Tapping into the booming online China market can be a windfall for any company. Establishing a web presence in China, however, is a unique challenge due to the technical obstructions imposed by the Great Firewall system that blocks certain content flowing into the country. In a recent benchmark study of international brands doing business in China, the performance-limiting byproduct of the firewall became clear as we uncovered a wide disparity in the speed and uptime of these websites.

Why did one luxury brand achieve a fast 3.5-second average webpage response time with 100 percent availability, while another took over 40 seconds to load on average with only 91 percent availability? The slow-loading or low-availability sites could result in a significant revenue loss, as end users either give up or go to a competitor. Either way, that opportunity is gone for the original site.

The factors we uncovered, through tests conducted via 26 backbone monitoring…