The questions European SMEs ask most about China are almost always the same. Do we need an ICP license, should we host inside mainland China and will that make our WeChat and website faster. I have heard the same questions for years from B2B brands, consumer products and ecommerce teams. This article walks through what actually matters, where the real bottlenecks sit and how to make a sane plan without getting lost in outdated forum threads.

Do you need an ICP filing at all

The ICP, Internet Content Provider, filing is a registration issued by MIIT. If your site is hosted on a server inside mainland China and is publicly accessible, you are in most cases required to file ICP before it can go fully live. The filing ties your domain to a legal entity and a responsible person inside China.

  • Marketing sites usually use a basic ICP filing, 备案, linked to a Chinese company.
  • Ecommerce or transactional sites generally need a commercial ICP license, 经营性ICP许可证, with extra review and stricter requirements.
  • Hong Kong hosting does not require ICP, even if almost all visitors are in China, because the servers sit outside mainland jurisdiction.

If your main presence is a WeChat Official Account or Mini Program, Tencent provides the infrastructure and regulatory layer. You do not file ICP for an Official Account or a Mini Program. What you do need is a company that passes Tencent onboarding checks, plus content that follows platform rules.

What the ICP filing process looks like in practice

For a mainland hosted site, the process usually looks like this:

  • Pick a Chinese hosting provider, for example Aliyun, Tencent Cloud or a local ISP partner.
  • Prepare documents, business license, ID of the legal representative, Chinese phone number and sometimes a photo taken at the provider office or through their app.
  • Submit the application through the hosting provider. They review first, then forward it to MIIT.
  • Wait typically a few weeks for approval, often around two to four, and sometimes longer, then add the ICP number to the site footer as required.

For foreign SMEs this is usually handled by a local partner or agency. The important part is to understand that the ICP filing belongs to the Chinese entity that owns the domain and content, not directly to your European company, and that foreign companies without a mainland entity cannot file on their own.

Common ICP misconceptions from overseas teams

  • We cannot show our site in China without ICP.
    This is not correct. Sites hosted overseas or in Hong Kong can still be reachable. They often suffer from slower routing and fragile asset loading, but they are not automatically blocked just because they lack ICP.
  • ICP will magically make everything fast.
    ICP is about registration and compliance. Performance still depends on hosting quality, how heavy your pages are and whether you use blocked resources.
  • ICP is only for big enterprises.
    In reality many small Chinese companies file ICP for simple marketing sites. The real barrier is having a Chinese legal entity, not company size.

Should you host inside mainland China

Hosting inside China gives clear technical advantages, but it also adds legal and operational work that not every SME needs. You want to match the infrastructure to your actual China stage rather than to a checklist.

Hosting inside China usually gives you:

  • Lower latency inside the country, which helps rich pages, logged in users and dashboards.
  • More predictable routing, since traffic stays inside local networks and uses domestic peering.
  • Better signals for some local search engines and certain platform integrations.

But it also requires:

  • ICP filing and ongoing responsibility for what lives on the domain.
  • Local documentation, including ID documents and a Chinese phone number.
  • Support workflows in Chinese, typically through a local IT partner or in house team.
If you are new to China, you usually do not need mainland hosting on day one. Start with Hong Kong hosting tuned for China routes, measure real traffic and conversion, then decide if mainland infrastructure is worth the extra complexity.

Simple hosting models that work for SMEs

In real projects I see a few patterns repeat because they balance effort and benefit quite well.

  • Model 1, Global site plus Hong Kong edge.
    Keep your main site in Europe, add a Hong Kong region or edge node for China and remove blocked resources. Good for early stage testing.
  • Model 2, China specific light site in Hong Kong.
    Keep a smaller, focused version of your site for Chinese visitors on Hong Kong hosting, while your main global site stays where it is. Menus in WeChat point to this lighter Chinese version.
  • Model 3, Full mainland hosting.
    When China is a serious revenue stream and you have a local entity, move key services and content to mainland cloud providers, while still keeping some global content outside.

Most SMEs I work with start in Model 1 or 2 and only move to Model 3 after one or two years, when the Chinese side of the business has clear traction and internal owners.

What actually affects speed in China

Many performance problems that European teams blame on the Firewall are actually caused by assets and services that are blocked, slow or simply heavy. You can remove a lot of friction without touching where the site is hosted.

