Building a Chinese website for a foreign brand maybe not be as straight forward task as in the case of other markets. Thanks to a unique nature of Chinese internet and various market specifics, brands must modify their approach for establishing China web presence.

Here is the comprehensive list of 15 points to consider for building Chinese websites for brands.

#1 Use native translation for Chinese website

While using native translation should be the obvious rule, a surprising number of foreign companies still cut corners on this one. It should go without saying that companies should always use professional translators to repurpose the original content for a Chinese website version while also making sure that they are proofread by native Mandarin speakers.

#2 Remove links to blocked social media

While re-purposing landing pages for Chinese market, many companies forget to remove standard links to their social media accounts that are inaccessible in China anyway. The links to company Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram links won’t work anyway and but those broken links may also significantly slow down Chinese website loading time. Ideally, a page loading time should not exceed 5 seconds, although that is often hard to achieve with overseas hosting (more on it below).

#3 Optimize your Chinese website loading time

Loading time is almost always an issue for sites hosted outside of China. Unfortunately, without local business registration, hosting in China will not be possible. The next best option would be to get a hosting in Hong Kong. Some Hong Kong based hosting providers would often advertise “fast China route” options without physically having to host on the Mainland’s servers.

Alibaba Cloud is a popular hosting solution that is cheap and easy to sign up for. However, make sure that you select Hong Kong based servers when buying their hosting package.

#4 Embed videos from local platforms

Embedded videos which are hosted on YouTube or Vimeo won’t be displayed in China (see #2). The solution is to setup an account on YouKu, Chinese YouTube equivalent, upload your video there and link to it from your Chinese landing page. However, one should keep in mind that free YouKu accounts will often display pre-roll ads to Mainland visitors. The solution is to opt to paid YouKu accounts or find an alternative video hosting platform that isn’t blocked in China.

#5 Integrate share buttons and links to Chinese social media

If you already have Chinese social media presence on Weibo, YouKu, WeChat or other platforms, make sure to include links to those sites on your Chinese website. As there is no such thing as a “WeChat link”, your Chinese website should display official account’s QR code. This will not only demonstrate to your visitors that you have an established local presence but will also help in getting more followers to your Chinese social media channels.

If your website includes sharable content, make sure to include sharing buttons to Weibo and WeChat that do not require having an account on those platforms.

#6 Localize the contact form

Most website nowadays offer some type of subscription form to collect visitor’s email and other data. What is often missed is localizing such the forms by making sure that all the fields are properly translated to Chinese and don’t have any original English field names which can confuse visitors.

Also, keep in mind that while your English form may have separate fields for first and last names, Chinese equivalent would typically use just one name field for both the surname (one character) and the given name (one or two characters).

#7 Optimize for mobile

Mobile optimization of a website is extremely important for Chinese market as most traffic comes from mobile devices anyway. It’s essential to use responsive design for your Chinese website ensuring that it displays correctly on most types of mobile screens.

You may consider a separate design for a mobile version of the site to pack the most essential info “above the fold” and minimize scrolling and clicking text links.

#8 Live support

Having been spoiled by Taobao, China’s online consumers often expect instant live support for Chinese website. This is especially true for ecommerce or website that offer services.

One of the most critical components for a successful conversion of online consumers is being able to communicate with them in real, or almost real time. Luckily, there are many options available for such live chats that can keep track of the conversations and capture users’ data at the same time. Companies like Alibaba offer their own chat solutions that can incorporates into other sites.

#9 ICP License for Chinese website

If your company is registered in China, it is eligible to apply for ICP (internet content provider) license. It would allow you to get hosting in China that helps improving Chinese website loading time as well signal to your users that are in full compliance with the local law.

The ICP license number should be displayed in the footer like this:

#10 Subdomains or multiple domains

Chinese search engines generally dislike subdomains – something that is very common with multilingual websites. For example, you should avoid setting up en.mysite.com for English and zh. mysite.com for Chinese. Baidu prefers to have different languages on completely separate domains. For example, if www.mysite.com is your main site, www.mysite.cn could be its Chinese language equivalent. This makes it harder to maintain, however, if you want to rank high on Baidu – do not use subdomains.

