Creating a Website in China: Webdesign is Different in China

China is the world’s largest Internet market, with 1.125 billion Internet users as of the end of 2025 (and even more smartphone app users, as WeChat has passed 1.2 billion monthly active users). Brands and marketers regularly ask us how to optimize a website for Chinese netizens, and there are still a lot of misconceptions about what that actually takes.

If you want to do business in China, your website has to be built for Chinese consumers and for search engines like Baidu, and increasingly for AI search tools like DeepSeek and Doubao. Language, design, mobile responsiveness, payment options, all of it matters. None of it is optional.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to build a website that actually works for China, one that ranks on Baidu, gets picked up by AI search engines, engages users, and converts. Including:

1. Chinese Language and content localization
2. Graphic chart and UX design
3. Live chat, contact info, and payment options
4. Mobile Optimization
5. China-compatible hosting and infrastructure
6. Getting recommended by AI search engines (GEO)

Olivier Verot has spent over a decade in Shanghai building and rebuilding websites for foreign brands entering China. He has watched too many good global sites get almost no traffic here, simply because nobody rebuilt them for how Chinese users actually browse.

1. In China, you need a website in Chinese Mandarin to rank on Baidu

This is probably the most important thing to remember when you build a website for China. Chinese people speak Mandarin, and Mainland China reads and writes simplified Chinese. Even users in Hong Kong, Macau, or Taiwan, who use traditional characters, will still understand your site if it’s in Mandarin.

Baidu, China’s largest search engine, only really indexes Mandarin content and will always favor it over a foreign-language site, no matter how good that site is.

Why the Chinese language is non-negotiable

You wouldn’t enter the French market with an English-only website and expect results. Why would China be different?

Don’t bother selling in China with an English-language website. Most visitors close the page the moment they see it’s not in Mandarin, then go shop somewhere else. Say you’re looking for perfume and land on a Chinese-only site with no English option: you’d close it, assume it’s not for you, and move on. Chinese consumers do the exact same thing to your site, in reverse.

In B2B, an English-language site gets you slightly more mileage, but keep in mind that a large share of Chinese decision-makers still prefer reading about your services in their own language, even when their English is solid.

Content localization, not just translation

Your content doesn’t just need to be in Chinese, it needs to be localized. A straight translation won’t convince a Chinese visitor. You’ll likely need to rewrite parts of it for a different audience, and cut anything that runs into Chinese laws and regulations (remember, the Chinese internet sits behind the Great Firewall).

The more localized and precise your content is, the better your odds of ranking for your target keyword on Baidu. Baidu’s algorithm is built for Mandarin specifically, and it has gotten far more precise over the last few years, so half-translated content simply won’t compete.

That same localized content is now also the raw material for AI search engines. A page written for one keyword and stuffed with filler doesn’t give DeepSeek or Baidu’s AI Overview anything to quote. A page that answers a real question clearly, in Mandarin, does. More on that in section 6.

2. Follow a graphic chart and UX design that appeals to Chinese netizens

Chinese users generally prefer denser, more colorful websites, the opposite of the minimalism popular in the West. The site should be practical, with the important pages and sections visible at a glance. And always feature your social media and contact info somewhere visible on the homepage.

Chinese typography rules

To keep Chinese characters legible, use a font of at least 12px. Chinese characters don’t have spacing between them the way Latin words do, so size matters more than you’d think.

Chinese characters are built from strokes, anywhere from 1 to 60 of them. A font that’s too small, or too decorative, turns unreadable fast.

A busy layout is not a cluttered one

Internal links, everywhere

In the early internet, search bars weren’t well suited to Chinese input, so sites compensated with dense internal linking to guide visitors. Search has improved a lot since, but the habit stuck. Chinese web pages are still built for clicking, not searching.

Newer sites try to move away from this, but as the CCTV homepage below shows, the fight against link density in China is far from over.

Complex layouts, complex menus

Chinese readers are used to visual complexity through their writing system, so a layout that looks busy to you looks entirely normal to them. You’ll find similar design conventions in Japan.

Filling white space reflects a broader cultural pattern where every inch of space is expected to serve a purpose. Empty space can read as “this company doesn’t have much to say” rather than as clean design. Where you’d leave blank space, Chinese sites feature information instead.

In China, less is rarely more. Visit a handful of the country’s biggest websites and judge for yourself.

Chinese users care about features, usability, and how well a site works, not about a minimalist layout. Some visitors dislike the busy style, but it’s what most major platforms, including Tmall and JD, still run on.

These platforms are large enough to set the rules themselves. The good news for fans of minimal design: Tmall and JD have both been drifting toward cleaner, less cluttered layouts over the past couple of years.

3. Live chat, contact info, and payment options for online shopping

A website in China is rarely where the sale actually happens. It’s more of a checkpoint, a place to verify your brand is real and gather the information needed before moving further into the purchase.

A live chat function is something we recommend to every client with a website in China. Chinese consumers expect instant answers, they’re used to it, honestly a little spoiled by it, since every major platform they use offers instant messaging by default. Skip live chat and you’re often losing the visitor before they even get to the contact form.

