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China digital

Is your site actually reachable from mainland China?

Before any strategy, a practical test. Most sites fail it for reasons that take an afternoon to fix.

France → China

A page that works perfectly in Paris can be unusable in Shenzhen, and the site owner generally has no idea — nothing in their analytics shows a visitor who never managed to load the page.

The four usual causes

  1. Fonts loaded from a blocked service. The page renders without text, or waits for a request that never resolves.
  2. Analytics or tag managers that block rendering while they time out.
  3. Embedded video and maps that leave a blank rectangle where your explanation was.
  4. Hosting with no Asian presence, so every request crosses the world twice before anything appears.

What to do about it

Self-host your fonts, drop the third-party scripts that are not earning their place, replace embeds with local assets, and make sure the page still communicates if a request fails. That combination usually takes a site from unusable to acceptable without touching the design at all.

Speed is a separate question from reachability. Hosting inside China requires an ICP filing and a Chinese legal entity — worth it only once China is a real acquisition channel for you.

Keep reading on this.

China digitalLocalise, don't translate: what that actually meansA translated page answers questions a Chinese buyer is not asking, in an order that does not match how they decide.France–ChinaConsultant, agent or representative: who does whatThe three words are used interchangeably and mean quite different things — including who carries the risk when something does not work.China digitalSearch in China: what changes when Google is not the answerBaidu is the obvious difference, and the least important one. The bigger change is that a large share of discovery never touches the open web at all.

If this raised a question about your own project, tell us where you are — the first conversation usually clarifies more than a proposal.

Audit your China presence →Read the full guide