#11 Using robot.txt file

Another Baidu quirk is disfavoring robot.txt file – Google’s standard way to communicate with search engine crawlers. This is the most common way to tell search engines which pages should not be crawled. For the purpose of your China web presence, those specific instructions should be set in .htaccess file or in server settings. This is another reason to use separate domain for your Chinese site (see #1).

#12 Domain names

Baidu ranks .CN domains higher than the equivalent .COM and.NET. As .CN domain registration is open to foreigners now, there is no excuse not to grab it. Also, once you have established you China web presence and your brand becomes well-known, chances are that .CN domain may become the target of internet squatters. So, if it is still available, register it now.

#13 Blacklisted keywords

If your site uses any of the blacklisted keywords, it will be deindexed by Baidu and probably blocked from access too. Wikipedia keeps updated list of blacklisted keywords that are mostly related to politics but keep in mind that the list may change quickly triggered by specific current events. In any case, staying away from politics in China is probably a good idea anyway.

#14 Using iFrames, JavaScript and Flash

Similar to Google, Baidu can’t crawl iFrames and Flash content. Although Google is getting much better in crawling JavaScript, Baidu is still pretty much blind to it. This means that any of your SEO content should not be in JavaScript which also includes navigation drop down menu. This is why it is a good idea to have a duplicate footer menu that is not JS based. As for iFrames and Flash – they belong to history anyway.

#15 Keep it Baidu-friendly

Due to frequent connectivity problems, Baidu’s crawlers won’t index pages that are too deep in your hierarchy. Keep your website’s architecture flat and accessible.

Anchor text should of course be in Chinese. They should also match the keywords being used on your website. Baidu is quite strict about this and may penalize sites where the anchor text and keywords are not in sync.

Don’t count on Baidu finding your site quickly – it’s better to submit it manually. Since, Baidu doesn’t have an equivalent to Google webmaster tools, the website has to be re-submitted every time there is a major change. Here is the link to Baidu submission tool.

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The main benefit of having a website hosted in China is much faster loading time compared to the same site hosted out of the country. There is no question that faster loading speed can benefit your website from both user experience and SEO standpoints. What’s more, there is practically no chance that your site may get blocked in China for simply being unlucky enough to share a server with a blacklisted site (it does happen).

Unfortunately, due to the fact that internet in China is tightly controlled by the government, hosting a website in China requires obtaining a permit called ICP license that stands for Internet Content Provider or bei’an (备案) in Chinese. This license is issued by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to permit China-based websites to operate in China. The ICP licence numbers for Chinese websites can often be found on the bottom of the front webpage:

The ICP license can only be issued to Chinese registered companies. A few years ago there was a pilot program in Shanghai that allowed foreign companies to apply for ICP but it seems to be discontinued now. This means that if your business is only registered overseas, you won’t be eligible for ICP license and can’t get a local hosting.

Once your company registers a business entity in China, getting ICP license still can be quite a hassle but, fortunately, most local hosting providers will take care of that for you. There is also a grace period for new companies to obtain the ICP license after they have purchased a hosting package. However, once that period expires, a site without a valid ICP license will be taken down by the hosting company.

What if you do not plan registering in business in China? Can you still have a reasonably fast website for the mainland visitors? The answer is yes. There are some intermediate hosting solutions that involve servers in Hong Kong or Macau. China’s largest hosting provider Aliyun offers such solutions to international clients so do some of the native Hong Kong providers.

There are also CDN (content delivery networks) providers that can accelerate your site specifically for Chinese visitors. The most well known one, CloudFlare, has special server options for sites trying to reach Chinese audience.

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One of the most critical components for a successful conversion of online consumers is being able to communicate with them in real, or almost real time. In this post we are going to look at how to incorporate and use live support for Chinese website.

Chinese online consumers have already been spoiled by near instant customer support on major ecommerce sites. For example, large percentage of shoppers on Taobao would often initiate online chat session with a seller before taking a decision to make a purchase.

Regardless of whether it is a product sold from a website or an online service, Chinese visitors would expect to be able to ask questions and get answers within minutes.

Luckily, this can be accomplished in several ways and we are going to look at each of them next.

Live support for Chinese website with QQ

QQ messenger is still the most popular chat program in China. Practically every Chinese is familiar with QQ from the early days of the internet. Incorporating QQ into a website is also quite easy – all it takes is pasting a piece of code to your website to display a functional QQ icon.

