Anybody experience with speeding up loading time for visitors from China mainland?

[lcourse]

I made some speed tests and noticed that our website loads 10 times slower for visitors from China mainland.
Did anybody have experience with speeding up loading time for visitors from China?

We operate the Chinese version of our website in a subdirectory and we have no interest in registering a company in China in order to get the ICP number.
Currently using cloudflare who should have a node in HK and serving static content via rackspace.

Does disabling google analytics and facebook widgets really make a difference? (ideally would like to avoid this)

[CleverPhD]

This may not be you, but simply due to what has been called "The great firewall of china" that slows things down.  This is an article that looked at a bunch of sites that were non-Chinese companies that hosted outside of the mainland and did a lot of business in China.

https://www.internetretailer.com/2014/08/14/foreign-retail-web-sites-load-slowly-china

Catchpoint says sites hosted outside of China often load slowly, because they are slowed by the so-called Great Firewall of China. For example, sites with the .cn domain—which are almost always hosted within China—typically are more than twice as fast as sites with .com in their domain names, Catchpoint says.

Regardless, I would not disable GA as you need that data to improve and understand your site traffic.  Facebook widgets can slow you down, but you have to determine if they help with your sales or not.  Your best bet is to try and design your site to be as simple as possible.  Cut down on all the Javascript menus etc.  Design your site for a mobile experience, then expand out from there.  Trim down your CSS file as much as possible.  Don't use typekit or other services with custom fonts.  Get lean and mean.

[lcourse]

thanks a lot. Makes sense.

Just in our case a bit difficult to implement since all our language versions are based on same template and it would not be worth the effort to make a complete new design/CSS/javascript for the Chinese web version. Site is already mobile optimized.

Anybody has experience with fast and affordable caching services from HongKong?

[Joe.Robison]

I don't have personal experience optimizing for the Chinese market, but I do have experience with Cloudflare. They recently announced a partnership with Baidu to tackle this problem regarding the Great Firewall.

"The combined network also improves the viewing experience for visitors inside and outside of China. After enabling the China network, visitors to CloudFlare sites from within China are served from Baidu’s network of data centers, while visitors from outside of China continue to be served from the CloudFlare network. The result is a decrease in application latency of greater than 200 milliseconds for China traffic."

Would definitely check out https://www.cloudflare.com/china and talk to their support team about solutions to your load time, that's the best be in my opinion.

[lcourse]

Hi Joe, thanks. I had the same thoughts and already talked to them. It is only offered to enterprise clients of cloudflare and requires an ICP number which in turn requires a company located in China.