Is my website accessible in China?

A site that opens for you can fail for a buyer in Shanghai, and nothing on your side will warn you. You can check most of it from your desk, as long as you know what each test really shows.

This guide is part of how to put your website in China. It covers one question: how to test your site, and how far to trust the answer.

How do you test a website from China?

Test exact URLs from probes inside the mainland, on several carriers, then check that the full page loads. Work in this order, because each step catches what the one before misses.

1. List your exact URLs. Take your home page, your main Chinese page and your contact page. GreatFire says blocking is per address, and it tests http and https as separate addresses.¹
2. Check reachability. Run each URL through GreatFire or WebSitePulse. Both compare mainland results with a point outside the mainland.¹³ If GreatFire has never tested an address, its page offers a live test.¹
3. Spread across networks. Use BOCE, ITDog or 17CE to compare carriers and regions.⁴⁵⁶ On BOCE, pick your node, since a single check uses one and assigns it at random by default.⁴
4. Check the whole page. Use a test that reports what loaded, such as AppInChina’s tester or Chinafy’s speed test.⁷⁸ Compare it with a run from outside China.
5. Repeat at another time. Try a different day and hour. A 2020 study found that cross-border slowdowns follow a daily pattern.¹⁶
6. Ask a real person. Someone on a normal Chinese connection opens the pages and sends your form. See why forms fail in China for what to watch.

1. 1Exact URLs
2. 2Mainland reachability
3. 3Carriers and regions
4. 4Full page load
5. 5Another day
6. 6Real visitor

Which tool answers which question?

No single tool covers everything. Reachability tools tell you if a connection worked. Network tools show where it failed. Page tools show what actually loaded.

Tool	Best for	Tests from	Limit to know
GreatFire	Blocking of one exact address	Several mainland probes, plus an outside control 1	Its headline figure covers 90 days, not this second 1
WebSitePulse	Quick live check	Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, plus Hong Kong as a comparison 3	No method published on the page 3
BOCE	Blocking, DNS and carrier comparison	Telecom, Mobile and Unicom, data center or home nodes 4	Chinese only, with a daily guest limit, no batch checks for guests, and no explanation of its detection method 4
ITDog	Ping, TCPing, HTTP, DNS and route	Results by node, region and carrier 5	Described here by a third party 5
17CE	Free performance tests	Analysis by region, carrier and test point 6	Node count not stated on the page we read 6
Globalping	DNS, HTTP, ping and traceroute	Community probes, selectable by country 1025	Results shift with each probe’s provider 10, and the pages we read give no count of probes in China
AppInChina tester	Full-page score from 0 to 100	Servers it says are inside the mainland 7	Vendor tool, and it says results vary by ISP and region 7
Chinafy tools	Blocked resources and load time	3 servers in China among 18 9	Vendor tool, and its code test covers a 10-page sample 8
ViewDNS and Comparitech	Quick check of one domain	ViewDNS says “multiple locations” in the mainland, Comparitech names none 2627	Neither page explains its method 2627
WordPress plugins	A check from your dashboard	Five named mainland locations each 1112	About one free test a month, and your URL goes to the vendor’s API 1112

We read each tool’s own page, or the source shown, on November 1, 2026. We didn’t run them side by side, and we found no independent comparison.

AppInChina calls its test free, and it covers DNS, HTTP, network diagnostics and browser rendering.⁷²³

Chinafy measured its Shopify benchmark with WebPageTest from Beijing, so that’s another option to check.¹⁷ Our speed guide covers what we could confirm about its agents.

Kinsta names four tools and seven test locations, and those are the same places WebSitePulse and Blocked in China name.²⁰³¹¹ That adds to the doubt, but it doesn’t prove shared probes.

Node counts don’t settle it either. Juejin’s guide says the number of nodes isn’t the quality of the observation.⁵

Why one green result proves little

A pass describes one address, one network and one moment. Published measurements show how much can differ on each of those.

What can change	What the evidence says	What to do
The address	One article can be blocked while the home page loads 1	Test the pages that bring inquiries
The province	Henan’s firewall blocked 4,196,532 domains in total, against 741,542 for the national one, from November 2023 to March 2025 with a 2024 gap, on traffic leaving the province 14	Don’t let a Beijing pass speak for the country
The carrier	GFWeb traced most gaps with other platforms to local ISP and cloud interference 13	Compare Telecom, Mobile and Unicom
The moment	On August 20, 2025, port 443 traffic got injected resets for about 74 minutes, seen from a Beijing server, exact cause unconfirmed 15	Repeat before you conclude
The direction	About 1,000 domains trigger the HTTPS filter only from inside China 13	Prefer probes inside, not outside

The Henan figures come from one carrier, China Unicom, and they stop in March 2025.¹⁴ The authors found no regional blocking in six other locations, though they say their vantage points were limited.¹⁴

Henan’s blocks were also short: 75% of blocked domains stayed blocked for under 51 days.¹⁴ We found nothing newer, so treat this as a known risk, not a current map.