By clicking a QQ icon, a visitor can start chatting immediately as long as the program is installed on their computer or a mobile device. Fortunately, this is the case for the vast majority of Chinese anyway.

Phone based support with Chinese toll free number

The good old toll free phone number is the traditional way get customers to call you directly and it would probably work well if you target somewhat less tech savvy visitors. Toll free numbers in China start with 400 and can be applied for with China’s telephone service providers. Typically, they offer several different packages and are fairly inexpensive.

Telephone companies are constantly adding more new features to those numbers such as autoresponders, forward services, voice mails, various types of notifications etc. They also allow to choose a number from an available pool, although the good numbers go quickly. While picking a 400 number it is best to avoid the “unlucky” digits such as “four”. “Eights” and “nines” are the best, so are the repetitive numbers such as 55, 66 etc.

How does live support with WeChat work

There are many good reasons to include WeChat contact on the webpage and having live support for Chinese website is just one of them. Once a visitor to a website starts following your company WeChat account, there are many ways to keep them engaged which is a whole separate topic.

Nowadays, increasing number of companies in China choose to provide customer service exclusively through WeChat because it offers much more than just a live chat. For example, WeChat can send pre-programmed answers in response to a specific inquiry with predefined keywords. It can also grab an information about users such as their present location and tailor the answer based on that criteria. More advanced companies can even integrate WeChat customer service into a sophisticated system that incorporates various types marketing automation.

One drawback of using WeChat as a live support channel is the fact it takes manual scanning of a QR code by a visitor with their cellphone. While this may be convenient for someone visiting from a desktop, browsing site on the mobile device makes that scanning impossible. The workaround is to save the QR code as a picture in the photos and then import it to WeChat. Unfortunately, this is not a straight forward process and many people are simply unaware of how to do that.

Incorporating Live Chat for Chinese Website

Live chat app is, perhaps, the most natural way to offer live support for Chinese website. Live chat can be integrated with practically any website in a form or a 3rd party plugin. There are many services that offer this type of functionality and they mainly differ in features and price plans. Basic features usually include support for mobile apps, automated responses, alerts and escalation scenarios, various levels of security, ability to share files, routing options etc.

Some of the most popular services that offer Chinese support are Zopim, LiveChat, Zoho Sales IQ as well as many others. Some of them, like Zopim, even offer free plans with limited features set and the prices for paid plans are also fairly affordable in the range of $15-30 per month – well worth the investment.

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Here are the top 10 items on your China web presence check list:

#1: Subdomains or multiple domains

Baidu generally dislikes subdomains – something that is very common with multilingual websites. For example, you should avoid setting up en.mysite.com for English and zh. mysite.com for Chinese. Baidu prefers to have different languages on completely separate domains. For example, if www.mysite.com is your main site, www.mysite.cn could be its Chinese language equivalent. This makes it harder to maintain, however, if you want to rank high on Baidu – do not use subdomains.

#2: Using robot.txt file

Another Baidu quirk is disfavoring robot.txt file – Google’s standard way to communicate with search engine crawlers. This is the most common way to tell search engines which pages should not be crawled. For the purpose of your China web presence, those specific instructions should be set in .htaccess file or in server settings. This is another reason to use separate domain for your Chinese site (see #1).

#3: Domain names

Baidu ranks .CN domains higher than the equivalent .COM and.NET. As .CN domain registration is open to foreigners now, there is no excuse not to grab it. Also, once you have established you China web presence and your brand becomes well-known, chances are that .CN domain may become the target of internet squatters. So, if it is still available, register it now.

#4: Loading time optimization

Long loading time will not only ruin user experience of your Chinese visitors but also lower your Baidu ranking. The best solution is to host in China, however that requires ICP license issued by Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and is only available to China registered businesses. Hosting in Hong Kong may improve the loading speed but it still won’t be as fast as hosting in China. Signing up with a reliable CDN provider (content delivery network) service, such as CloudFlare, could be another alternative solution.

