself, you can go to the linked article and find more information there.

How to do sharing right

There are two ways you can implement sharing of articles to social media:

  • Solution number 1 is to embed code from the various social media platforms that then gets executed on your website and e.g. shows the number of likes or shares for that post. Don’t use this.
  • The right way to do it is to use links that contain the post URL in the parameters.

Why not embed any code?

Very simple. Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc. are all banned in Mainland China. If you embed code from their platforms on your website, files get loaded from their server when your website is loaded.

This makes the website super slow to load in Mainland China.

Furthermore, the code you execute slows the website down period, so even users outside of Mainland China will profit from you switching over to links.

What do correct links look like?

Here are some examples what links could look like:

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=URL

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?source=webclient&text=URL

LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=URL

Always make sure to replace URL with the URL of the article you want to share on social media.

Can I use a plugin?

That depends. If the plugin is doing things as described above, it’s fine. If not, then not.

You could try to look for a GDPR compliant sharing plugin, that would be most likely to not load any code from 3rd party sites.

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