Reachable doesn’t mean working

Shopify shows the gap. GreatFire recorded no blocking of https://shopify.com in 13 tests up to November 1, 2026.²

Yet Chinafy’s benchmark says 83% of its tests on 100 Shopify storefronts from Beijing ran past 30 seconds or didn’t finish. Only 50 to 54% succeeded from Singapore, Virginia and London.¹⁷ Chinafy sells the fix and gives no exact test date, so read those figures with care.

Both can be true. One tests an address, and the other tests a whole store with its images, scripts and fonts.

A fast result can even be a bad sign. Chinafy’s guide shows a page that looks quicker in China, and points to the number of resources loaded as the figure that matters.⁸

Its rule of thumb is that a gap above 5% in resources means parts of the page may display badly.⁸ That’s one vendor’s threshold, not a standard.

Why VPN, Hong Kong and roaming tests mislead

They don’t travel the network your visitors use, so a pass tells you little.

• VPN. GreatFire lists VPNs among the connections that reach the internet differently from its probes.¹ A pass may only show that your VPN works.
• Hong Kong. WebSitePulse itself labels Hong Kong as “not behind the China firewall.”³ Chinafy, a vendor, says a clean test there “creates false confidence.”¹⁸
• Corporate lines. GreatFire puts these in the same group,¹ so a colleague in a multinational’s office may not be a fair test.
• Foreign SIMs. UNSW’s Salil Kanhere told The Canberra Times that in many cases, a traveler’s data is routed through the home carrier or an overseas gateway, while a local Chinese SIM typically stays subject to local filtering.¹⁹ So don’t count a traveler’s phone as a test.
• DNS lookups from abroad. Citizen Lab reported in 2021 that forged Chinese records had polluted public resolvers, including Google’s and Cloudflare’s.²² So a lookup outside China can mislead you too.

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

How do you read the results?

Read the pattern, not a single failure. Juejin’s guide suggests working through the layers in order: DNS, TCP, TLS, HTTP, then routing.⁵

What you see	Likely meaning	Next step
Ping fails, but TCPing and HTTP work	ICMP is filtered, and your site may be fine 5	Ignore the ping
Lost packets at a middle hop only	Not proof of a problem 5	Check the final result
One node fails	Possibly local interference, not a national block 13	Compare other carriers and regions
A warning page about ICP	A Chinese cloud provider’s check, not the firewall 13	If you host with that provider, check your filing with it. If not, retest from another network
DNS returns an IP that isn’t yours	Possible DNS poisoning 1021, or one of several IPs your domain normally resolves to 5	Compare with your host’s or CDN’s IP ranges
Connection resets on TCP or TLS, on most nodes, while the outside control passes	Possible filtering of your domain 13	See if your IP or name is the cause
All mainland nodes fail, control passes	Censorship, or a firewall or misconfigured server 10	Check your host’s blocking rules first
Control fails too	Inconclusive, and your server may be down 1	Check the server, then retest
Everything connects, but slowly	A speed problem	Read the speed guide
Connects, with fewer resources loaded	Blocked third-party files 8	Audit your Google services
GreatFire says “Not enough data”	The test couldn’t tell, not that you’re fine 1	Use another tool

The ICP row matters more than it looks. GFWeb saw Aliyun and QCloud redirect HTTP requests for 7.8 million and 6.8 million registrable domains to ICP warning pages. It says this isn’t state censorship, but hosting providers enforcing the ICP rules.¹³

For the full diagnosis, read is your site blocked or just slow.

What no test can tell you

A test shows what happened. It doesn’t tell you why, and it doesn’t tell you if search engines have your site.

• Why a site was blocked. We found no way to learn the reason for a given site. Our guide to why websites get blocked covers the known causes.
• Whether your IP is the cause. We found no dedicated tool for this. A URL test can’t always separate the IP from the name. See shared IP blocks.
• Whether Baidu has your pages. That’s a separate check, covered in how to see which pages Baidu has indexed.
• Whether it will last. A clean test today says nothing about next month, so build it into the China-ready checklist.

The bottom line

Test exact pages from inside the mainland, across carriers and on different days, then have a real person confirm it. Don’t count VPN, Hong Kong or roaming results.

Keep “the address connects” and “the page works” apart. Most of what looks like a contradiction between tools comes from mixing up those two questions.

How Index in China can help

We localize sites into Simplified Chinese, with a person reviewing every page, and get them indexed on Chinese search engines. Testing from China isn’t a listed part of that offer.

Being found only helps if your page loads, so bring your results when we talk. Book a 30-minute call.

Book a 30-minute call

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