Perhaps you’ve set up a beautiful, high-converting HubSpot site, only to hear from a user in China that your site wasn’t accessible. For marketers, this can be a frustrating and costly issue—especially when your site performs perfectly elsewhere.
Chinafy previously found that most websites built with HubSpot’s landing page builder faced significant performance issues in China.
Our updated findings suggest that HubSpot may have made some changes that affect how website pages built with their CMS load from within China.
So, does HubSpot work in China?
TL;DR: Typically, global CMSs like HubSpot or WordPress face delays, broken content and blocked resources when accessed from China. However, contrary to this, we’ve seen some web performance metrics are satisfactory and in some rare cases, better in China than the US.
In this article we’ll cover our latest findings, including an analysis of three HubSpot websites*, and explain how you can make your website run fast and fully for end users.
*Disclaimer: Kindly note, this article refers to websites built using the Hubspot website builder and not websites leveraging other Hubspot tools like their Hubspot CRM, Hubspot Sales and Marketing Hub, or Hubspot Analytics. Most websites that leverage Hubspot technologies do not build their full site with Hubspot, and may use other more dynamic builders such as Sitecore, Adobe AEM, etc.
Now, let’s quickly cover the context.
HubSpot is a leading inbound marketing, sales, and customer service platform. Since its founding in 2006, HubSpot has become a trusted solution for businesses looking to manage their marketing efforts, automate workflows, and grow their customer base.
With its built-in CMS, CRM, and marketing automation tools, HubSpot provides everything businesses need to attract, engage, and delight customers.
Larger businesses typically use HubSpot as a separate tool to their primary website builder, often opting to use it for subdomains, such as a standalone landing page or blog.
For a website to be considered “working” in China, we would want to see it loading within an acceptable time frame (Chinese visitors expect a site to load in under 2 seconds) and users should be able to interact with it as the site owner intends them to.
What often happens with HubSpot sites, as well as many other global websites, is that certain resources are slow or blocked in China and this impacts the loading time as well as the functionality of the website if it manages to load.
To understand how well HubSpot websites and landing pages work in China, we conducted web performance comparison tests, focusing on three key metrics:
Speed
Function
Consistency
The three sites we tested were:
blog.mountainroseherbs.com - a relatively simplistic blog subdomain
peachjar.com - a marketing site
move.quikly.com - a standalone landing page
Here’s what we found…
The first website we tested was blog.mountainroseherbs.com, a fairly basic blog subdomain for a shop selling herbs and teas.
The surprising result of this analysis was that the Mountain Rose Herbs blog site had significant web performance issues in both the US and China.
When loaded for the first time from Virginia US, these were the results from webpagetest.org:
Time to First Byte (TTFB): 0.296s
First Contentful Paint (FCP): 1.449s
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): 4.660s
Visual loading complete: 10.3s
FCP signals to the end user that the site is loading because the first visual element(s) have appeared, and an FCP lower than 1.8 seconds is good.
Comparing this to Beijing, China, the results are:
TTFB: 1.604s
FCP: 4.918s
LCP: 5.018s
Visual loading complete: 20.8s
We also used Chinafy’s Visual Speed Test to understand how this would look for the end user.
As you can see below, our test shows that at 11.2s, the page has still not visually loaded in Beijing but is visually complete in California:
Taking a look at the waterfall chart for our Beijing test, we can see that there are multiple images being pulled from HubSpot (notice “hubfs” in the URL) that have 4xx errors and therefore cannot be loaded.
Running a second test for the same site within several minutes of each other also showed that load time was not consistent each time it was loaded:
In the US, however, the site loaded fairly consistently across 3 test runs:
Conclusions:
The Mountain Rose Herbs blog loads slowly in the US and even slower in China. HubSpot resources are significantly impacting the site loading in China, and the inconsistency between each test run when loaded from China shows the effect of China’s internet environment.
The second site analyzed was peachjar.com, a marketing site for a platform connecting schools and parents.
This site had a noticeably worse performance in China compared to the US, impacted by resources stored and delivered from HubSpot’s servers.
When loaded for the first time from Virginia US, webpagetest.org showed:
TTFB: 0.620s
FCP: 1.339s
LCP: 2.293s
Visual loading complete: 7.5s
This shows that the end user sees the first visual elements appear in just over 1 second, and the main content loads in just over 2 seconds.
Comparing this to Beijing, China, the results are:
TTFB: 1.206s
FCP: 3.364s
LCP: 4.102s
Visual loading complete: 17.5s
For the end user, this means no visual elements show until after 3 seconds, which can lead to users bouncing as it can appear as though the website isn’t going to load.
When we put peachjar.com through our Visual Speed Test, you can see that the site loads relatively quickly in China but not in the intended way.
When we dive into why the web performance differs in China, we can see from the Waterfall that there are certain resources that are leading to delays in loading time, including a zoominfo domain with a 4xx error, as well as styles, images and Javascript hosted on HubSpot.