#5: Broken links to blocked sites

Links to blocked social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube will appear broken which will slow down the loading as well (see #4). Also, services like Google fonts wouldn’t load causing your fonts look not as intended. Google map wouldn’t work either and YouTube hosted video wouldn’t play. The only solution is to use the local equivalents for blocked services such as Weibo, YouKu and Baidu.

#6: Blacklisted keywords

If your site uses any of the blacklisted keywords, it will be deindexed by Baidu and probably blocked from access too. Wikipedia keeps updated list of blacklisted keywords that are mostly related to politics but keep in mind that the list may change quickly triggered by specific current events. In any case, staying away from politics in China is probably a good idea anyway.

#7:  Keyword research

It is important to do a proper keyword research with the tools available from Baidu rather than Google. Also, the keywords should never be a straight forward translation from English – Google translate or similar tools are absolutely inadequate for this purpose. This is why it is important to enlist help of a professional translator or, at least, run it by a native Chinese speaker.

#8: Using iFrames, JavaScript and Flash

Similar to Google, Baidu can’t crawl iFrames and Flash content. Although Google is getting much better in crawling JavaScript, Baidu is still pretty much blind to it. This means that any of your SEO content should not be in JavaScript which also includes navigation drop down menu. This is why it is a good idea to have a duplicate footer menu that is not JS based. As for iFrames and Flash – they belong to history anyway.

#9: Link building

At the moment, Baidu still values link quantity over quantity, which means that techniques and tricks that used to work with Google 2-3 years ago can still be quite effective for your China web presence purpose. It is quite likely that, eventually, Baidu will follow Google’s approach of putting more emphasis on link quality vs. quantity, after all they used to follow Google’s every step. In any case, for now, back links from anyone and everything would still bring SEO benefits to your site.

#10: Baidu site submission

Don’t count on Baidu finding your site quickly – it’s better to submit it manually. Since, Baidu doesn’t have an equivalent to Google webmaster tools, the website has to be re-submitted every time there is a major change. Here is the link to Baidu submission tool.

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First, let start with the definition of – a landing page (or LP) is where your potential customer “lands” first after clicking your link in the search results, social media or an email. Making sure that landing page design is clear, focused and the content is easy to understand is the key in converting visitors to customers.

Before we look at the specific guidelines that are relevant to building a Chinese landing page, let’s make sure that the general page structure follows best practices applicable to all types of landing pages.

Let’s start off with a quick rundown of those guidelines that are applicable to all types of landing pages:

• Having clear and concise headline up top
• Strategic placement of a large and distinctive CTA (call to action) button
• Using interesting and visually appealing images
• Making sure that the main text clearly explains the offer and is going from general to detailed description as the reader moves down the page

Now, let’s list the specific requirements for Chinese landing pages along with the common mistakes that companies often make in creating them:

Chinese landing page design: do’s and don’ts

#1 Use native translation

While using native translation should be the obvious rule, a surprising number of foreign companies still cut corners on this one. Re-purposing original landing pages for Chinese market by using machine translated text or simply relying on low-quality translations would make such landing pages completely useless and counterproductive.

Always use a professional translator to write proper copy for your Chinese landing pages and make sure that they are proofread by native Mandarin speakers.

#2 Remove links to blocked social media

While re-purposing landing pages for Chinese market, many companies forget to remove standard links to their social media accounts that are inaccessible in China anyway. Not only those Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Instagram links will appear broken and wouldn’t even display an icon, they will significantly slow down Chinese landing page loading time.

Ideally, a page loading time should not exceed 5 seconds, although that is often hard to achieve with overseas hosting (more on it below)

#3 Optimize your Chinese landing page loading time

Loading time is almost always an issue for sites hosted outside of China. As long as your company doesn’t have a local business registration – hosting in China is not permitted. The next best option would be to get a hosting in Hong Kong. Some Hong Kong based hosting providers would often advertise “fast China route” options without physically having to host on the Mainland’s servers.

Alibaba Cloud is a popular hosting solution that is cheap and easy to sign up for. However, make sure that you select Hong Kong based servers when buying their hosting package.

#4 Embed videos from local platforms

It is often a good choice to have embedded videos on a landing page, however, if it is a YouTube one – it won’t work in China (YouTube is one of the blocked sites).

