Expanding your school’s digital presence into China isn’t just about slapping a translation onto your existing site and calling it a day. 

Whether you’re aiming to connect with students, parents, alumni, or partners in China, localization ensures they can access your site and feel included. China has a unique internet environment, cultural nuances, and user expectations which require a more thoughtful approach.

TL;DR: Localizing your school website for China means tailoring your experience to properly welcome everyone from Chinese students, prospective students, alumni, and parents. Functionally, this means optimizing for loading speed with tools like Chinafy, localizing text into Simplified Chinese, adapting to cultural and design preferences, and offering localized support.

Here’s how marketing teams and web developers can localize their school website for a Chinese audience segment, step by step.

Optimize for China’s internet

Let’s start with the tech side—because if your site doesn’t load, nothing else matters. China’s internet ecosystem isn’t like the rest of the world’s. No matter what tools you build your site with, poor performance often stems from two key issues: code incompatibility and infrastructure limitations.

Code incompatibility

Many school websites rely on third-party tools, like YouTube for campus tour videos, or analytics trackers like Google Analytics. In China, hundreds of these types of resources are slow or inaccessible due to the country’s internet setup, causing the site to load slowly or not at all.

Infrastructure incompatibility

Hosting your site outside China means that data has to travel a long way to reach Chinese users. Even with best-in-class global CDNs in place, the experience can still be slow even for the simplest of components because the majority of these CDNs do not have Points of Presence (PoPs) by default inside China.Even if they do have PoPs inside of China, they’re not automatically included in your CDN package as you would still have to fulfill certain pre-requisites in order to leverage them.

How to make your site load fast and fully in China

Test your site’s performance in China:

Use tools like Chinafy’s Visual Speed Test to compare load times in China versus elsewhere.

Use a China-compatible CDN:

Use CDNs with PoPs in* or near China, like Tencent Cloud or Akamai, to cache static content (images, scripts) closer to users. Using a CDN with PoPs inside Mainland China requires meeting specific prerequisites, including obtaining an ICP filing or license and establishing a local entity or partnering with a local provider. (Contact Chinafy to learn more about this.)

*Note: Adding a CDN can reduce latency, but won’t resolve code or file-based issues due to blocked or slow-performing third-party resources on your website. Without addressing those third party resources, your site may still load slowly or fail to load altogether. These hundreds of resources require separate handling.

Chinafy your site:

Whether your site is hosted offshore or onshore, Chinafy can be bolted onto your existing technical stack to achieve faster loading times, and more functional website experience.

Chinafy tackle both infrastructure and code issues:

Generates a version of your website for China visitors without affecting your current site.

Detects and handles blocked or slow-performant resources (e.g., replacing Google Maps for Baidu Maps for the Chinafy version).

Adds a China-friendly CDN without changing your hosting.

Keeps your China-optimized site synced with your global one.

Read more: Optimizing Your School Website for China

Translate content into Simplified Chinese

A fast site is useless if users can’t understand it. Translating your content into Simplified Chinese requires an understanding of not only the language but also cultural nuances and resonance. If you’re not looking to translate the entire site, focus on what typically matters most to your audience, such as program details, admissions processes, faculty bios, academic credentials and campus life highlights.

To streamline localization, you may want to consider creating separate pages (e.g. website.com/zh-sc) or subdomains for your Chinese audience (e.g., cn.yourschool.com), allowing tailored content and design while keeping your global site intact. This approach also simplifies maintenance and targeting for tools like Baidu SEO.

It is not recommended to put both Chinese and English (or other languages) onto the same page. Not only is this important for your user experience, but also so that search engines can properly detect and index your content for its appropriate language.

Avoid machine-only translations: AI tools are improving, but errors can look sloppy on your website. Hire native speakers who understand educational jargon and can keep the tone formal yet welcoming.

Does WPML work in China?

Boost SEO: Translating pages into Simplified Chinese is also beneficial from an SEO point of view if you want your school’s website to be visible on China’s search engines. Baidu, China’s dominant search engine, favors Simplified Chinese content, including meta titles, descriptions, and alt tags.

Adapt cultural context

In some cases, it may be advantageous to go a step further than translation and take cultural context into consideration when developing pages specifically targeting a Chinese audience.

China is identified as a typical high context culture where communication often relies on background understanding, shared experiences, and implicit cues rather than explicit verbal or written language. This is in comparison to the West, particularly the United States and Northern Europe, which is considered a low context culture where communication relies more heavily on the literal meaning of words. For a Chinese audience, therefore, context is more important than content. Chinese advertising, for example, tends to use implicit and tactful words with deep meanings to achieve subtle identification and understanding.

Two key implications of a high-context culture for websites are:

Design: Websites targeting high context cultures like China might benefit from more subtle visual cues, intuitive navigation, and layered information, expecting users to infer deeper meanings and explore further. They might also incorporate storytelling and emphasize the brand's history and values implicitly. This is in contrast to a more clear and direct information architecture used for Western-facing sites.

Marketing content: Marketing content for high context cultures might focus on building relationships and trust over time, using indirect communication and emphasizing shared values. This compares to the typical Western marketing style of communicating more directly about explicit benefits and features, with a clear call to action.

Keep in mind that every business and industry is different. These are broader observations that may or may not be directly applicable to your school.

Provide localized support

Now your site is loading fast, offering Simplified Chinese language options and culturally relevant content, your users—be it students, prospective students, alumni, parents or partners—may wish to contact the school. The school’s website is likely their first stop to find contact details. To provide localized options, you may want to consider adding:

A WeChat QR code

China-specific phone number (+86 code)

An email staffed by native speakers with hours aligned with China’s time zone.

Adjust design and usability

Design isn’t universal, and China’s preferences lean mobile-first and functional, which can appear cluttered or overwhelming to Western eyes.

Fonts: Noto Fonts (like Noto Sans and Noto Serif) support both English (Latin characters) and Simplified Chinese (Chinese characters), optimizing for readability in both languages. You can also pair fonts to blend stylistically, such as Roboto (for English) with Noto Sans CJK (for Simplified Chinese).

Layout: Design layouts on Chinese websites can be dense—prioritizing convenience, efficiency and functionality—especially with the use of smaller screens. A whopping 99.7% of Chinese internet users used mobile phones to go online in 2024. This means your site needs to be fast-loading with responsive design and touch-friendly navigation to cater to a mobile-first population.

Color: There are various hypotheses about how colors influence the psychology behind purchase intention, trust and brand prestige in Chinese culture. “Chinese red” (RGB: 230, 0, 0), for example, has been stereotyped as a culturally preferred color, used to increase sales. However, one study showed that blue (typically associated with harmony and growth in Chinese culture) increased consumers’ purchase intention more so than red, concluding that red isn’t universally functional. For schools, using red and/or gold could leverage cultural psychology to influence perceptions and emotionally resonate in the context of achievement, tradition and prestige. However, the inconclusive studies indicate that color is not the be all and end all when localizing your site for just one segment of your audience, so any nods to Chinese cultural preferences should be done subtly.

Localizing your school website for China isn’t a quick fix. It’s a strategic move to connect with a massive, unique market. Optimize for China’s internet with Chinafy, translate with care, adapt to cultural preferences, tweak your design for local tastes, and back it with support that speaks their language (literally). For school marketing teams, this is about brand resonance; for developers, it’s about performance that delivers. Get it right, and your school becomes accessible and welcoming for all your website visitors from China.