The State of Global Website
Performance in China
We tested 614 global websites from Beijing (China), Virginia (US), and London (UK). Two thirds failed to load in China. Here's what we discovered about how users experience global websites in China and the consistent gap that affects every industry.
The Measurable Performance Gap
Hotels: The worst performers
Hotel websites had the highest failure rate in our sample: 3 out of 4 hotel websites completely fail to load in Beijing. Even the 25% that work average 22.9 seconds to load - roughly 4x slower than the same sites tested from Virginia in the US.
The CDN-only problem
Content Delivery Network (CDN) selection alone did not correlate with successful loading in China. Even websites using leading global CDNs and infrastructure can still face timeouts.
The 3-second rule
Industry research typically cites 3 seconds as the threshold for user patience. At a median of 17.2 seconds for visually complete, virtually no global site meets user expectations.
Valid control regions
Virginia (US) and London (UK) produced similar results across metrics, validating them as control regions.
High variability in China
Beijing shows a larger gap between mean and median metrics than the US and UK, indicating higher variability and more extreme or partially failed loads.
Consistently worse performance
Tests from Beijing (China) performed slower across all median metrics and all industries compared to Virginia (US) and London (UK).
median load time across 600+ sites tested from Beijing, China
Performance by Sector
Industries with the worst timeout rates in China
Performance by Geography
Many businesses view China website performance as synonymous with speed. Performance also encompasses long-term accessibility, deliverability, and stability of a website to ensure that user experience isn't interrupted by resources that have failed to load properly, videos that can't play, or other common issues.
Perceived Load Time* By Region
Success Rate by Region
Performance Metrics Breakdown
Pages that render in ~5-7 seconds in the US and UK often take 15-20+ seconds in China - if they load at all.
Beijing tests are slower across ALL median metrics and ALL industries.
How We Tested
How to interpret this report
Website Performance Metrics
The time from the initial request until the first byte of the response is received. Reflects backend processing network latency, and server responsiveness.
The point in time when the browser first begins to display any visual content (text, images, background) on the screen.
The time when all visible page content has finished rendering and no further visual changes occur above the fold.
The time until the browser fires the onLoad event, indicating that all synchronous page resources have finished loading.
A calculated score that measures how quickly visible content is displayed during page load. Lower scores indicate faster visual progression.
The total number of network requests made to load the page, including HTML, CSS< JavaScript, images, fonts, and third-party resources.
The total amount of data transferred to load the page, typically measured in kilobytes or megabytes.
Largest Contentful Paint measures perceived load speed, Total Blocking Time measures interactivity, and Cumulative Layout Shift measures visual stability.
Want to find out how your website performs in China?
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