China Web Guide
What you need to know
about the web in China
Practical, no-fluff articles about running a website behind the Great Firewall.
How to Choose a Web Agency in China
Four kinds of vendor sell China websites, and only one of them can build, file, host and rank one. Here is how to tell them apart before you sign.
The four vendor types on every China shortlist, eight questions that expose the difference on the first call, the red flags worth acting on, and how the market prices this work.
Google Analytics in China without slowing your site
GA4 is blocked behind the Great Firewall. You can still run it for everyone else, as long as the decision to load it happens on the server instead of in the browser.
How to geo-gate Google Analytics at the edge so GA4 keeps working outside China while visitors inside the Great Firewall never send a byte to Google.
Is WordPress blocked in China?
The software runs fine on a Shanghai server. What breaks is the twenty-odd calls a default install makes to the outside world before a visitor sees anything.
WordPress isn't blocked in mainland China. Here's the 2026 list of which dependencies really fail, which are only slow, and which ones guides get wrong.
WordPress Hosting in China
All three major Chinese clouds ship a one-click WordPress image. None of them ships managed WordPress, and that gap is where foreign projects stall.
What Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei actually sell, the ICP filing that gates every mainland server, the Hong Kong shortcut, and the update problem that never makes it into a budget.
Who Owns Your Baidu Account?
Ask whoever runs your China marketing who holds the login for your Baidu search property. If the answer takes more than five seconds, or comes back as a person's name, that is an hour of legal time well spent.
Real-name verification is Baidu's ownership record. If your agency or a former employee holds it, they hold the asset. Baidu publishes no transfer flow.
What Is the Baidu Search Resource Platform?
Most foreign companies arrive in China with a Baidu SEO budget and no Baidu login. The budget goes on content. Nobody creates the login. Six months in, there is a meeting about why none of it ranks.
Baidu's webmaster platform is where China SEO is actually run. What every tool does, and which three tools the guides still recommend are dead.
Getting a Baidu Account as a Foreign Company
Everyone warns you about the Chinese phone number. Almost nobody mentions the identity document, which is the requirement that stops foreign companies at the door.
A Chinese mobile number is the obstacle everyone talks about. The identity document requirement is the one that actually stops foreign brands.
Verify Your Site on Baidu: File or HTML Tag
Two verification methods work. A third is still printed in most English guides, and it has not worked since the first quarter of 2023.
Two verification methods still work on Baidu's platform, and CNAME is not one of them. Exact file names, tag placement, WordPress and Astro notes.
Baidu Site Verification Failed: The Usual Causes
Baidu gives you one line of red text and nothing else. The file it says is missing loads fine in your browser, at your desk, in Frankfurt. Those two facts coexist, and the gap between them is the whole problem.
Baidu verification failed? Every common cause, what each one looks like from the outside, and the fix: redirects, robots.txt, WAFs, DNS, accounts.
Baidu Verification: www, HTTPS and Subdomains
In Google Search Console a domain property covers both protocols and every subdomain under one roof. Baidu has no equivalent. What you verify is what you get.
On Baidu, http and https are separate sites, www and non-www are separate hosts, subdomains inherit a verified root, and folders cannot be added.
Baiduspider Blocked by Cloudflare and WAF Rules
The site is up. The CDN dashboard is healthy, the Shanghai team has been publishing Chinese content for six weeks, and index volume in the Baidu Search Resource Platform has not moved off zero.
Cloudflare, WAF defaults and geo rules block Baiduspider silently. How to spot it, verify a real crawler by reverse DNS, and fix it in order.
Submit a Website to Baidu: Push, Sitemap, Manual
The developer finishes the sitemap, logs into Baidu, goes looking for the box to paste it into, and cannot find it. Nothing is broken. Most of the time the tool is missing because the account has not earned it.
How to submit a website to Baidu when the sitemap tool is missing: the API push endpoint, real quota behavior, and manual submission.
Baidu Fast Inclusion Is Gone. What Replaced It
Somewhere this week a China SEO checklist is landing in a new client's inbox, and step four says to switch on fast inclusion. That tool has not existed since April 2024. The checklist goes around anyway, usually with a price attached.
Baidu retired fast inclusion in April 2024. What Baidu fast crawl replaced it with, who qualifies, and what a new site should do instead.
Reading Baidu's Index Volume and Traffic Data
Two weeks after launch, somebody in marketing finally logs into the Baidu Search Resource Platform. Index volume: zero. Traffic and keywords: empty. Crawl frequency: a flat line. The obvious reading is that the site is broken. Usually it is not.
What Baidu's index volume, traffic and keyword reports actually measure, how far to trust each one, and when a new site should expect data.
Baidu Merchant Center: What BMC Actually Does
Somebody on your team has been told that Baidu Merchant Center is how product data gets into Baidu. Roughly true, and roughly true is where the planning goes wrong. Which account owns the tool, what the data may do once it is loaded, and whether anyone at Baidu still maintains the product are separate questions with answers most teams guess wrong.
Baidu Merchant Center is an ads-account product feed, not an organic tool. What BMC does, where the console lives, and who still maintains it.
How to Build a Baidu Product Feed
The task arrives sounding small. Get the catalog into Baidu Merchant Center. Then you go looking for the plugin and there isn't one. No WooCommerce extension for this exists, free or paid. The export is custom work, written against a 2019 specification that mostly sits behind a login.
How a Baidu product feed is structured, the five ways to load it, and the field rules that quietly break a WooCommerce or headless export.
A Baidu Ads Account Without a Chinese Entity
Merchant Center product feeds, dynamic product ads, paid Aladdin placements. Most of what a foreign brand wants out of Baidu sits behind an advertising account, and the standard way to open one starts with a mainland company you do not have.
