In this article, we will walk you through some speed tests we conducted to determine if Shopify works in China or not. Our staff conducted the tests in Shanghai (China Mainland) and Hong Kong (outside Mainland China) and we used 3rd party testing tools to ensure our tests weren’t biased.

By the end of this article, you should have a good understanding of Shopify and if it works in Mainland China or not. Also, you can contact usto get a free speed test of your Oracle site for China.

What is Shopify?

Shopify is a Canadian e-commerce store creation platform. Individuals without a technical background can easily create e-commerce websites through the visual interface provided by Shopify. In addition, Shopify also provides a rich rental library for store owners to use to make their Shopify store better. For example, make it support multi-language, multi-currency support.

How Fast is Shopify in China?

We picked 10 different high-traffic stores for this case study.
Below are the speed tests results:

Case 1: Fashion Accessories Company: Steve Madden

• Website: www.stevemadden.com
• Global ranking Worldwide: 20,446
• Estimated traffic per month: 2.9 Million

If you visit Steve Madden’s website outside of China, you may not notice slow access or even opening issues, because Shopify’s access speed outside China is generally great. However, in China, it is impossible to open the site.

We can look at the following screen record our team put together.
When recorded this screen record, it's under the normal 4G network speed and is in the center of Shanghai, China, here is what we see on Steve Madden:

As a result, we waited over 60 seconds on this blank screen, and Steve Madden's website wasn't loading at all in Shanghai. If it's not for this experiment, I would just exit the site in a few seconds without seeing things on the screen.

Is it just people in Shanghai that can't open Steve Madden's website?

We did another test to check the access speed of all the provinces to Steve Madden's website. Here is the result:

The color represents the speed at which users open the website. The green areas represent the faster the user can open the website. Yellow to dark red show areas that take a long time for users to open.

The test results show that people from China (not just Shanghai) cannot visit Steve Madden's store. Even first and second-tier major cities in China cannot open Steve Madden's website.

How about other stores powered by Shopify?

To see how the following Shopify stores faired in China, click on the link below to see the full case study.

Wildly Popular Soccer Club: Manchester United
Korean Beauty Brand: Soko Glam
Gaming Platform: Skybound
British Broadcasting Company: BBC
Japan Women’s Clothing Brand: Sister Jane
American Luxury Brand: Cettire
Hong Kong Clothing Brand: Black Tailor
United Kingdom Men’s Clothing Brand: Sinner Attire
Canada Swimsuite Brand: Cupshe

Summary

To wrap up, as you can see the speed tests above, if people in China can’t open these high-traffic Shopify sites, we can probably conclude that other websites powered by Shopify are likely not openable in China unless you configure custom CDNs for China or use an acceleration service like what we discuss in this article

Want to test if people in China can open your Shopify site? Click here to get yours for free.

Originally published at https://www.21cloudbox.com/solutions/how-to-speed-up-shopify-site-in-china.html on March 27, 2021.