After deciding to enter the China market, the technical to-do list gets long fast. But the value of a checklist is not in being long — it is that every item can be verified. The checklist below is organized into five stages. You can start from any stage, but do run “Assess” end to end at least once — measure first, then act.

Stage 1: Assess

• Get real mainland reachability data: a multi-region (Beijing / Shanghai / Guangzhou directions), multi-ISP probing baseline
• Get real mainland performance data: TTFB / Core Web Vitals by region, not monitoring from an overseas datacenter
• Inventory third-party dependencies for mainland reachability: fonts, analytics, payments, maps, video — each one is a potential single point of failure
• A compliance gap list: ICP filing requirements, data and privacy essentials, industry-specific rules

How to verify: probing report + RUM data + a dependency reachability matrix. Three artifacts, or it is not done.

Stage 2: Accelerate

• DNS strategy: mainland resolution lands on nearby nodes; TTL allows fast switching
• CDN strategy: mainland presence or a warm-up path; consider edge caching for HTML too (the most commonly missed item)
• Static assets: fingerprinted filenames + long cache lifetimes; first-screen payload on a diet (a high-latency link is an amplifier)
• Origin fetch path: know which requests must go to origin, and which transit they use

How to verify: quantified TTFB improvement in mainland directions (say, from seconds to within a few hundred milliseconds), with an observable cache hit ratio.

Stage 3: Host

• Decide which parts need local presence: site, API, data — evaluate each separately
• Domain strategy: the path choice between a .cn domain and an overseas domain plus a filing entity
• ICP filing: entity, process timeline, and a fallback for the unfiled state (e.g. HK/SG nodes + edge acceleration) — have plans for all of it

How to verify: filing status is checkable; the hosting plan’s actual mainland latency meets the bar.

Stage 4: Distribute

• Android channel ecosystem: a list of major app stores and their listing requirements (mainland Android distribution is highly fragmented; Google Play is unavailable)
• App update channels: the path for version distribution, hotfixes, and staged rollouts
• iOS side: confirm the App Store China account and compliance requirements

How to verify: complete at least one real listing drill in the target channels.

Stage 5: Operate

• Continuous monitoring: coverage of real mainland user experience, with signals for both “slow” and “down”
• Change process: how to confirm mainland-side rollouts after a deploy (edge cache refresh strategy)
• Incident fallback: a degradation plan for link-quality fluctuations

How to verify: a real incident or fluctuation shows up in alerts and can be located.

The five-stage structure of this checklist matches the approach on the Chinaready page: every step validates independently. If you want a diagnostic report based on your own site’s real measurements as the starting point for “Stage 1”, begin here: