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:

The post How To Test Chinese Website Loading Time And Accessibility first appeared on Sampi.co.

The post How To Test Chinese Website Loading Time And Accessibility appeared first on Sampi.co.

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

The post How to Test Website Loading Speed in China first appeared on Sampi.co.

The post How to Test Website Loading Speed in China appeared first on Sampi.co.