We plan and build WordPress sites for mainland China, including hosting, filing support and Baidu (百度) SEO. The Shanghai team agrees the scope around your content and publishing needs.
Illustrative simulation. Timings are examples, not measured client results.
Review the requests your WordPress theme and plugins make before a China launch. Google Fonts can behave differently on a mainland datacentre connection and a home line. Serving fonts locally removes that dependency.
21YunBox recorded 72 of 72 completed requests to fonts.googleapis.com from Alibaba Cloud (阿里云) cn-zhangjiakou on 28 August 2026, and 0 answers from 54 requests on Beijing China Mobile (中国移动) residential broadband on 30 August 2026. Source: 21YunBox, A Chinese Cloud Probe Is Not a Chinese Visitor: The Same Hosts, Opposite Answers, 28 to 30 August 2026.
Hosting and external requests need separate checks. A mainland site needs its ICP filing (ICP备案) before it opens; the provider’s application process belongs in the launch plan.
Use the illustration to understand request failures. A review of your own site starts with its actual dependencies.
Illustrative comparison. The displayed timings are not measurements.
6 things we do every week for foreign brands running WordPress in China. Each comes with a named deliverable, and the same in-house team in Shanghai ships all 6.
Custom themes designed for Chinese users and built without a single call to a blocked domain. Responsive, bilingual-ready, tested at 375px on the phones people actually use here.
Deliverable: A production WordPress site verified from mainland connections.
Design & developmentChoose mainland or Hong Kong hosting after reviewing the entity, filing requirements and external requests. Alibaba Cloud (阿里云) and Tencent Cloud (腾讯云) provide options for these deployments.
Deliverable: A hosting setup with in-China response times you can check yourself.
China hostingWe prepare your ICP Bei’an filing, submit it through your host to MIIT, and tell you plainly if your business model needs the commercial licence instead.
Deliverable: An ICP number in your footer, registered to your entity.
How ICP filing worksTechnical and on-page work for Baidu, Sogou and 360. Baidu Webmaster Tools setup, Simplified Chinese keyword research, and content written by native speakers.
Deliverable: A Baidu-indexed site with a keyword plan and monthly ranking reports.
Baidu SEO serviceWe review the existing site, move the agreed content and replace unsuitable external requests. Redirects and search changes need their own checks during migration.
Deliverable: A migration with documented redirects and dependency changes.
China migrationCore and plugin updates, security patches and maintenance reports, with external dependencies reviewed against dated third-party evidence.
Deliverable: A monthly report and a site that stays fast.
Maintenance plansOne team, one contract, one point of contact. Tell us where your China project stands; we scope the rest.
These examples show faults to investigate in a theme or plugin. Behaviour depends on the host and the network. Use dated evidence for each service before choosing a replacement.
Availability differs by network. The dated comparison above explains why we self-host fonts.
Every font self-hosted as WOFF2 on your own server.
Contact forms that never submit. Enquiries silently lost.
Honeypot fields and China-friendly anti-spam instead of Google’s widget.
A grey box where your office location should be.
AutoNavi (Gaode) or Baidu Maps embeds.
Dead video players across your product pages.
Self-hosted video or a Tencent Video / Youku embed.
Comment sections and author boxes that stall the whole page.
Remote avatars disabled, local images served instead.
jQuery from ajax.googleapis.com hangs everything that depends on it.
Every script bundled and served from your own hosting.
No visitor data, plus one more blocked request on every page.
Baidu Tongji or a self-hosted tool such as Matomo.
Plugins are the sneaky part. A page builder or slider plugin can bundle its own calls to blocked CDNs, so we audit every plugin from a Chinese connection before it ships. For the full list, read our guide: what the Great Firewall blocks.
A mainland-hosted website needs an ICP filing (ICP备案). A commercial ICP licence (ICP许可证) is a separate permission whose applicability depends on the activity. Assess the service and entity before selecting the hosting setup.
The entity and planned activity determine which setup is available. Start with the entity question below.
Alibaba Cloud (阿里云) and Tencent Cloud (腾讯云) have mainland hosting options. Confirm filing eligibility and the requirements of any mainland CDN before ordering.
Alibaba Cloud (阿里云) says its Hong Kong servers do not require mainland ICP filing. The site’s external requests and network path still need review.
Source: Alibaba Cloud (阿里云), ICP filing overview, 26 August 2026. Mainland hosting requires filing; its Hong Kong and overseas servers do not.
We handle the filing end to end: paperwork prepared in Mandarin, submission through your host, and follow-up with MIIT until the number comes through. More detail in our guides on ICP filing for foreign companies and hosting a website in China.
A new brand site takes 8 to 12 weeks start to finish. The ICP filing and the SEO groundwork run in parallel with the build, and the filing number sets the launch date.
We review your current site and its external requests, then agree the China scope and budget.
Wireframes and visual design shaped for Chinese users: denser layouts, mobile-first, checked inside WeChat.
