Over the years this blog has covered a lot of DevOps, SRE, CDN, and observability practices — and the same question keeps arriving from teams outside China:

“Our site works fine everywhere else, but it’s slow and flaky in mainland China. What’s actually wrong?”

There is rarely a single-answer explanation. It is usually a combination of DNS resolution paths, CDN coverage, origin location, front-end payload weight, and regulatory requirements (ICP filing) amplifying each other. This page gathers the related practices in one place.

Three recurring questions

1. Why is the site fast overseas but slow in mainland China? Physical distance is only the surface cause. More often it is fluctuating cross-border link quality, a CDN with no mainland presence or warm-up, DNS steering users to distant nodes, and front-end payload that a high-latency link punishes.

2. How do you troubleshoot intermittent, non-reproducible instability? Separate availability problems (resolution or connection failures for some regions/ISPs) from performance problems (loads, but slowly). They require different diagnostics — which is why “checking occasionally” never finds the real issue; you need continuous, multi-region measurement.

3. What should be technically ready before entering China? A practical checklist: domain and ICP strategy, static asset distribution, reachability of third-party dependencies (fonts, analytics, payments) from the mainland, and monitoring that covers real user experience. For apps, add the Android store distribution track.

A staged path

You don’t have to do everything at once — but order matters. A practical sequence:

1. Assess — measure before deciding: real mainland reachability and performance data, a compliance gap list, prioritized recommendations.
2. Accelerate — act on network and content delivery: DNS and CDN strategy, payload weight and loading-path optimization.
3. Host — give the parts that need local presence (site, services, or data) a compliant landing.
4. Distribute — take mobile apps into the Android channel ecosystem: listings and updates across major app stores.
5. Operate — launch is the beginning: keep monitoring real user experience and surface problems earlier.

Each stage validates independently, and you can start from whichever one fits.

Start with a diagnostic report

Measure instead of guessing. Chinaready is assessment-led: a free, data-driven diagnostic covering your site’s reachability and loading performance in the mainland, with prioritized recommendations.

Further reading

Articles in this series will be published on the blog, covering: root causes of overseas sites being slow in China, a technical readiness checklist for entering the market, and common CDN/DNS/ICP/observability pitfalls.