The solution is to setup an account on YouKu, Chinese YouTube equivalent, upload your video there and link to it from your Chinese landing page. There is one caveat here however – the video will be preceded by an advertisement and those are notoriously long and can even run for up to 90 seconds. The only way to play videos without pre-roll ads is to sign up for a paid YouKu account. Although not cheap (currently RMB 5,000 per year), it would make sense to purchase if you are planning to host more videos on the platform in the future.

The last tip about the videos – if they are in English, make sure to either provide a Chinese voiceover or, at the very minimum, Chinese subtitles.

#5 Integrate share buttons and links to Chinese social media

If you already have Chinese social media presence on Weibo, YouKu, WeChat or other platforms, make sure to include links to those sites on your Chinese landing page or, in the case of WeChat, display official account’s QR code. This will not only demonstrate to your visitors that you have an established local presence but will also help in getting more followers to your Chinese social media channels.

In case you didn’t yet setup those social media account in China, at least include sharing buttons to Weibo and WeChat.

#6 Localize the contact form

If your Chinese landing page is designed for collecting users’ data, make sure that the contact form is properly translated to Chinese and don’t leave any English field names to avoid confusion.

Also, keep in mind that while your English form may have separate fields for first and last names, Chinese equivalent would typically use just one name field for both the surname (one character) and the given name (one or two characters).

#7 Optimize for mobile

Mobile optimization of a landing page is extremely important for Chinese market as most traffic will come from mobile devices. It’s essential to use responsive design for your Chinese landing page ensuring that it displays correctly on most type of mobile screens.

Once the landing page is displayed on a small mobile screen, it is critical to make sure that most relevant information such as the headline and CTA (call to action) shows up “above the fold” rather than relying on users to scroll down the page.

#8 Test, test, test

Finally, your Chinese landing page is ready to go live and now you can just sit back and relax. If only that was true… The fact is that you can never be 100% sure that your page works correctly unless you, or someone else on your behalf, would test it from within China.

Although, there are some online tools available to test loading speed and accessibility of sites in China, they cannot be relied on completely as they wouldn’t show common display problems, broken links or other errors. Therefore, it is best to have someone to test your Chinese landing page in China using inspector browser option (F12 hotkey in most browsers) to note and record any errors and loading time.

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Ideally, if your site is hosted in China, the loading time wouldn’t be an issue for a properly designed website. Unfortunately, hosting on Chinese servers requires obtaining ICP license first, which is only available to local companies. In one of the earlier posts, we have already discussed pros and cons or hosting website in China. 

If you are a foreign based company than you should carefully consider whether your current hosting is the adequate solution for reaching Chinese audience.

How can you test your Chinese website loading time and accessibility without being physically present in the country?

There are many free tools to test website performance in different countries. It comes as no surprise that none of them offers accurate results for China. This is primarily due to heavily regulated nature of Chinese internet and its infamous Great Firewall.

The only tool that works reasonably well, and which we use all the time, is the one by 360 Search company called YiYun. It is completely free and, although, the interface is in Chinese, it is quite easy to use. Here is how it works:

Step 1: go to http://ce.cloud.360.cn/:

Step 2: paste or type in your website in the prompt, then click the green button:

Step 3: give it some time to get data from all the nodes on the network. Once ready, you will see something like this:

The map is self-explanatory: the “greener” it is – the faster is your Chinese website loading time. Grey areas mean that no data is available in those provinces and red is obviously “bad”. For example, testing it with google.com predictably shows that the site is inaccessible everywhere except Taiwan, Hong Kong and, surprisingly, Heilongjiang – the most Northeastern province bordering Russian Far East (must have been a temporary glitch in the Great Firewall):

The table on the right of the map shows top three provinces sorted by faster loading speed:

Each province can be looked in for more details. For example, clicking on Guangdong shows more data for that province:

Below the map, there is more data presented in a table format. Each province shows local ISP (there are only handful government owned ISPs in China), IP address, loading time, connection time, download time etc.

For technically inclined, there is some more data for each locale:

Ping option shows the website’s ping response:

Trace button returns more detailed traffic info:

Finally, there is more info with “dig” option:

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Unfortunately, many websites that are hosted abroad still have a dismal loading time. This, undoubtedly, is adversely impacting their business in the Mainland. In addition, there is always a risk of getting banned and losing Chinese traffic completely if a website has been unlucky enough to share a server with a site that has been blacklisted by Chinese authorities for whatever reason.