Theme and plugin development with zero blocked resources. Every dependency self-hosted from the first commit.
We review dated third-party reachability evidence and check the implementation against the agreed acceptance criteria.
Filing preparation and hosting setup can run alongside development. Approval remains a condition of opening a mainland site.
Baidu Webmaster Tools, sitemap submission, Chinese keyword mapping and on-page work. Before launch, never bolted on after.
DNS switch, CDN warm-up, and a launch-day check from mainland connections.
Updates, monitoring and monthly reporting under a maintenance plan. Most clients stay with us for years.
"Should we even use WordPress in China?" is a fair question. Here's how we answer it, honestly, from a team that builds on more than one stack.
WordPress suits teams that already use its editor or publish frequently. Review themes, plugins and external requests when preparing the China site.
Our take Choose it when its publishing workflow fits the team.
A WeChat official account matters in China and we build for it. On its own though, you rent your audience from Tencent, and a local CMS locks your content into a platform your HQ team can’t use.
Our take Good alongside a website. Risky as a replacement for one.
Astro can prepare pages at build time; a headless CMS can supply content to several front ends. Choose against the editing workflow and the requests the finished site makes.
Our take The brief decides the stack. If WordPress is wrong for your project, we say so on the first call.
Most of our clients are foreign companies with revenue at stake in China: exporters, universities recruiting Chinese students, hotels courting Chinese travellers, and SaaS firms whose product pages need to load in Shenzhen. Your buyers are in China and your site isn't: that's exactly the gap we close.
Migrated Bassetti's WordPress + Elementor site to China in 6 weeks. ICP filing, .cn domain, China hosting, blocked dependency swaps, and ongoing maintenance.
Swiss luxury watch brand IMHOF needed their WordPress WooCommerce store to work in China. We migrated, fixed, and launched their site for Chinese buyers.
Pharmaceutical packaging supplier ZeinLey needed a bilingual WordPress website for China and international markets. We built it from zero content to dual-hosted launch.
We work 2 ways. The quote follows a 30-minute scoping call: the call is free, the price is fixed, and within a week you'll know whether the numbers work for you.
A defined build or migration: fixed scope, fixed price, agreed timeline. One invoice, no surprises.
Everything that keeps the site fast and climbing, billed as one flat monthly fee.
What moves the price:
ChinaWebFoundry is led by Cyril Drouin, in China since 2005. The delivery team lives in Shanghai and works full-time on China web projects. Everything this page claims is something we do weekly; you can check each point on a first call.
We use dated third-party evidence for mainland host reachability. A datacentre result and a home-line result stay separate, with their networks and test dates.
Our team files ICP paperwork directly with hosts and MIIT, in Mandarin, and has done so for years. You sign documents; we do the rest.
Chinese keyword research, Baidu Webmaster Tools and Chinese content written by native speakers. The same team that builds your site ranks it.
One account lead who answers in English or French within 24 hours, backed by a Shanghai delivery team. We never subcontract.
WordPress can run on mainland hosting. Its themes and plugins need a separate review of external requests. Google Fonts availability differs by network, as the dated comparison on this page shows. Serving fonts locally removes that external request.
Mainland hosting requires an ICP filing (ICP备案). A commercial ICP licence (ICP许可证) is separate and depends on the activity. Review the planned service before choosing a licence category. Alibaba Cloud (阿里云) says its Hong Kong and overseas servers do not require mainland ICP filing.
Usually, yes. Most slow sites suffer from blocked third-party resources and distant hosting, and both are fixable without touching your design or content. We migrate the site to China-ready hosting, localise fonts and scripts, and swap the plugins that break. Run our free China site scanner to see exactly what’s blocking yours.
A new brand site takes 8 to 12 weeks from kickoff to launch, once a mainland entity exists. Migrating and localising an existing global site takes 14 to 20 weeks including content rewrite and Baidu indexing. We plan 3 to 6 weeks for the ICP filing and start it in week one, in parallel with the build.
WooCommerce needs payment and fulfilment arrangements suited to the business. Check merchant eligibility with the payment provider and review the activity-specific permissions. A checkout alone does not establish which telecoms licence applies.
A China site can run alongside the global site. Keep redirects, canonical URLs and language annotations consistent, and monitor search results after changes. No migration can guarantee that existing rankings will stay unchanged.
Yes. We work with WPML and Polylang for multilingual WordPress, and our native Chinese writers produce the Simplified Chinese content. Machine-translated Chinese reads as poorly to Chinese buyers as machine-translated English reads to you, so we don’t use it.
It depends on page count, whether you need an ICP filing, the hosting tier, localisation volume and any e-commerce. We quote a fixed price after a scoping call, and the call and quote are free. Ongoing maintenance and hosting run on a flat monthly retainer.
Send us a brief or book a 30-minute call. A human writes back within 24 hours, in your timezone.
