Guides & Tutorials

How to bring your composable website inside the Chinese firewall

Guides & Tutorials

How to bring your composable website inside the Chinese firewall

One of the questions we often hear is: Will my composable website work in China? In this post, we’ll show you how your website can pass through the Chinese firewall with Netlify's China Integration with 21YunBox—resulting in improved agility, lower costs, and faster delivery to the Chinese market.

Will my composable sites work in China?

When it comes to getting your website through the Chinese firewall, it really boils down to two things: compliance and technical issues.

Failing to comply with Chinese laws

If your website is hosted outside China and relies on services that don't comply with strict Chinese regulations, it's at risk of being blocked or performing poorly in China. We often hear that people have no issues to start but suddenly find their websites stop working in China.

Not following Chinese compliance laws and regulations can be bad for your business. If you operate in China without the right filings or compliance checks, you may get fined and it can hurt your reputation. Bvlgari's mistake is a lesson for all brands. It shows how important it is to be careful and follow China's rules. If you don't, you may face consequences like a damaged reputation, blocked website, financial penalties, and problems with customers and authorities.

Technical issues with the Firewall of China

To understand why most foreign tech doesn't work well in China, we need to take a look at the Firewall of China. The Chinese government uses the Firewall to censor and control the flow of information on the internet.

A typical composable website comprises around 40-100 components, known as resources. These resources include images, videos, social media embeds, scripts, fonts, and more. Many of these resources are either blocked or loaded slowly in China due to various technical constraints caused by the firewall.

Speed is another critical factor influencing website performance. Slow connections caused by the firewall can result in certain resources taking too long to load or timing out, leading to poor user experiences for your users in China.

Use this real-time China Firewall Test to see how your site works in China.

How to get a composable site working in China

To bring the benefits of your composable website into China, you'll need to host it in China and bring your site's resources inside the firewall.

Netlify partnered with 21YunBox to provide Global companies with an enterprise-level solution to bring your Composable site to China with ease.

Netlify’s China integration allows teams to deploy to China straight from their Netlify Dashboard. As a result, global companies can extend the benefits of their modern and agile website to their Chinese market, replacing legacy China websites.

Since our platforms are entirely vendor and framework-agnostic—you can now also bring along your favorite composable technologies into China.

By bringing your composable sites into China, global companies can avoid the headaches and costs of maintaining a standalone legacy Chinese website. Traditionally, it’s standard to use a local Chinese agency to manage and update content on your company's Chinese websites. But now global teams have the freedom and flexibility to manage their Chinese site just like they do for the US, EU, and the rest of the world.

4 Steps to get a composable site working in China

In short, here’s how you get a composable site working in China:

Overcome Chinese compliance
Set up website localization for China
Set up your Netlify China integration and dashboard
Deploy to China

Let’s dive in.

Step 1: Chinese compliance

China’s unique internet ecosystem and legal framework demand compliance with specific regulations. Content publication in China requires proper licensing, such as ICP Filing, while strict adherence to the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) safeguards individual data.

Adhering strictly to Chinese law is essential for all of 21YunBox’s China solutions. To simplify China compliance and ensure proper compliance, 21YunBox’s dedicated team of China compliance experts is available to assist or handle all compliance requirements on your behalf. This includes identifying, preparing, submitting, and coordinating with the Ministry of China to obtain approval for all the licenses, certifications, and assessments needed to operate your websites in China.

Step 2: China site localization and dashboard setup

Once signed up for your China service, 21YunBox solution architects work with your developers or agency to identify those resources from your Headless CMS and other pieces of your website that would be slow to load in China. We work with your team to implement technical and compliance-related solutions to ensure your website runs smoothly for your Chinese market.

Our solutions work through various in-house integrations. Since we’re technology agnostic, you can bring your favorite composable tools into China, such as your headless CMS like Sitecore or Contentful, to your ecommerce platforms like Shopify or Salesforce Commerce—we ensure your data syncs to China automatically.

For example, your resources like APIs where you want to maintain one global database, you can use 21YunBox’s API Acceleration suite and fast-speed cross-border network to get them working fast in China. This requires minimum changes on your end. For those larger files and resources, we’d host them inside China, inside the firewall to give you the best performance in China.

Step 3: Setup your Netlify China Integration

The Netlify China Integration is simple to set up and makes deploying to China a breeze. It allows your teams to launch your updates to China directly from your Netlify Dashboard, ensuring faster delivery with minimum changes to your workflow.

This integration pulls the built site through the Great Firewall of China and deploys it in China on 21YunBox’s blazing-fast multi-cloud China Edge.

Step 4: Deploy to China

The Netlify China integration allows teams to deploy directly to China. So when a developer commits an update on Github, or your marketing team publishes new content, your site updates will be live in China within minutes.

To show you the performance boost of the Netlify China integration, we ran two China speed tests. First, the image on the left was a site deployed with Netlify. The image on the right is the same site, but deployed with Netlify’s China integration, and hosted on 21YunBox's multi-cloud China edge.

The test results show the Netlify China integration brought the site from slow/inaccessible (orange and red) to fast/stable across China (green), illustrating how it can help bring your composable site into China’s huge market.