AI live chat became the baseline in 2026

Basic live chat used to be enough. It isn’t anymore. Chinese consumers now expect a reply within seconds, at any hour, and most sites can’t staff a live agent 24/7 to deliver that.

That’s why AI-driven customer service moved from a nice-to-have to close to a default on Chinese-facing sites. It removes the two things that kill conversion: waiting, and nobody being available outside Beijing office hours. A bot trained on your catalog and FAQ answers most questions instantly and hands off the rest to a human, often across your site, WeChat, and Xiaohongshu at once, so a lead never repeats themselves.

Response speed isn’t a detail here. On sites we’ve audited, every extra ten seconds before a first reply drags down conversion, and teams that get under 30 seconds see it jump during promotional spikes, when human agents can’t keep up alone. You don’t need a custom-built system for this, most Chinese live chat and CRM providers now bundle an AI layer into their standard plans. The real work is writing the scripts it draws from, and that content has to be as good as anything a human agent would say.

In the same vein, keep your contact information visible and easy to find. Your China website will usually be a step in a longer customer journey, not the endpoint.

Visitors expect a company address, a phone number, and your WeChat account (plus other Chinese social platforms). Don’t bother linking to Facebook or X/Twitter, both are blocked by the Great Firewall and useless to a Mainland visitor.

If you sell directly through your site (a WeChat mini-program helps here too), make sure your customers’ preferred payment methods are available: WeChat Pay and Alipay. It smooths the transaction and removes one more reason for a visitor to abandon the purchase.

4. A mobile-friendly website is not optional

China’s own numbers make this section short to argue. As of December 2025, the country counted 1.121 billion mobile Internet users, 99.6% of all Chinese netizens, according to the China Internet Network Information Center. If your China website isn’t built mobile-first, you’re not losing a segment of the market. You’re losing almost the whole thing.

If you run B2B campaigns and most of your leads still come from desktop, mobile neglect hurts less, but it still hurts. Just like Google, Baidu now favors mobile-friendly sites in its rankings. Build for both desktop and mobile from day one, it’s not extra work if you plan for it up front.

5. You need a China-compatible website, not a translated one

Plenty of clients ask us to simply translate their website and put it on a subdomain, often something like cn.company.com, to keep everything in one place. We understand the instinct, nobody wants to spend extra budget building a second site just for China. Most of the time, though, it doesn’t work, and the reason is simple: your global site almost certainly runs on an API that’s blocked in China.

There’s a simpler fix than a full rebuild. Copy your existing website, migrate that copy to a server in China, or close to it, Hong Kong is the usual choice, and adapt it to China’s internet regulations. Every blocked foreign API has a Chinese alternative, so nothing is actually missing, it just needs swapping.

ICP filing and licensing, the 2026 reality

The rules here shifted in the last two years and most agencies still quote the old version. Since late 2024, Beijing, Shanghai, Hainan, and Shenzhen run a pilot program that allows 100% foreign-owned entities to hold an ICP license, and in 2026 that pilot has deepened rather than been rolled back. Outside those four zones, foreign ownership is still capped, generally your China entity needs majority Chinese shareholding to qualify.

Two different things get lumped under “ICP” and they’re not the same cost or timeline. The basic ICP filing (备案) is free and mandatory for any site hosted on the Mainland. The commercial ICP license (许可证) is the one you need if the site itself makes money, through ads, subscriptions, or online sales, and it typically requires a minimum registered capital, generally cited around RMB 10 million for platforms that let third parties sell through them. Budget for registering a local entity and the filing process to take a few months if you’re starting from nothing, per China Briefing’s guidance for foreign investors.

Loading speed optimization

1. CDN: Content Delivery Network. A set of servers spread around the world, all pointed at your site, that speeds up delivery for visitors no matter where they’re browsing from.
2. You can also host in China or nearby (Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan). The catch with hosting on the Mainland is you need an ICP license, which is only obtainable through a China-registered entity. The upside: it comes with a .cn domain.

Avoid blocked elements like Google’s API

This sounds obvious, but judging by how many clients ask us to duplicate their global site and publish it as-is for China, it clearly isn’t. Google is blocked in China, and so is Google’s API, along with most Western developer tools you’re used to relying on.

A few examples of tools you’ll need to replace:

• Google Fonts
• Google Maps
• Gmail and Google login
• YouTube embeds, and most Western analytics tools

Avoiding blocked content keeps your site from looking broken to Chinese visitors, and it also helps loading speed, since your browser won’t be waiting on a timed-out request to a server it can’t reach.

Worth mentioning: tracking tools too. It won’t slow your site down, but not being able to properly track your China traffic is its own problem, and it’s an easy one to fix before launch rather than after.

6. Getting recommended by AI search engines (GEO)

This section didn’t exist the last time we updated this guide, because it didn’t need to. It does now.

