Our WordPress sites load in under 2 seconds inside mainland China. Design, build, hosting, ICP licensing and Baidu SEO, all handled by one Shanghai-based team.
Simulation · modelled on the audits we run every day
Take a WordPress site built for Europe or North America and open it in Shanghai. It loads in 20 to 40 seconds, if it loads at all. The theme calls Google Fonts. The contact form waits on reCAPTCHA. The footer map calls Google Maps. The Great Firewall blocks all 3, and each one hangs the page while the browser waits for a timeout.
Distance makes it worse. Every request travels from the visitor in China to a server in Frankfurt or Virginia through congested international gateways. And without an ICP filing you can't host in mainland China or use a mainland CDN, so there's no way to shorten that trip.
A China-specialist WordPress agency deals with all of this before launch. Flip the switcher to see what your buyers see, then run the real test on your own site.
Interactive · switch between the two connections
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 & developmentMainland or Hong Kong hosting on Alibaba Cloud or Tencent Cloud, fronted by a China CDN. We target sub-2-second loads in tier-1 cities and monitor from nodes inside China.
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 serviceYour WordPress site already exists but crawls or breaks in China. We move it onto China-ready infrastructure and strip the blocked resources, keeping your content and rankings.
Deliverable: The same site, loading in seconds from Shanghai.
China migrationCore and plugin updates tested against the firewall before they go live, security patching, uptime monitoring from Chinese nodes, and a human who replies within 24 hours.
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.
The Great Firewall doesn't block WordPress. It blocks the services a typical theme quietly depends on. Flip the switch to see what our rebuild changes.
Text invisible for 20+ seconds while the browser waits for a timeout.
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.
Every website hosted in mainland China needs an ICP filing with MIIT, the Chinese telecoms ministry. There are 2 kinds. The ICP Bei'an (备案) is a registration that covers brochure and marketing sites. The commercial ICP licence is a full permit, required when you sell directly to Chinese consumers from the site.
Both require a Chinese legal entity. Answer one question and we'll point you at the right setup.
Alibaba Cloud or Tencent Cloud, inside the firewall. Full access to mainland CDNs and the strongest signal you can send Baidu.
Just outside the firewall, so no licence to file. With a tuned site and the right routing, load times in southern and eastern China stay comfortably under 3 seconds.
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. Licensing and SEO run in parallel with the build; no workstream waits on another.
We audit your current site from a Shanghai connection, map your goals for the China market, and agree 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 load the site from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou nodes and fix anything slower than 2 seconds before you ever see a staging link.
ICP filing prepared and submitted, hosting and CDN configured. Runs alongside the build, so it costs no extra calendar time.
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.
The right choice when your team already knows the editor, you publish often, or you run multilingual content. Hosted in China with local assets, it loads in under 2 seconds and Baidu indexes it well.
Our take Our default for content-led brand sites.
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.
When raw speed wins and content changes rarely, a static or headless build beats WordPress on performance. We build these too, and we’ll recommend one when it fits.
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.
Every build is checked from Chinese connections in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. A green light in Frankfurt means nothing to a visitor in Chengdu.
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.
Yes, when it’s hosted in or near China and stripped of blocked resources. WordPress core itself is fine; the problems come from themes and plugins that call Google Fonts, reCAPTCHA, Gravatar and other blocked services. We’ve shipped 50+ WordPress sites that load in under 2 seconds from mainland connections.
Only if you host in mainland China. The basic ICP Bei’an filing covers brochure and marketing sites and requires a Chinese legal entity. Selling directly to Chinese consumers from the site usually means the commercial ICP licence, which has stricter requirements. If you have no Chinese entity, Hong Kong hosting skips the ICP entirely and still performs well.
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. Migrating and localising an existing global site takes 14 to 20 weeks including content rewrite and Baidu indexing. The ICP filing takes 2 to 4 weeks and runs in parallel with the build.
Yes, with local adjustments. Checkout needs WeChat Pay and Alipay rather than Stripe or PayPal, and selling domestically requires the commercial ICP licence plus a Chinese entity. Many foreign brands start with cross-border e-commerce instead, which has lighter requirements. We’ve built both.
No. Your China site runs alongside your global site, usually on a subdomain or a .cn domain, with hreflang tags telling Google and Baidu which version serves which audience. Your existing rankings stay where they are.
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.