Conclusions:
At first glance, PeachJar’s website seems to perform well when accessed from China. However, upon closer inspection, while the site might appear to load quickly, many resources fail to load fully. This results in a website that looks and functions very differently compared to when it's accessed from the US, for instance.
The third website we tested was move.quikly.com, a landing page for marketers from Quikly.
When loaded for the first time from Virginia US, webpagetest.org showed:
TTFB: 0.540s
FCP: 1.789s
LCP: 1.882s
Visual loading complete: 2.5s
Comparing this to Beijing, China, the results are:
TTFB: 4.177s
FCP: 36.106s
LCP: n/a (timeout)
Visual loading complete: n/a (timeout)
The waterfall chart for the site loading in Beijing shows HubSpot style resources impacting the rendering.
Conclusions:
The Quikly landing page performs well in the US, significantly better than the other two sites we tested, which is to be expected with a simplistic landing page. The site, however, failed to load entirely from China, showing the impact of slow third-party resources for sites accessed from China.
Curious to see how your HubSpot website performs in China? Try Chinafy’s Visual Speed Test tool for a side-by-side comparison of how your site loads in China versus other global locations.
There are two main reasons why HubSpot sites don’t work well in China:
Code-based incompatibilities - HubSpot sites often rely on third-party resources that are either blocked or slow to load in China (e.g., Google Fonts, Facebook Pixels).
Infrastructure-based incompatibilities - HubSpot uses global CDNs like Cloudflare, which are slower compared to in-China CDNs.
Although we focus on HubSpot in this article, similar challenges apply to other CMS platforms like Shopify, Magento, and WordPress among others.
Let’s break these incompatibilities down further.
HubSpot websites, just like WordPress or Webflow, rely on third-party resources as identified in the waterfall charts above, many of which are hosted on platforms like Google or Facebook, which are blocked in China. This leads to broken elements on pages, such as missing images or forms that don’t load.
To take an obvious example, if your HubSpot site uses Google Fonts or Facebook Pixels, those resources won’t load in China because Google and Facebook are blocked in China. Instead, the browser will keep attempting to load these elements until it times out, further delaying the overall page load.
There are hundreds of lesser known third-party resources that are slow or blocked in China, many of which are subject to changes based on the evolution of China’s internet ecosystem.
Even when resources aren’t blocked, third-party files hosted on slow global networks can severely drag down performance. As demonstrated by the websites in our examples, HubSpot-hosted media on static.hubspot.com or using hubsf files can take too long to load, leaving users with a frustrating experience.
Even though HubSpot uses content delivery networks (CDNs) to distribute files, not all CDNs are created equal. Global CDNs like Cloudflare (Global)* often face latency issues in China, leading to slower load times and unreliable performance.
*Cloudflare China CDN is a separate service, only available to Cloudflare Enterprise customers who meet the prerequisites (i.e. China business entity, ICP filing/license etc.). While they are both available via Cloudflare.com, they are functionally and operationally separate. This means that Cloudflare customers do not by default have access to Cloudflare’s China points of presence. More on Cloudflare Global vs Cloudflare China here.
Why is this a problem?
When a user in China tries to load your HubSpot site, the browser has to fetch every asset (images, videos, JavaScript) from servers outside China. Due to China’s strict internet regulations and the Great Firewall, these connections are much slower, leading to delays or complete timeouts.
Given that HubSpot does not have a China version, one option is to simply (or not simply, as the case often is) rebuild your site from scratch onshore.
By shifting your hosting infrastructure onshore within China, this can help resolve some of the web performance issues associated with loading time. However, this is a complex process requiring a business entity in China, an ICP license, a PSB filing, and using China-approved hosting services.
This route can take 6-12 months to execute and often comes with significant financial and operational costs. For most companies, this isn’t a viable or scalable solution. It’s also sometimes the case that onshore-hosted sites still face issues with third-party resources.
If you’re looking for a faster, more efficient way to optimize your HubSpot site for China without completely overhauling your infrastructure, Chinafy is the most value-effective option.
Here’s how Chinafy works:
Chinafy creates a version of your site for China without affecting your global site.
The platform scans your site to identify blocked or slow resources.
Chinafy then sets rules to replace or remove blocked resources with China-friendly alternatives.
Chinafy then adds near-China CDNs for faster delivery.
Content synchronization keeps your China-friendly version up-to-date with your global site.
By addressing code-based incompatibilities and optimizing your site’s delivery pipeline, Chinafy ensures that your HubSpot site performs well for users in China.
With Chinafy, you can make sure your HubSpot site works just as well for your users in China as it does for your global audience, without the need for a complete site overhaul or extensive development time.
So, does HubSpot work in China? Not usually, but with the right optimizations, it can. HubSpot’s CMS may be globally powerful, but it struggles with slow load times, blocked resources, and broken elements when accessed from China.
With Chinafy, you can make your HubSpot site fully functional for Chinese users without having to build or manage a separate site.
Ready to get started? Test your site with our Visual Speed Test, or contact us for a detailed assessment of how we can optimize your HubSpot site for China.