Blog / Why You Need to Test and Continuously Monitor Your Web Performance in China

Why You Need to Test and Continuously Monitor Your Web Performance in China

This is a guest blog written by Catchpoint.

Ensuring your websites and applications are high-performing, resilient, and available in China is a continuous task. Web performance testing is an important part of this, as we’ll get into in this blog, but continuous monitoring after you’ve gone to production is equally important. Here, we’ll delve into why both matter and share some best practices for web testing and monitoring, including some real-world examples from our customers.

The unique challenge of the internet landscape in China

Digital service delivery within China is well known for its challenges due to the Great Firewall and direct ramifications in terms of network congestion, difficulties around network peering, and limitations placed on content that originates from overseas. Challenges may also arise due to regulatory issues and limitations.

As Chinafy discussed in its recent blog for Catchpoint, most websites in China have user experience issues, whether that’s slow loading times, videos not playing, or fonts not delivering. Many companies, they said, are shocked upon first testing their website in China to see how poor user experience is, not just in terms of “high performance in the milliseconds, but the basic level of visibility and accessibility.”

Nonetheless, the scale that the digital market in China represents is vast (since 2022, China accounts for about one-fifth of the 5.4 billion Internet users worldwide, according to Statista), making such challenges worth surmounting for both Chinese and many global companies.

As our CEO, Mehdi Daoudi often says, what gets measured gets improved. The first step for anyone wishing to have a viable online presence in China is the right kind of visibility.

“By actively measuring, analyzing and improving the performance of their digital channels and user experiences, organizations can enhance customer satisfaction and drive higher conversion rates.” 

Mehdi Daoudi, CEO and Co-founder, Catchpoint

Test web performance in China

Chinafy turned to Catchpoint WebPageTest to measure site performance of its users to “gain deep insights into how to improve it.”

In its guest blog for us, Chinafy steps through how it uses WebPageTest (WPT) to run, analyze, and compare performance across borders, devices, and network conditions. Check it out in full detail here.

Website Performance Summary from Catchpoint WebPageTest

Key web performance metrics to measure

Some of the key web perf metrics it’s important to measure and analyze include:

Time to First Byte (TTFB)

Start Render

First Contentful Paint (FCP)

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Speed Index

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Total Blocking Time (TBT)

Interaction to Next Paint (INP)

Page Weight

WPT provides you with a performance summary, revealing all these metrics, including those gathered from Google's CrUX report, in an easy-to-read format. Beyond metrics, it offers actionable suggestions to improve overall site performance. You can also run no-code experiments to instantly test the impact of suggested optimizations without altering any code. Additionally, the filmstrip view allows you to visualize the page load process frame by frame, while the waterfall chart helps you speedily pinpoint loading bottlenecks, making performance optimization both detailed and efficient.

Continuously monitor your websites in China

At Catchpoint, the industry’s leading Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) platform, we have many customers in and out of China who use Catchpoint because of our ability to help them understand their web performance from their user' perspective– and overall digital resilience – where it matters most.

Often, we see that companies, when they first come to us, don’t have as comprehensive an approach to visibility as they need in China.

Here are three of our top tips for how to achieve that 360 visibility:

Make sure what you’re building today works tomorrow

Firstly, you need to ensure that what you’re building works on a continuous basis. Just because it works today doesn’t mean it will work tomorrow. Unless 100% of your tech stack is within China, it’s likely that at some point you will experience your site either being blocked or breaking in one way or another.

Monitor your third parties

You need to monitor 24/7 particularly in order to keep an eye on third parties. Your CDN, for instance, might be hosted in Singapore or Hong Kong and be fine today, but be blocked tomorrow. We experienced this directly when out of the blue, the CDN we use for our RUM tags in China was blocked overnight. Our RUM tags, which previously stopped working occasionally, were suddenly 100% not working. The only way we were able to identify what had happened – and why – was thanks to continuous monitoring, both internal and of the third parties that support our Chinese online presence.

Benefit from the largest observability network within China

With over 2734 vantage points worldwide, Catchpoint has the largest observability network in the industry, providing our customers with unparalleled coverage across geographies. This includes the most observers in China, with over 100 vantage points across 30 cities, covering all major ISPs (China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom) and China’s leading cloud providers). This extensive coverage allows you to measure user experience across critical locations and service providers, empowering you to detect and resolve performance issues across your entire Internet Stack before they affect your users.

Our cloud-native platform also features:

AI-powered tools, including:

Internet Sonar so you can answer the question, “Is it me or something else?” quickly.

Internet Stack Map for instant awareness of critical service or application issues.

Automated browser testing with Playwright and Puppeteer

Experience Level Objective (XLO) monitoring

Map showing Catchpoint's extensive network of nodes across China

Case studies of Internet Performance Monitoring in action in China

Finally, we wanted to showcase a couple of case studies of our customers who turned to Catchpoint for their IPM needs in China:

EdgeNext (formerly ChinaCache), a global edge cloud service provider specializing in APAC, China, MENA and global cloud delivery. Some of the reasons EdgeNext partnered with Catchpoint include the ability to:

Isolate content suffering from performance issues within a webpage or application.

Manage service level agreement (SLA) requirements with both customers and vendors.

Provide accurate and trustworthy third-party validation for their content delivery services.

Read the full customer story here.

Radial, a global B2C eCommerce fulfilment solution provider, uses Catchpoint as a single source of truth for operational monitoring, reporting, and SLA measurement.

Radial turned to Catchpoint for support when one oif its clients with a large customer base in China received complaints about poor site performance within China. Using Catchpoint’s waterfall data, Radial was able to quickly identify the root cause for why load time in China was 10x longer than it was in the US.

Read the full customer story here.

For further information, visit Catchpoint’s Website Experience Solution page or schedule a chat with one of our solution engineers to discover how WebPageTest and Catchpoint IPM combined can improve your website’s speed, reliability, and resilience in China and thousands of locations worldwide—all within a single, enterprise-ready platform.

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