The Challenge: 20 Service Lines, a Lot of Pixels, and a Firewall
HubStudio is a content production house with studios in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Changsha and the Philippines. Their site has to carry the whole catalogue: 20 service lines, sample work, motion, the lot. It’s a big, visually dense site by design, because the product is visual.
Two of those studios are on the mainland. So are many of the brands, agencies and manufacturers they produce for. A heavy site hosted abroad loads slowly from China, and for a studio whose own work is the showcase, slow is the wrong first impression.
The catalogue’s size made it worse. More pages, more imagery, more places for an overseas dependency to drag the whole thing down behind the firewall.
| Client | HubStudio |
| Industry | Content production house |
| Studios | Hong Kong, Shanghai, Changsha, Philippines |
| Platform | Large multi-page site, 20 service lines |
| Key services | Audit, Design delivery, China hosting, Integration, Maintenance |
The Audit: Where a Big Site Loses Its Speed
A large site fails behind the firewall in lots of small ways at once. We mapped every one from a mainland connection.
| Issue | Action |
|---|---|
| Hundreds of heavy images across the catalogue | Reprocessed to WebP, sized correctly, lazy-loaded |
| Hosting located outside China | Moved onto the mainland with ICP filing |
| Showreels and embeds blocked or slow | Swapped for China-compatible delivery |
| Render-blocking scripts and fonts from overseas | Self-hosted and deferred |
The Fix: Make the Whole Catalogue Light
We rebuilt the delivery across the entire site, not just the homepage. Every image was reprocessed and loaded on demand, so a visitor only pulls what they actually scroll to. Showreels moved to players that work in China. Fonts and scripts came in-house and stopped blocking the first paint.
Hosting moved onto the mainland, ICP filed, every overseas dependency tracked down and replaced. On a site this large that’s the unglamorous part, and the part that decides whether it opens in two seconds or twelve.
The Outcome: A Showcase That Opens Like One
HubStudio’s full catalogue now loads fast from inside China. All 20 service lines, the sample work, the motion, served quickly to the mainland brands and studios they work with every day.
A production house gets judged on its own production. The site finally moves as well as the work it’s showing.
“Our site is basically our reel, and it used to crawl for anyone opening it from China, which is half our world. Now the whole thing loads fast, every page of it.”
Kevin H., Studio Director, HubStudio
The website
Services used in this project
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