Your website still carries the health of your business in China, even in 2026. It generates leads, it converts visitors, it builds your brand before a single salesperson picks up the phone. There are a lot of ways to get this wrong. I have watched foreign companies spend six figures on a beautiful site that Baidu never sees and Chinese visitors never load. Only the right knowledge, applied in the right order, leads to a website that actually works for the Chinese public.
I’m Olivier Verot, founder of GMA and based in Shanghai since 2012. I’ve rebuilt or audited hundreds of foreign company websites for the Chinese market, and the mistakes are almost always the same three: wrong server, wrong search engine, wrong assumptions about what Chinese users expect from a homepage.
Falling For Search Engine Optimization Myths on Baidu
Every new business owner in China hopes to build a Chinese website that sits at the top of Baidu, and every other Chinese search engine, for more than one keyword.
The truth is that a good SEO strategy takes time, judgment, and budget. You cannot optimize a single homepage for hundreds of keywords. That’s not how ranking works, and if you try to cut corners, Baidu notices.
A better approach: pick the top keyword for each page and write for that keyword specifically. A few rules that still hold in 2026:
- Write real long-form content. Keyword stuffing stopped working years ago. Write something thorough and useful for a Chinese reader, and Baidu rewards it.
- Structure your content with heading tags. Headings look like a small detail, but they give both readers and Baidu’s crawler a map of the page.
- Add a clear call to action. Your homepage should tell a visitor exactly what to do next: buy, sign up, or leave a WeChat ID.
What Changed for Chinese Websites in 2026
China now counts 1.125 billion internet users, and 99.6% of them get online through a phone, according to the 57th CNNIC report on internet development. If your site is not built mobile-first, you are already invisible to almost everyone you are trying to reach.
The second shift is AI search. Baidu now shows AI-generated summary boxes above the classic list of blue links for a growing share of queries, built on its own Ernie model line. Users ask a question and get an answer pulled from several pages at once, often without clicking through. Your site needs to be structured so an AI engine can lift a clean answer out of it, not just so a human can scroll it.
That’s the mechanic behind GEO, generative engine optimization: clear headings, direct answers near the top of a section, and facts an AI model can quote without misreading them. It applies to Baidu’s AI summaries and to DeepSeek and Doubao, which more Chinese users now open the way they’d open a search bar. We wrote a full breakdown in our guide to GEO in China, worth reading before you touch your site structure.
None of this replaces the basics. Chinese generative AI now has 602 million users, 42.8% of all netizens, but the other 57.2% still type a plain query into Baidu and scroll. Build for both, not one or the other.
Get Your Hosting and ICP Filing Right Before Anything Else
This is the step most foreign companies skip, and it’s the one that breaks everything downstream. A website hosted outside mainland China, on AWS Frankfurt or a European server, loads slowly behind the firewall and Baidu ranks it accordingly. A commercial website also needs an ICP filing (备案), and as a foreign entity you cannot file for one directly. You need a Chinese subsidiary or a trusted local partner to file and host it for you, as China Briefing explains in its guide to internet business licenses. Get this wrong and your site will stay blocked or slow in China no matter how good the design is.
Treat Your WeChat Mini Program as a Second Website
According to WeChat’s own 2026 Open Class figures, mini programs now reach over 1.2 billion users and processed more than 9.5 trillion yuan in transactions over the past year, up 38.2% year on year. A mini program will not replace your website, it loads inside WeChat and Chinese users treat it as a lighter, faster version of the same brand. For anything transactional, a WeChat mini shop next to your main site captures visitors who would never leave the app to browse a separate URL.
Creation of a Chinese Website
Building a professional, convincing website is a company’s first step in establishing itself online. Even more so in China, where more than half the population researches a product or service directly on its website before buying anything.
GMA designs websites that are technically sound and visually right for the market, on infrastructure that extends your reach into China rather than fighting the firewall, and built to be SEO-friendly from the first line of code.
Design Your Website for Chinese Eyes
Even with websites, the eye decides first. A careful design keeps a visitor on the page. What sets an experienced agency apart is knowing Chinese taste specifically: a homepage built for a Western audience looks different from one built for China, which tends to favor more links and information density over large hero images and white space.
We build sites that respect your brand identity and Chinese user expectations at the same time, on the same site.
SEO on Baidu
Ranking on search engines is the single most important lever for guaranteed visibility, for your website and for the products behind it.
Baidu is China’s number one search engine, and doing SEO on Baidu is not the same job as doing it on Google. Baidu has its own rules and its own criteria, and our agency builds an SEO plan specifically for it.
GMA offers a focused service both at the design stage of the website and after it goes live, if it isn’t generating enough traffic. What we do next depends on where the site is stuck.
