When you are trying to attract more Chinese users to your website, fast loading is one of the key factors affecting the traffic, usability and, ultimately, the conversion rate. Testing your Chinese website loading time is a critical step to take before launching marketing campaign directed at users in China.
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:
