How do you put your website in China?

Most guides on this subject answer a narrower question: how to get an ICP license. For a foreign company, that’s often the wrong place to start.

Your site has to do three things in China: open, finish loading, and get found. This hub covers the first two, as part of how to be visible in China.

Do you need a server in China to have a website there?

No. A site hosted abroad can be visited from China, and China Briefing says servers outside the mainland don’t technically need an ICP.¹¹⁵

The catch is performance. China Briefing warns such sites will load slowly and may be intermittently blocked.¹

So the choice isn’t between being in China and being out. It’s about which route gives you acceptable results for what you’re willing to commit.

Your options for putting a website in China

There are five routes, and two questions separate them: do you need an ICP, and do you need a Chinese entity? China Briefing says an ICP requires one.¹

Route	ICP?	Chinese entity?	Main limit	Fits when
Keep your current host	No 1	No	5 to 17 hours of daily slowdown at most mainland receivers, in 2019 tests 3	Your tests already pass
Host in Hong Kong	No MIIT filing 2	No	Can still be slow or blocked 1	China matters and speed needs work
CDN outside the mainland	No, on Alibaba’s non-mainland zone 9	Check the provider’s terms	Mainland users reach Japan, Singapore or Hong Kong nodes 9	You want nearer nodes without moving
Mainland CDN	Yes 59	Yes, or a licensed partner 1	Cloudflare’s runs with JD Cloud, on Enterprise plans, after content review 78	You hold an ICP and keep a foreign origin
Mainland hosting	Yes 1	Yes, or a licensed partner 1	Filing, local vendor and ongoing upkeep	Chinese revenue justifies it

Our guide to website hosting in China goes through each provider type, and do CDNs and Cloudflare work in China? covers delivery.

What mainland hosting really takes

It takes a local legal presence before it takes a server. The steps below are why this route suits companies with proven Chinese business, not first tests.

• An entity. China Briefing says filings and licenses require a Chinese business entity, so foreign companies need a subsidiary or a licensed partner.¹
• A license if the site earns money. China Briefing says any monetization needs a commercial license on top of the filing, and foreign ownership limits still apply to parts of it.¹ Sources differ on which structures qualify.
• A mainland account. AWS China asks companies for a valid Chinese business license, and uses credentials separate from global AWS.⁴
• A filing before traffic. Alibaba Cloud blocks a domain that points to its mainland servers without a filing.⁶
• A number on your site. Cloudflare says public mainland sites must display their ICP number on the home page, and Article 12 of the Measures asks the same of providers.⁵¹⁸
• A public security registration. Dezan Shira’s 2019 guide puts it within 30 days of going online,²⁵ while China Briefing counts from the ICP number.¹ See what a PSB filing is.

Skip the filing and the risk is concrete. Cloudflare says China-based hosts are told to shut down sites without a number, often without notice.⁵

Start with do you need an ICP license? and ICP filing vs ICP license. If you have no local company, read can you do this without a Chinese company?.

Where the published advice disagrees

Much of what you’ll read comes from companies selling one of these routes, and it shows. Here are the three disagreements that matter most.

Question	One view	Another view	What the evidence supports
Does Hong Kong solve it?	Alibaba Cloud sells it as a “passageway to China” 14	Chinafy said it “isn’t a solution” in 2020, then “a reasonable step” in 2026 1312	It helps distance, not third-party scripts
Is a site blocked for having no ICP?	EU SME Centre says it may be blocked by ISPs 16	Chinafy says it’s “not blocked simply” for that reason 15	We found no data either way for sites hosted abroad
Does Baidu favor mainland hosting?	SEO Sherpa says it tends to 27	The same guide says foreign sites can rank if accessible and fast 27	We found no Baidu statement that settles it

Cloudflare describes shutdowns and Alibaba Cloud describes blocked access, both for sites on mainland hosts.⁵⁶ Don’t assume they carry over to a site hosted abroad, and don’t assume the reverse either.

One figure to ignore is Chinafy’s claim that “99.9%” of companies don’t need an ICP.¹³ It may point the right way, but it comes with no data.

For the ranking question, see can you rank on Baidu without an ICP?.

What moving your server won’t fix

Relocating changes your distance and your network path. It doesn’t change what your pages load from elsewhere. Chinafy says even onshore hosting “solves for one piece of the puzzle.”¹²

The best public data on that path is old but clear. A 2020 study of traffic entering China found a slowdown on 79% of measured pairs, and Hong Kong was the only geographic exception.³

3

Sender Hong Kong

4 to 8

India, Japan and Korea

5 to 17

Most mainland receivers, all senders

Zhu et al., published March 2020, 2019 tests

So on 2020 numbers, Hong Kong shrinks the slowdown without ending it. The study covers traffic from abroad, so it doesn’t measure mainland hosting.

