This tutorial is a quick guide linking to the most important articles and topics you should consider when optimizing your website for Mainland China.
If you want a more bespoke tutorial for your website, make sure to check out the China website audit service I provide.
With that out of the way, here’s how to optimize your website:
Server check
Make sure your website is not hosted on WordPress.com or providers that are blocked in Mainland China. If your website isn’t loading at all in China, this is the first thing to do.
To pick a good server for China, make sure you get location right and pick a well performing hosting provider.
Files loaded from 3rd party servers
The second thing to do is to make sure you don’t load any files from 3rd party servers. All files should be loaded from your own server. Here are the steps to take/try:
- Turn off your CDN
- Load Google Fonts and GStatic elements from your server
- Make sure Google reCaptcha isn’t used
- Don’t embed Youtube videos directly
- Don’t embed Google maps directly
- Handle social media and sharing properly
- Be careful with Facebook Pixel
In case you still have certain files loaded from other servers, you an dequeue them manually in WordPress.
Website speed
After the steps above, your website should load in Mainland China – but might still be slow. Make sure to improve your website’s speed, something important everywhere, but even more so in Mainland China where loading speeds a lower.
Login & Payments
Finally, if you do have an e-commerce business, make sure login and registration are working in Mainland China and think about adding Chinese payment methods to your shop.
More?
The above should be all you need to do in 80-90% of cases. In fact, removing 3rd party server files should do the trick in most of the cases.
If you want more customized advice or if you are stuck, consider reaching out to me and purchasing a website audit. Then I can look into your specific situation in more detail.