Analysis of Your Results
One of the fundamentals at GMA is building long-term relationships with our clients. That means full transparency and involving you in your own project. Every month we share the data and results of your campaign, and we find new strategic priorities together for a more profitable investment.
Market Your Website on Chinese Social Media
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest: all blocked in China. You need WeChat, Weibo, and Xiaohongshu to reach an audience and keep customers up to date on what your company is doing. Whenever you update your website, post about it on your Chinese social channels, but balance that with genuine, non-promotional content.
Also link to your social media from your website, typically in the footer or a sidebar. And don’t treat Xiaohongshu as a pure social platform anymore: for a growing number of shoppers it works as a search engine in its own right, which is another reason your product pages need to say something specific, not generic marketing language.
“Building relevant keywords into your content from the very first phase of your Chinese website, with a strong focus on SEO from launch, brings you organic traffic early, before you’ve spent a single yuan on ads.”
A Real Case: Fixing a Website That Was Invisible in China
Efi runs a small Greek jewelry brand, handmade silver pieces, sold mostly through boutiques in Athens and a growing online store. She wanted a foothold in China after a Chinese buyer discovered her at a trade fair and asked for a website she could send to her own contacts back home.
Her first move was the obvious one: translate her existing Squarespace site into Chinese and run Baidu ads to it. The site stayed hosted in Europe. Within two weeks her Baidu ad account was suspended for missing an ICP filing, and the site itself took over eight seconds to load from Shanghai, when it loaded at all.
We moved the site to mainland hosting through a filing partner, rebuilt the homepage around Baidu’s structure rather than Squarespace’s template logic, and rewrote her product pages as direct answers: material, origin, price range, shipping time, stated plainly near the top of each page instead of buried in a brand story. That’s also what makes a page quotable by an AI search engine, which mattered because a meaningful share of her early Chinese traffic was already coming through DeepSeek rather than a typed Baidu query.
Load time dropped to under two seconds. Four months after relaunch, the site was drawing steady organic Baidu traffic instead of near zero, and roughly one in twenty visitors requested a quote through the contact form, enough for Efi to justify a second production run aimed specifically at the Chinese market. The fix wasn’t a redesign. It was hosting, filing, and structure, done in the right order.
Building a website for your small or big business to find customers on the Chinese internet? Who better to help than a team that lives in the Chinese market? Our native-speaking team is ready to support you. Contact us and we’ll help you level up your business in China.
FAQ: Building a Website for Chinese Users
Can I just translate my existing website instead of building a new one?
You can, but it rarely works well on its own. Translation fixes the language, not the hosting location, the page structure, or the ICP filing you need for a commercial site. Most brands end up rebuilding the homepage and product pages even when they keep the same domain and design system, because a template built for Google and Western reading habits doesn’t perform the same way on Baidu.
Do I really need an ICP filing if I’m only running ads, not selling online?
Yes. Baidu checks for a valid ICP filing before approving an ads account, and it checks the domain, not just the business behind it. Without one, your account can be suspended even after approval, which is exactly what happened to the site in the case above. A basic ICP filing (备案) covers an informational site; a commercial one (ICP许可证) is needed if you sell, take payment, or run affiliate links.
Should I optimize for Baidu or for AI tools like DeepSeek?
Both, and the good news is the same structural work helps with each: clear headings, direct answers stated early in a section, and facts that aren’t buried in marketing copy. Baidu’s own AI summaries pull from the same kind of well-structured content. Don’t pick one over the other, roughly four in ten Chinese internet users now use a generative AI tool regularly, and the rest still search the old way.
How long before a new Chinese website shows real traffic?
Expect three to six months for organic Baidu traffic to become meaningful, assuming hosting and ICP filing are correct from day one. Paid ads can bring visitors immediately, but they cost more without an SEO foundation underneath them. Sites that skip hosting and filing and go straight to a redesign usually see no improvement at all, because the problem was never the design.
Do I still need a website if I already have a WeChat mini program?
Yes. A mini program lives inside WeChat and depends on someone already being in the app. A website gets found independently, through Baidu, through an AI search tool, through a link shared outside WeChat entirely. They do different jobs. Use the mini program for existing followers and quick transactions, and the website for discovery.
Read also:
- Website in China
- 5 tips to build a good website for China
- GEO in China: why your website is invisible to DeepSeek
GMA has built and rebuilt Chinese-facing websites for foreign brands since 2012, from hosting and ICP filing to Baidu SEO and GEO for AI search. If your current site loads slowly, ranks nowhere, or was never filed correctly, our Shanghai team can audit it and tell you exactly what’s broken. Reach out through our contact page and we’ll walk you through it.
