I just made a wordpress based website for a client that operates in China. The website is being cached completely by W3 Total Cache and served very fast in Europe (where our main server is located). But my customer told me that if he visits the website it takes up from 30 to 50 seconds to load.
The website itself is a very small (4 small articles) onepage, with only one bigger image.
All in all the whole website size is about 300kb. The content itself couldn't be considered "harmful" as it is just a very short description of an award.
In my tests through online tools, I found out that, the main problem seems to be the init process before even the first asset is loaded.
I already tried services like Cloudflare and CDN77, but both with no luck as it keeps about the same speed or gets even slower. Also another website on the same server runs much fast than this one.
The domains are newly registered .com and .cn domains. Could it be that?
Is there something I can do about this or does anyone have an idea?
- host it in China directly? (Will it still work well with people outside of China?)
- transfer the domains to a chinese hosting provider?
Best Answer
This has nothing to do with your site's size or anything. Wordpress is almost completely blocked in China. The government blocks nearly all sites like that, or makes them so damned slow that nobody wants to use them. I've lived in China for nearly 5 years, and in order to do anything on the web outside of China's control, I've gotta use a VPN. Includes other site builders like Weebly, Wix, and SquareSpace. Your client is basically SOL unless you DO host it on Chinese servers, and disassociate it with Wordpress, google fonts, and any other web technology that's currently being tampered with.