Two routes open a Baidu ads account for a foreign company with no mainland entity. What each requires, how long it takes, what it costs you.
Baidu DPA: Where Product Feed Data Actually Goes
Somewhere in the sales conversation, a product feed became free visibility. Load the catalog into Baidu Merchant Center and your products start showing up in Baidu search. That pitch survives because Baidu's own vocabulary invites it and English write-ups have repeated it for years. None of what follows says the feed does nothing. It says where the data is documented to go.
Baidu documents three destinations for product feed data, all paid: search DPA, feed DPA and paid Aladdin. No documented organic path exists.
Baidu Aicaigou: B2B Search in China
Foreign B2B companies read a Baidu results page the way they read a Google one. Ads at the top, labeled as ads, then the real results underneath. On commercial queries in industrial categories that reading is wrong. The block above everything is often a marketplace Baidu owns, and the buyer who clicks into it ends up shopping a supplier list instead of reading your site.
Baidu Aicaigou is a paid B2B marketplace that outranks your own site on commercial queries. What it costs, how to get in, and when it is worth it.
Baidu Structured Data: What Still Works
The markup ships in the first sprint. JSON-LD in the head, Organization and BreadcrumbList and Product, the same block that goes out on every site the team builds. Then somebody asks how you confirm Baidu picked it up, and the room goes quiet. There is no report to open.
Baidu never published a schema.org spec or a validator. What died, how OpenCard actually works, and which markup is still worth shipping anyway.
Host a Website in China: The Full Guide
Where your server physically sits decides whether a Chinese visitor sees your homepage in under a second or gives up on a spinner.
Why offshore hosting fails in China, the ICP and entity rules, Alibaba Cloud vs Tencent Cloud vs offshore, plus a step-by-step launch checklist.
How to Vet a WordPress Agency for China
A web shop cannot file your ICP, host inside the mainland, or build around the Great Firewall. Here is how to hire one who can.
The capabilities that separate a China WordPress specialist from a generic agency, and the questions that expose the difference on the first call.
WooCommerce China: Build a Store That Sells
Standard WooCommerce stores fail Chinese shoppers before they buy. Here is how to fix payments, logistics, checkout speed, and ICP compliance for China's mainland market.
Standard WooCommerce fails Chinese shoppers: blocked scripts, no Alipay or WeChat Pay, slow checkout. Fix payments, logistics, speed and ICP compliance.
Content Marketing Strategy for China: Planting Grass Before You Sell
Effective content marketing in China runs on 种草 - planting seeds of desire long before anyone is ready to buy.
China's content marketing revolves around 种草 (zhongcao): planting desire before purchase. This guide covers platforms, formats, and key shopping events for foreign brands.
China Data Privacy Laws: PIPL, DSL, and the Cybersecurity Law
If your website collects any personal information from Chinese users, three separate laws apply to you. Even if your company is based in New York, London, or Berlin.
China's data privacy framework includes PIPL, DSL and the Cybersecurity Law. PIPL applies globally to any company processing Chinese residents' personal data.
Website Hosting in China: Where You Host Decides Whether You Load
For Chinese users, the difference between a site hosted in Shanghai and one hosted in Frankfurt comes down to whether your page loads at all.
Where you host your China website affects speed, Baidu rankings and compliance. Compare mainland, Hong Kong and overseas hosting plus top cloud providers.
Website Localisation for China: A Full Rebuild
Translating your website into Chinese covers about 10% of what localisation actually means. The other 90% is payments, trust signals, cultural cues, and customer service expectations that most Western companies haven't thought about.
China website localisation covers Simplified Chinese, Alipay and WeChat Pay integration, trust signals, cultural adaptation, content tone and customer service standards.
The Great Firewall: What It Blocks and How to Work Around It
If your website loads Google Fonts, fires a Google Analytics tag, or embeds a YouTube video, it's already broken for 900 million Chinese internet users.
China's Great Firewall blocks Google, Facebook, Slack and dozens more. Learn how it works technically and how foreign businesses can build around it.
Mobile-First Design for China: Actually, Make That Mobile-Only
In China, 'mobile-first' is already outdated. Over 95% of internet users access the web from their phones. If your site isn't built for mobile, it doesn't exist.
China's internet is mobile-only. This guide covers design principles, WeChat browser compatibility, the super-app ecosystem and mini-program strategy for foreign brands.
Baidu Keyword Research Tools and Methodology
You can't rank on Baidu by translating your Google keyword list into Chinese. Here's how keyword research actually works for China's search engine.
Keyword research on Baidu requires different tools and methods than Google. This guide covers Baidu Index, Keyword Planner, 5118, and Chinese search behaviour.
Baidu SEO: Ranking on China's #1 Search Engine
Most foreign companies optimise for Google. In China, that's like advertising on a billboard nobody drives past.
Baidu dominates Chinese search with 724 million monthly users. Learn ranking factors, on-page optimisation, ecosystem strategy and mistakes foreign companies make.
China's Search Engines Beyond Baidu
Four other search engines control a combined 25-30% of China's market between them, and each one is wired into a different corner of the Chinese internet.
Baidu controls 60% of China's search, while Sogou, 360 Search, Shenma and Toutiao Search each serve different audiences worth knowing about.
ICP Licence and ICP Filing: What Foreign Companies Need to Know
If you want to host a website in mainland China, you need an ICP. No exceptions. But there are two types, and confusing them can cost you months.
Every China-hosted website needs an ICP. The Bei'an filing is simple. The Commercial Licence has ownership restrictions that block most foreign companies.
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