On the other hand, hosting website in China is not as easy as it would have been in case of most countries.

What are the Challenges of Hosting Website in China?

First of all, every website that is physically hosted in China must obtain ICP (Internet Content Provider) license from Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

ICP licenses are issued on provincial level and, currently, only Chinese registered businesses are eligible to obtain them. In the past, there was a pilot program in Shanghai that allowed issuing ICP license to some foreign enterprises but, so far, we haven’t heard of anyone getting one.

This policy is unlikely to change in near future as Chinese government seems to be tightening its control over internet rather than loosening it.

On the other hand, registering WOFE (Wholly Foreign Owned Enterprise) type of company in China is becoming much easier and significantly cheaper than it was in the past. Some jurisdictions, such as Shenzhen or Shanghai, have streamlined their process in recent years, significantly simplifying business registration in China.

As an alternative to web hosting in China, doing it in Hong Kong could be considered as a half way solution. The loading speed will most likely improve, although it will still fall short of what it would have been in case of physically hosting website in China.

If you would like to test your website’s performance in China, you could use the tools that we discussed in our post on how to test website loading speed.

The next challenge is related to communication with the hosting company and the tech support. Unfortunately, very few Mainland based web hosting providers offer English control panel or any support in English. Those that do, charge premium for that. So, picking a good Chinese web hosting provider with all the required qualifications could be tricky. Many web hosting companies just don’t see selling hosting plan to individual sites as a particularly profitable business and prefer to focus on large enterprise solutions instead. As a result, there is a major lack of options to host a regular site with the provider that also offers English tech support.

Finally, hosting website in China may still not work as smooth as one would expect. The main reason behind it is the problematic infrastructure of Chinese internet in general that often creates major traffic bottlenecks. The root of the problem is the fact that China’s core internet access is largely controlled by just two ISPs: China Telecom and China Unicom.

Here is the technical explanation from the recent blog by Cloudflare, one of the largest CDN (content delivery network) providers:

“…China Telecom operates many distinct networks across several provinces, many of which operate independently of one another. The interconnection points between these networks, and the ISPs themselves, are also candidates for congestion, with too much traffic paired with too little capacity. The connectivity between different ISPs in different provinces can become so fraught that it is sometimes more efficient to route traffic outside the country, across a third party network, and then back in.”

In fact, in the same article, Cloudflare has announced its partnership with Baidu that will allow them to setup 17 data centers in Mainland China. This can, potentially, become another alternative for physical web hosting in China. Cloudflare even claims to be able to automatically process ICP license applications on behalf of their clients.

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Loading speed is one of the most important metrics of a website performance and is directly linked to bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave rather than continuing on to view other pages within the same site) and search engine ranking. Typically, if takes more than 5 seconds to load a page, a visitor would be most likely to move on. Loading time within 2 seconds is considered to be the optimal.

Not surprisingly, website loading speed in China is also a major factor in website ranking with search engines like Google or, in China’s case Baidu.

Unfortunately, even if your website is loading fast in your main market such as US or Europe, it is almost certain that it will be slower in China. There are two main reasons for it: website that are physically hosted outside of China have to pass the “Great Chinese Firewall” – a set of censorship methods setup by Chinese authorities and designed to restrict internet access to websites hosted on foreign servers. The process slows down data transfers and, ultimately, affects the loading speed of foreign based websites.

How to Test Website Loading Speed in China

I’ve personally tried several of the tools that are often recommended but found the results highly unstable or plain unreliable. First the tools that are, in my opinion, don’t do a very good job. Then, at the end, there is the one that I recommend.

WebPageTest.org

This is quite popular but clearly outdated tool which is obvious from the old-fashioned design. One plus, however, is that it allows selection of different browsers to test: Chrome, Firefox, IE etc. Unfortunately, for China there is just one choice – Shanghai. This can be completely inadequate as the loading speeds across China vary quite a bit.

