By Janus Boye
Every brand wants to be global. But very few truly understand what that means online.
You can have a flawless digital experience in London, New York, or Copenhagen — and still deliver a broken, painfully slow website in Shanghai or Beijing.
In a recent Boye & Co members call, digital strategist Marta Cukierman shared her experiences helping international organisations untangle these issues. Marta is co-founder of StreamX, a company that helps global organisations deliver high-performance, compliant digital experiences in China and she is also one of our active members with a background in web performance and composable architectures
What she revealed wasn’t just about slow sites or blocked scripts — it was about how easily global ambitions collide with local realities. To quote from the call:
“If you’re a global brand and you ignore 20 % of your potential market — that’s not necessarily a good approach.”
Marta’s message was simple but powerful: your website might technically load in China, but that doesn’t mean it actually works.
Marta’s message was simple but powerful: your website might technically load in China, but that doesn’t mean it actually works.
The Harsh Reality: Your Global Website Probably Fails in China
When organisations finally test their sites from within China, the results are often surprising. Pages that load instantly in Europe can take ten seconds or more. Videos disappear. Product images fail to show up. Fonts look broken. Analytics tools stop reporting, leaving you to think that “no one’s visiting” when, in reality, your site just isn’t loading.
Marta has seen this countless times. A luxury fashion site that looks stunning in Paris becomes a blank shell in Beijing. A financial firm’s login page that works flawlessly in London never finishes loading in Shanghai. Even large tech companies with mature digital teams are caught off guard.
Almost 90 percent of web teams have no idea how their site actually performs in China. That lack of visibility doesn’t just create frustration — it damages trust. From a user’s point of view, a broken or slow site feels careless. From a company’s perspective, it’s often invisible until someone finally checks.
It’s easy to say “it works for us” when you’re sitting in Copenhagen or San Francisco. But for many users in China, your site may as well not exist.
Why It Happens: The China Reality
It’s tempting to blame everything on the Great Firewall, but as Marta mentioned, the picture is more complex than that. The Chinese internet is its own ecosystem, with different infrastructure, rules, and expectations.
A Different Internet
China runs on its own network backbone with its own approved service providers. Many familiar global tools, CDNs, and scripts don’t perform well across borders. A simple external dependency — a font, a tracking pixel, a CDN call — can slow your entire site to a crawl.
Unpredictable Access
Connectivity in China isn’t uniform. A site might load well in one region and fail in another. It can change from day to day or even hour to hour. What looks fine in your tests one week might be unusable the next.
Assumptions from the West
Most enterprise architectures are built on Western infrastructure and compliance models. They depend on tools that aren’t licensed or hosted in China. This creates a fragile setup where one unapproved service can quietly break your experience.
Translation Isn’t Localisation
Translating content into Chinese doesn’t make a site local. True localisation means adapting your technology stack to local regulations, hosting content close to users, and replacing services that simply don’t work behind the firewall.
This isn’t a niche technical issue. It’s a business problem. When an investor, journalist, or potential customer can’t load your website, they don’t see a technical glitch. They see a company that doesn’t take the market seriously.
Slow performance also skews your data. Analytics tools that don’t operate in China make it look like there’s no audience there, which then reinforces the idea that China “isn’t a priority.” It’s a feedback loop that hides opportunity.
Meanwhile, your local competitors who host inside China and understand the regulatory environment — are faster, more visible, and easier to trust.
Let’s move onto the key advice that Marta shared with us.
Five Recommendations to Make Your Website Work in China
The first step is curiosity. Don’t assume your site works — find out. Test it from inside China, not from your home office or data centre. It’s remarkable how different things look when you see them through a local lens. Once you know the reality, the problem stops being abstract and starts becoming something you can address.
From there, start measuring. Get hard data on page load times, asset failures, and overall responsiveness. Treat this as a baseline to improve upon. It’s easy to make decisions based on incomplete analytics, especially when your tracking tools don’t even operate properly behind the firewall. Once you can see what users see, the path forward becomes much clearer.
Then look at your setup with a critical eye. If your site relies on global tools and services that don’t function in China, that’s not bad luck — it’s a design issue. Rethinking where and how you host content can transform the experience. Some teams move part of their stack closer to users, others build a separate delivery path for the region. It doesn’t need to be perfect; it just needs to work.
Performance should be treated as part of your brand experience, not an afterthought. A site that’s slow or inconsistent still counts as broken. Check load speeds regularly and treat reliability as a KPI in its own right. It’s the online equivalent of being open for business — users can’t engage with what they can’t reach.
Finally, treat China as a deliberate strategic choice, not an experiment. If it’s important, invest the time, resources, and partnerships to get it right. If it isn’t, decide that consciously and move on. The key is to stop operating in the grey area where everyone assumes someone else is responsible. Clarity always beats complacency.
The Boye & Co Perspective
We see this pattern all the time. Organisations want to act global but are still building for a single region. China simply makes that mismatch visible.
As Marta Cukierman reminded members during our call, fixing China web performance isn’t about chasing new traffic. It’s about respect and recognising that users in other markets deserve the same quality of experience as those closer to your home base.
If your digital front door doesn’t open for one-fifth of the world’s internet users, you’re not really a global brand yet. You’re still thinking local.
Learn more about making websites work in China and beyond
The conversation naturally continues in our peer groups at conferences in Europe and North America. Why not join us and be a part of it? You can meet Marta in person at CMS Kickoff 26 held in January in Florida, where she is making the long journey from Poland.
Marta shared two presentations in the call, both of which you can download below:
You can also lean back and enjoy the recording from the call.