The Challenge: Selling China While Your Site Stalls in Shanghai
TheChinaPath helps international brands enter and grow in China. Tmall Global, Douyin, RED, the whole apparatus. They run it day to day from Shanghai, Hong Kong and Paris.
So when a prospect opened their website during a meeting in Pudong and watched the homepage hang for eight seconds, that was a problem. An agency whose pitch is “we know how China works” can’t have a site that behaves like every other foreign brand’s: hosted abroad, leaning on services the Great Firewall throttles, slow exactly where it needs to be fast.
The site was multilingual already, English, French, German and Spanish. The copy and design were fine. What broke was everything underneath. Hosting sat outside China, fonts and scripts were pulled from overseas, and the result from a mainland connection was a site that loaded like it was apologising.
| Client | TheChinaPath |
| Industry | Marketing and eCommerce agency |
| Markets | Shanghai, Hong Kong, Paris |
| Platform | Multilingual marketing site (EN, FR, DE, ES) |
| Key services | Audit, Rebuild, ICP filing, China hosting, Maintenance |
The Audit: Where the Seconds Went
We tested the live site from real connections inside the mainland. No VPN, no proxy. Then we traced every request that crossed the border.
| Issue | Action |
|---|---|
| Hosting located outside China | Moved to mainland infrastructure |
| Fonts and scripts loaded from overseas | Self-hosted locally |
| Third-party embeds blocked behind the firewall | Replaced with China-compatible alternatives |
| No ICP filing | Filed before going live on the .cn |
| Heavy uncompressed imagery | Reprocessed and lazy-loaded |
Most of it was the usual story. A site built for a Western audience, then expected to also work in China without anyone checking whether it actually did.
The Rebuild: Fast Where It Counts
We kept the brand and the structure, and rebuilt the delivery underneath. Hosting moved onto servers in China. We guided the team through ICP filing, set up the .cn, and pulled every overseas dependency back in-house so nothing on the page waited on a server the firewall might block.
The four languages stayed, with proper hreflang so each market gets its own version cleanly. Images were reprocessed to WebP and loaded only when needed.
The Outcome: A Homepage That Opens Before You Finish the Sentence
TheChinaPath’s site now loads fast from the mainland, fully filed and compliant, with nothing left pointing at servers outside China.
The difference shows up in the room. When their team pulls up the site in front of a Chinese prospect, it opens immediately, and the agency that sells China expertise finally looks the part on its own website.
“We spend our days telling brands their sites have to work in China. Ours didn’t, and we knew it. Now it loads faster in Shanghai than the old one did in Paris.”
Émilie R., Managing Partner, TheChinaPath
The website
Services used in this project
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