Last time I tried, it got stuck on me and this was all I got:

Conclusion: not recommended

Gomez Networks

This is a very basic tool, although with slightly more choices for the cities: Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Xian. Not a particularly exciting interface and doesn’t test HTTPS (only HTTP):

Conclusion: still too limited

Dotcom-Monitor.com

This tool has a much better designed interface and it allows selecting multiple locations and test them simultaneously. However, the results I got while testing Baidu.com loading in China didn’t make any sense – 4.5 sec to load the number one China’s website in Shanghai? I don’t think so.

Conclusion: unreliable

Site 24×7

This modern looking tool allows testing with several cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou and Qingdao. Unfortunately, it doesn’t allow to run simultaneous tests but one by one. However, when testing website loading speed in China, the results were much more believable: Baidu’s loading time in Shanghai was 0.6 sec. Also, the tools shows some useful breakdown of loading time for different site elements:

Conclusion: acceptable but not the best

CE Cloud 360 by Qihoo

This is the tool that is local to China. It is free to use and run by Qihoo-Haosou, one of the most popular Chinese search engines. The only drawback of this one is that it is entirely in Chinese, otherwise it’s perfect.

CE Cloud not only tests the site from every province and major Chinese city but gives a color coded map of China. Hovering over a map shows a more detailed info for each location and there is a report shown at the table below with even more data.

This is by far the best tool out there for testing website loading speed in China.  Its straight forward interface ensures that even someone with zero Chinese skills can use it just fine.

Conclusion: the best

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When it comes to Chinese market, it is often a good idea to have your site translated to both Simplified Chinese for Mainland China audience and to Traditional Chinese used in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Even though, both Taiwanese and Hongkongese would have little problem reading content in Simplified Chinese, having those two choices would be seen as showing respect to millions of Traditional Chinese readers. Large number of corporate executives and managers of companies in China are from Taiwan and Hong Kong and it would certainly be a good idea to offer them proper translation as well.

Website translation to Chinese doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg

If you are on a bootstrap budget, the first thing to try would be finding a freelance translator through sites like Elance.com or Odesk.com (recently merged to Upwork.com). It’s by far the cheapest option but could also be a hit and miss.

Many freelance translators, who are native Chinese speakers, don’t have a good grasp of Traditional Chinese and would simply use machine translation program, like Google Translate, that simply substitutes Simplified to Traditional characters. As a result, Traditional Chinese translation would look awkward and, sometimes, completely unreadable. If you use any of the freelance translators, make sure to test them first by asking them to translate a paragraph to both languages and have it verified with a native Taiwanese or Hongkongese.

A word of caution: for website translation to Chinese, never hire translators who are not native speakers, this would be a complete waste of your money. You should also make sure to verify the work before you release the payment.

If your company has a decent budget for a website translation to Chinese, then, by all means, consider a professional translation firm or a local marketing localization agency. They would typically pay attention to details that are beyond a straight translation, such as proper formatting of time, date and currency.

You still have to exercise caution while hiring a professional translation company – unfortunately, many of them are simply one-two man operation, regardless of what they say about themselves on their website. Large number of them would use machine translation software with some corrections afterwards. Be prepared to shop around for a while as, in my experience, 80% of such firms provide very low quality work.

Just like with the freelancers, you should test the quality first by asking them to translate one paragraph and, if you suspect that machine translation has been used for any of the languages (most likely Traditional Chinese), don’t hire them.

If you are prepared to spend anywhere around $1,000 or more, make sure to have a written contract with such company. The contract should stipulate that the company must correct the translation within 2-4 weeks after submitting it to you if you find any issues. There must be a legal recourse clause in the contract in case of substandard quality of the translation but it’s always time limited, so make sure to check their work carefully as soon as you receive it.

Now to the technical side. Most websites use CMS (content management system) that make inserting new language a much easier process than editing HTML or XML files. You have to make sure that your system supports Chinese which shouldn’t be a problem with all modern CMS.
A website can also be configured to load a specific language based on IP address location. However, there should be an option to change an automatically selected language because not everyone who may visit your site should be assumed to be able to read Chinese. Besides, IP address based geolocation would not work if a site visitor uses VPN – a very common way to bypass China’s infamous Great Firewall in order to get access to blocked sites.

The post Localizing web presence for China: Website Translation to Chinese first appeared on Sampi.co.

The post Localizing web presence for China: Website Translation to Chinese appeared first on Sampi.co.