Well, it’s pretty easy to find that out, and it’s something I do every week for potential clients.
In this post, I’ll be showing you the tool I use 17ce.com, and, of course, how to use it.
To help with the demonstration, I searched for “Skiing in Canada” (in Chinese) and pulled up a few websites hosted in China and the rest of the world (RoW).
I’ll be entering these websites into the search bar of 17ce.com, comparing their loading speeds, and explaining what the results mean.
Let’s get stuck in.
Check the video version here or read on.
The Tool
The website 17ce.com is very straightforward to use and gives you information about how your website is performing (or not) across different areas of China.
I begin by entering dealmoon.ca into the search bar and clicking the green button, which is sometimes in English or Chinese.
Now, we just have to sit back and wait for the results.
See how the map of China has changed color? There’s a color key in the corner representing the loading speeds. What you want to see in the map change to a light or a dark green color.
You probably knew this already, but just in case:
- Red – You’ve got problems
- Orange – Problematic
- Yellow – Average, not great
- Light green – Pretty good
- Dark green – Very good
You get the idea.
The loading speed is displayed next to each color in the key (e.g., red is >5s).
In this set of results, the only areas of China with decent loading speeds are Hong Kong and Taiwan.
From a professional standpoint, if I was going to promote this website in China, I would say it wasn’t fast enough, and that problem would need addressing first.
A China-Hosted Website Doesn’t Guarantee Loading Speeds
Here’s another example of a Canadian website that’s not loading very well across China.
What about China-hosted websites? You’d expect a website hosted in China to load more quickly and have much better speeds compared to the Canadian website pictured above. However, the results below point towards the opposite.
But, what about a good one, what would that look like? Well, here are the results for Baidu, which are much better compared to others we’ve just seen.
Baidu has the best possible rating. The majority of the country appears in dark green, which means the website loads in a second or less in these areas,
However, the loading times are slightly slower in Yunnan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia. This demonstrates that even a prominent website like Baidu still doesn’t have a perfect record across all of China.
So an important takeaway—even if your website is hosted in China, this doesn’t necessarily guarantee its loading speed.
The Banned and the Blocked
What if your website is blocked in China?
Western businesses have come to fear the “Great Chinese Firewall,” and several big websites—Facebook, Wikipedia, and Google (to name just a few)—cannot be accessed within China without a virtual private network (VPN).
Take a look at these results for Google.
When I search for Google, no results emerge except for Hong Kong and Taiwan. These two locations are not behind the Great Firewall, so they appear in dark green.
If you’re in one of the following industries, your website is probably going to be blocked:
- Crypto
- Porn
- Politics
- Gambling
- VPNs
No Two Days Are the Same
Website loading speeds change constantly depending on a number of external factors.
If you watch my YouTube video on the same topic, on that day you’ll see
- Baidu had a red rating in Tibet, and
- Google was loading (or loaded) very slowly in Beijing.
These results are only a few days apart, and you can already see the differences in loading times across the country for each website.
What About Your Website?
And there you have it, 17ce.com is a great tool for checking your website’s loading speed in China.
Give it a try, and let me know how quickly your website is loading across the country.
If you’re pleasantly surprised or not doing as well as you expected (or would have hoped), we’d love to hear from you in the comments section below.
2 Comments.
Are you sure that 17ce gives a valid measure of page loading time?
My understanding is that it only measures the “time to first byte” (TTFB) which is the initial server response, not the final page loading.
If you look at a page load “waterfall” there are other factors that need to be considered, like how long scripts, images and other assets take to load.
My own theory (which is purely speculative) is that the Great Firewall scans images through an image recognition filter. I’ve seen even very small JPEG files (<50kg) take a LONG time to render on the page load waterfall graph.
I think https://www.webpagetest.org/ gives a more complete analysis for a few key Chinese cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Ningxia.
Would love to hear your thoughts.
The map shows the “total time”. If you over over the chart below the map, you can see the time broken down into categories, which includes TTFB and other factors.
This is useful info for our content marketers or other marketing people, even if they don’t have development know-how.
When we are going to speed up a site ourselves, we use Chrome’s developer tools (or something like that) to spot specific things that load quickly and then improve them. Looks like WebPageTest is kind-of like that, right?