If the website you are responsible for needs to be accessed within China there are some obstacles you need to overcome. If no action is taken then users within China will face intermittent performance issues, ranging from slow speeds to complete timeouts. Many of the tools and features we expect to use will no longer work. Google Analytics will not work, and videos hosted with YouTube or Vimeo will also fail.
Planning
These days websites depend on lots of features delivered by external 3rd parties and we generally take them for granted. But within mainland China you will find that a lot of these will probably fail, creating a disjointed experience for your visitors.
You should audit your site to identify all these external services and check whether they work in China. If they don’t you will need to decide how they will be replaced, or potentially removed.
Google Analytics / Tag manager
Baidu Tongji is the Chinese equivalent of Google Analytics. Not all the features are free, so there will be a cost to access the full suite of functions.
YouTube / Vimeo
There are multiple options when you need to stream videos within China; Youku and Tencent are two options.
Google Maps
Baidu offers a mapping service, and apparently, Bing Maps work in China also.
Google Fonts / CDN Resources
If your site uses fonts directly from Google, then you will need to change this approach. The same goes for other resources you may load via a CDN, i.e., jQuery.
In all these cases you should now serve the resources locally.
Other considerations
The areas above are the obvious ones, and you should be thorough in your audit to make sure that you have identified everything.
The majority (if not all) of the Chinese services previously mentioned do not cater for non-native speakers. You will need a team within China or at the very least fluent to help you manage these tools.
Content
The site content is another factor which needs to be considered, it is the representation of your brand.
- Review external links, there is no point in linking to sites the visitor cannot access.
- Use Chinese social media. Twitter, Facebook etc have no presence in China.
- Review content to make sure it doesn’t contain anything sensitive that may fall foul of the Chinese censors.
- Don’t rely on automated translation, at the very least get a native speaker to review the site content.
Hosting
Hosting your site within China is the best option, but not possible when the site is hosted by Optimizely DXP.
So, what are the options?
- Try and locate the origin servers as close as possible to China. This will help with dynamic content.
- Use a China CDN. Optimizely have a partnership with Cloudflare China, which caches static content within China. (You will need to speak to your Account Manager to get this added)
- Consider caching more content, for example, some pages could be cached as they change infrequently.
If you self-host or use a different CMS then the options above are still valid. You will just need to contact Cloudflare directly.
Hostname
You will need to register your hostname in China and will have a .cn suffix.
ICP (Internet Content Provider)
This is required if you host your site, or the site is served by Chinese data centres and must be shown in the footer of every page on your website.
There are two types (Filing and License), the Filing is used by non-commercial sites, whereas the License is required by sites that have retail activity. People generally refer to both the Filing and the License as just License.
To start the process with either Optimizely or Cloudflare you require a valid ICP (License) and neither company will help you obtain this. I would recommend that you engage a specialist agency to help you with the application process, they can advise on the current rules and help with the application process.
What happens if I already have an ICP filing/license?
Even if the site already has an ICP filing/license you are probably moving the hosting provider.
If this is the case, you will still need to get the License/Filing modified to reflect the changes.
Testing
You should test the site before you go live. It is possible to set up a test site using the ICP number and using the China CDN, this will allow you to:
- Understand the performance, you need to add caching to your dynamic content.
- Tackle any issues with access to the site, from experience we needed to amend the WAF rules as some users had trouble accessing the site.
Useful Links
https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/china-network/
https://manage.whois.com/kb/answer/1609
https://www.goclickchina.com/blog/icp-license-required-to-operate-website-in-china/
https://nhglobalpartners.com/what-is-icp-license-how-to-get-one/#Servers_and_Domains