In a one-day side test, only 34.45% of bottleneck hops matched firewall hops, and only nodes that inject resets were measured. About 71% of bottleneck hops sat deep inside China.³ The authors call the low match a clue, not proof, that the firewall isn’t the cause.

Then come third-party resources. Chinafy says a browser can wait 30 seconds or more on one blocked resource that holds up rendering.¹² That’s a vendor’s figure with no published method.

Chinafy also tested 100 Shopify stores on a 30-second limit. In Beijing, 17% succeeded, against 50% to 54% from Singapore, Virginia and London.¹⁷

Chinafy sells a fix, and about half failed even outside China, so read this as a gap and not a verdict.

Check these on your own pages, in this order:

• Which Google services fail in China, for a full picture
• Why your forms fail in China, since that’s where you lose inquiries
• Google Maps on your site in China
• Fonts, YouTube and embeds in China
• WordPress, Shopify and Webflow in China, for what your platform adds

Free check

Is your website visible on Baidu?

Enter your website. We check Baidu, access from China and how your site is set up, then email you the report.

Your websiteCheck my site

Can your site still get blocked?

Yes, and sources describe three different causes. The fix depends on which one you face, so don’t assume.

1. Your content. China’s rules for information providers list 9 prohibited categories, including national security and gambling.¹⁸ They don’t explain how a given site gets blocked, and whether they reach a site hosted abroad is a question for a local adviser.
2. Your neighbors. In a 2019 study of the Alexa top 1 million, 84.5% of sites censored in China were under IP blocking, and the authors argue many were collateral damage from shared addresses.¹⁹ The current extent is unknown.
3. A local filter. Researchers found a separate block on China Unicom in Henan, covering 4,196,532 domains in total up to March 2025.²⁰ They limit that finding to this one ISP. By our reading, a site could fail there and work elsewhere.

For scale, the 2024 GFWeb study tested about 1.02 billion domains over 20 months. That covers 694 million pay-level domains. It found about 943,000 of those blocked by HTTP filters and 55,000 by HTTPS filters.²¹

We found no source describing a formal notice or appeal route for a blocked site.

Read is your site blocked or just slow? first, because the two need different fixes. Then see why websites get blocked.

How to test your site from China

Test from mainland networks, on your real pages, at more than one time of day. No public benchmark can tell you how your own site behaves there.

1. Leave your VPN off. GreatFire warns that VPNs, corporate lines and routes through Hong Kong or Macau can give different results.²²
2. Use several locations. WebSitePulse tests from Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, and notes that Hong Kong isn’t behind the firewall.²⁴
3. Test exact URLs. GreatFire says blocking is per address, not per site, so a home page can load while an article doesn’t.²²
4. Don’t trust a failed ping. Run a TCP check on port 443, then an HTTP test, which splits DNS, connection, TLS and server response.²³
5. Repeat at different hours. The slowdowns measured in the 2020 study came in daily hours, not around the clock.³

Our guide to testing whether your site is accessible in China explains how to read the results.

The order to work in

Start with what you can learn for free, and leave the expensive decisions for last. Moving your host before you’ve tested means paying to solve a problem you haven’t measured.

1. 1Test
2. 2Fix third-party resources
3. 3Choose hosting
4. 4Localize
5. 5Index
6. 6Retest

1. Test your current site from mainland locations.
2. Fix what fails, starting with forms and anything that blocks rendering.
3. Retest, then choose hosting. You may not need to move.
4. Localize. Start with translating and localizing a website for China.
5. Get indexed. See does Baidu index foreign websites? and which Chinese search engines to target.

That last step matters more than it looks. Baidu held 49.00% of measured search clicks in China in StatCounter’s October 2026 data, with Bing at 21.69%.²⁶ A site that loads but isn’t indexed there stays invisible.

The China-ready website checklist turns this into a list you can hand to a developer.

Every guide on putting your website in China

Here’s the full set, grouped by the question you’re trying to answer.

Check your access

• Is my website accessible in China?
• Is your site blocked or just slow in China?
• The China-ready website checklist

Understand blocking

• What the Great Firewall means for your website
• Why websites get blocked in China
• Can a shared IP get your site blocked?

Choose hosting and delivery

• Website hosting in China: your real options
• Hong Kong or mainland hosting?
• Do CDNs and Cloudflare work in China?
• How to speed up your website in China

Fix what breaks

• Which Google services fail in China
• Google Maps on your site in China
• Why your forms fail in China: reCAPTCHA and alternatives
• Fonts, YouTube and embeds in China
• WordPress, Shopify and Webflow in China

The bottom line

You don’t need a server in China to have a website there, and a server in China wouldn’t solve everything anyway.

Test what you have, fix what fails, and only then decide where to host. Save the mainland for when Chinese revenue pays for it.

How Index in China can help

We localize your site into Simplified Chinese with a human reviewer, then work to get it indexed on Chinese search engines.

An ICP isn’t part of the offer we list, and we’ll tell you if your case needs a local adviser. Book a 30-minute call.

Book a 30-minute call

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