China counted 602 million generative AI users by the end of 2025, a 42.8% penetration rate, per CNNIC’s most recent report. DeepSeek alone crossed 85 million monthly active users in the second quarter of 2026, and enterprise API calls to it grew over 300% year over year. A growing share of the people who used to type a query into Baidu now ask DeepSeek, Doubao, or Baidu’s own AI Overview instead, and read a generated summary before ever clicking a link.

This is what Generative Engine Optimization, GEO, is about: getting an AI model to cite your site, and your brand, when it answers a question a prospect asked. Traditional Baidu SEO still matters, but it no longer covers this. The mechanism is different.

An AI model doesn’t rank pages by keyword density or backlinks. It decides what to cite based on whether a claim is backed by a credible source, whether the content answers the question directly instead of circling it, and whether the same facts about your company show up consistently across your site, your Baidu Baijiahao account, review platforms, and news mentions. Baidu’s own developer guidance confirms this: source authority and cross-platform consistency now matter more than the keyword tricks that used to move rankings.

Practically, that means three things for a website launch in 2026: write pages that answer one clear question each, in plain Mandarin, near the top of the page. Back claims with a number and a source instead of an adjective. And keep your company details, name, address, registration, identical everywhere they appear online, since an AI model checking your credibility compares all of them. Worth knowing: 2026 is being called the “compliance year” for GEO in China, with a formal trusted-evaluation standard for GEO providers rolled out this year. The government treats this as infrastructure now, not a marketing gimmick.

A real example: from an invisible site to actual leads

Andrei runs a Romanian furniture and home goods brand that wanted to test the China market before committing to a full local operation. His plan was the one we hear constantly: translate the existing WordPress site into Mandarin, put it on a subdomain, run a small Baidu ad budget, and see what happened.

What happened was close to nothing. Six months in, the translated site was pulling around 3,000 monthly impressions from Baidu ads, a bounce rate above 90%, and had generated exactly two inbound leads. The site used Google Fonts and Google Maps, both invisible to Mainland visitors, loaded slowly from a European server, and had no live chat at all. Visitors who did land on the page had nothing to do but leave.

The fix wasn’t a redesign from scratch. We mirrored the site to Hong Kong hosting, swapped every blocked element for a Chinese equivalent, added a WeChat-linked AI live chat trained on Andrei’s catalog and shipping policy, and rewrote the top product and category pages so each one answered one specific question a Chinese buyer would actually ask, backed by real specifications instead of marketing copy. That last part mattered as much as the hosting fix: within weeks, one of the rewritten pages started showing up as a cited source in Baidu’s AI Overview for a mid-tail furniture keyword, something the old page had zero chance of doing.

Three months after launch, the same ad budget was generating 19 qualified leads a month instead of two, and average time on site had tripled. Nothing about the product changed. What changed is that the site finally worked the way Chinese visitors expect a site to work.

Frequently asked questions

Can I just translate my existing website instead of building a new one?

You can, but it rarely works well. Most global sites run on APIs blocked in China (Google Fonts, Maps, analytics) and are hosted outside the Mainland, which slows loading dramatically. A mirrored copy, rebuilt with Chinese-compatible tools and hosted in or near China, almost always outperforms a straight translation.

Do I need an ICP license to have a website in China?

Only if you host on the Chinese Mainland. Hosting in Hong Kong or Singapore means you can skip the ICP process entirely, though your site will load a bit slower for Mainland visitors. If you do host on the Mainland and the site generates revenue, you’ll need the commercial ICP license, not just the free filing.

Can a 100% foreign-owned company get an ICP license now?

Yes, but only in the pilot zones: Beijing, Shanghai, Hainan, and Shenzhen. Outside those four regions, your China entity generally still needs majority Chinese ownership to qualify for a commercial ICP license.

How long does it take to launch a China-ready website?

If you’re hosting outside the Mainland (no ICP needed), a rebuild typically takes 6 to 10 weeks depending on site size. Add ICP filing on top and plan for 2 to 4 additional months, most of that is entity setup and MIIT processing time, not development.

Do I really need a WeChat mini-program too?

Not on day one. A solid website with WeChat Pay integration and a visible WeChat account covers most early-stage needs. A mini-program becomes worth building once you have repeat traffic and want customers to transact without leaving WeChat.

Is optimizing for AI search worth it if my site already ranks on Baidu?

Yes. Baidu ranking and AI citation are related but not the same thing. A page can rank decently and still never get cited by an AI Overview if it doesn’t answer a question directly or lacks a credible source. With over 600 million Chinese users now using generative AI tools, that gap is only going to matter more.

Need a website built for China?

Contact us, we have solutions for you. We’ve built and rebuilt sites for hundreds of foreign brands entering China, from full new builds to hosting migrations and ICP filing.

Our team covers web design, translation, and full-funnel digital strategy for the China market, and we’ve done it for over 1,000 clients across a decade in Shanghai. Here’s our web design service breakdown:

One of our website-in-China case studies, a Swiss vitamins and supplements brand we rebuilt and localized for Chinese buyers:

Leave us a comment, or get in touch to talk through your project in China.