Webflow Website Performance in China – Tips & Experiences

What to change to achieve better website performance in China?

My experience of getting a Webflow website through the “Great Firewall of China” (the Great Firewall) in the best possible way.

• In general, do not integrate services from Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo, etc. This extremely lengthens the charging time and is blocked anyway and not charged in China.
• If possible, host videos yourself and integrate them via an HTML embed (see video).
• Upload and host web fonts on Webflow yourself. If you integrate the font directly via Google Fonts, the font won't even be loaded in China.
• Don't integrate jQuery via Google CDN. However, this is now also standard with Webflow and is integrated via Cloudfront.
• External language changers like Weglot work well.

Even with these settings, your site will most likely load around twice as long in China than in Germany or the rest of the world. However, if you ignore these optimizations, it takes up to 4x as long. I initially had load times of up to 20 seconds. We have now been able to get them under 8 seconds on average. Many pages even under 5 seconds.

Link to a speed test with Chinese locations

• https://www.webpagetest.org

Webflow with Chinese hosting

Many western countries also recommend a Chinese host for good website performance in China. However, the effort and many benefits of Webflow would be lost as a result. Nevertheless, Webflow also offers the option of hosting with a CDN location in Asia.

The Webflow Site Plan “Business” includes global CDN locations and one in Asia, among others. I haven't been able to test whether it's even faster because my customer uses the “CMS” site plan.

However, all Webflow site plans that use the Global CDN do not use Fastly as a provider, but Amazon CloudFront (how to in this forum post can easily understand). And if you look at the locations of Amazon CDN, there will also be listed in China. So I assume that the loading time and therefore the performance would be even better with a business site plan for China.