What is Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and how does it work?
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is an enterprise CMS and digital experience platform that lets teams build and manage websites, apps and forms while integrating natively with the wider Adobe Experience Cloud. Pages are usually served through an Apache Dispatcher layer and a managed CDN, which caches content for fast global delivery.
Does AEM work in mainland China?
Not reliably. The typical AEM website can take up to 50 seconds to load from China and drops roughly 19% of its resources, so users often encounter broken or blank pages.
Why do AEM pages struggle to load in China?
Most deployments rely on global CDNs such as AWS CloudFront whose standard PoPs sit outside the mainland, inflating round-trip time. Pages also call third-party libraries (e.g., Google Fonts, YouTube, social pixels) that are blocked or throttled in China, stalling rendering.
What happens when a AEM site is accessed in China?
Chinafy tests record full-page load times of 50+ seconds and around 19% resource loss on standard AEM builds, indicating severe performance degradation. Users may experience missing images, blank text and stalled scripts before the page eventually renders (if it renders at all).
Will hosting my AEM site inside China fix the problem?
Onshore hosting can reduce the physical distance between the user and the server, but proximity without compatibility is like a super-highway to a roadblock. This means if third-party resources remain incompatible, the site will still under-perform without additional optimizations.
No. You can bolt Chinafy onto your existing Adobe stack and launch a China-optimized version in about two weeks, with no code rewrites or re-hosting required. Rebuilding your site for China and securing an ICP license along with other prerequisites to onshore hosting can take six months or more and add significant cost.
Note: Some businesses may still require local hosting and an ICP license depending on their operations and business needs. For those, Chinafy can support onshore configurations. Always consult your legal/compliance team as needed.
Do I need an ICP license for an AEM site?
Only if you choose mainland hosting or a China-domestic CDN. ICP filing/license is a legal prerequisite for sites physically hosted in China or using China infrastructure. This is the case for any website, regardless of which CMS or site-building platform you use.
Does adding a China CDN solve AEM performance issues?
A China-based CDN can improve loading speeds as static assets will be delivered from a node closer to the end user. However, as with onshore hosting, a China CDN only solves part of the problem with cross-border China web performance. A CDN does not handle for third-party resources, which are often the primary technical reason why a site performs poorly in mainland China.
How can I test my AEM site’s performance from China?
You can test your site's performance using Chinafy’s グローバル・スピード・テスト または ビジュアル・スピード・テスト to compare load times, TTFB and third-party resources inside vs. outside China.
How does Chinafy optimize AEM sites for China?
- Generates a version of your website for China visitors without affecting your current site.
- Combines both in-person and platform-level features to detect and replace blocked or slow resources that cause loading delays.
- If you're hosting offshore, Chinafy routes China-IP-based traffic to the China-optimized version of your site. If you're already hosting onshore, all your traffic will see the optimized version for China visitors.
- Chinafy then keeps your China-optimized site in sync with your global one, so any content changes are reflected accordingly.
Fill out the form and one of our Chinafy team members will reach out to you within 1 business day to book an initial call or with a plan for next steps.
check30%-40% faster compared to using a CDN alone.
checkVerifiable results in just 2 weeks, instead of 1-2 years.
checkLittle to no action required from your IT teams.