Common speed problems come from:

  • Blocked font hosts, for example Google Fonts or some Adobe services.
  • Blocked analytics scripts, for example Google Analytics, Tag Manager or Facebook Pixel.
  • External CDNs with weak presence or peering inside China.
  • Heavy JavaScript and large images that would be slow even in Europe.

Fixing these points often gives you most of the China performance gain while still hosting in Hong Kong or a nearby region.

Practical steps that usually help

  • Self host critical fonts and keep your font stack simple instead of using several display fonts.
  • Swap blocked analytics for a local solution or move tracking to your backend where possible.
  • Use a CDN with proven China routes or a Hong Kong region adjusted for Chinese users.
  • Compress images aggressively, do not autoplay background video and avoid oversized hero media.

A very simple test is to open your site on a normal Chinese mobile connection and watch the network tab. You will often see fonts, tags or external scripts stuck in pending while the main HTML is already delivered.

WeChat hosting versus external hosting

One misunderstanding I hear often, WeChat does not host your Official Account website content. Menus and articles inside a Service or Subscription account still point to URLs on your own servers.

Mini Programs are different. They run inside the WeChat client on Tencent infrastructure and load code packages that you push through the WeChat developer tools. This is one of the reasons Mini Programs feel fast and native inside China.

  • Official Account website, uses your chosen hosting, overseas, Hong Kong or mainland.
  • Mini Program, uses code bundles hosted entirely inside Tencent environment.

Because of this many brands choose a mixed setup.

  • Use a Mini Program as their primary China site for product listings, basic account features and purchase.
  • Keep longer articles, brand storytelling and investor focused pages on a Hong Kong or global site.

How this affects your architecture

  • Put high value China conversion flows, such as product discovery and purchase, as close as possible to the user, often in a Mini Program.
  • Use Official Account menus as a router to Mini Programs, service chat and a light web landing page.
  • Test all flows inside the WeChat browser on real Chinese networks, since not all global design patterns behave the same way there.

The Firewall, what it actually does

The Great Firewall is not a single box that allows or blocks your site. It is a mix of routing rules, filtering and network policies between Chinese users and the rest of the internet. From outside, behaviour can look random. From inside, most people do not think about it at all.

  • DNS resolution can be slower and sometimes returns different answers than you expect.
  • Packet loss is higher on cross border routes, which punishes chatty scripts and large assets.
  • Secondary assets such as fonts, pixels and embedded media may be blocked while your core HTML still loads.

This is why simple, well structured pages often behave much better in China than heavy marketing builds, even before you move hosting. Less JavaScript, fewer external calls and smaller images are not just nice to have, they are survival tactics for cross border performance.

What the Firewall does not do

  • It does not automatically block every site that is not hosted in China.
  • It does not guarantee that hosting in China will always be fast if the site is heavy or poorly built.
  • It does not replace the need for good UX, natural translations or local payment methods.

Governance, risk and who should own this internally

When you decide to move closer to Chinese users, the technology is only half the story. The other half is governance. Someone inside your team needs to own the Chinese digital presence and be responsible for changes, content and provider choices.

  • Decide who signs off on hosting region changes and ICP related decisions.
  • Keep a short internal document listing which domains and apps point at China users and who owns them.
  • Align legal, marketing and IT early, especially if you plan to collect user data in China, and check how local laws on cybersecurity and personal information might affect your setup.

This does not need to be heavy bureaucracy. A single page of responsibilities already avoids many problems later when staff changes or agencies rotate out.

Closing thoughts

Going local in China is less about ticking every box on a legal checklist and more about making smart architecture choices. ICP, hosting regions and WeChat entry points are tools you can combine based on where your China business is today and where you want it to be in two or three years.

A pattern that works well for many European SMEs looks something like this.

  • Start with a fast, light Hong Kong hosted site that avoids blocked resources.
  • Use a WeChat Service Account and a focused Mini Program for discovery and conversion inside China.
  • Measure real user performance and only add mainland hosting and ICP when China has clear traction and internal owners.

If you get these basics right, you avoid the most expensive mistakes, over engineered infrastructure before product market fit, slow WeChat flows and legal setups that nobody in your team really understands.

None of this is legal advice. Rules and enforcement evolve, so always confirm the details with a local hosting partner or legal adviser before you make structural changes.

If you want a second pair of eyes on your current stack, or you are planning your first China facing setup and want to stress test the plan, I am happy to review it and suggest a simple staged approach.

Optimize your China tech stack Email PerOla