Which DXP performs best in China?

Our data does not support ranking them, and that is the finding. Measured across 199 Sitecore sites the never-completing share was indistinguishable across three deployment architectures, and the other platforms we measured individually failed in the same way. Placement and dependencies decide the outcome; the platform choice does not.

Is a headless architecture better for China?

Not on this evidence — 35.0% of headless deployments completed in none of four windows against 33.1% for classic. Headless changes where rendering happens, not which border the requests cross.

What does change the outcome?

Serving from inside mainland China so the requests do not cross a border, decided per resource rather than wholesale — some hosts are genuinely healthy and moving them costs latency for nothing. That arrangement is also what makes the ICP filing a requirement rather than an option.

By the 21YunBox China Engineering Team·Reviewed 2026-08-30·Verified against primary sources

Which digital experience platform works best in China?

On our measurements the platform is not the variable — placement is. The clearest evidence comes from measuring one platform at scale: across 199 public websites carrying Sitecore fingerprints, requested from a probe inside mainland China (Alibaba Cloud cn-zhangjiakou) in four windows over a continuous 17-hour period, 33.2% completed in none of them — and the never-completing share was 33.1% for XP classic, 35.0% for headless and 31.6% for hybrid. Three architectures, the same outcome. Other DXPs we measured individually failed in the same way rather than a different one: optimizely.com answered in 611ms and completed none of three attempts; Adobe properties failed with a protocol-level error rather than a timeout. What separates a working China deployment from a failing one is where the bytes are served from and what the pages depend on, and re-platforming does not change either. Serving from inside the mainland is the arrangement that does — and it is what brings the ICP filing into scope.

What we measured across platforms

Fact	Primary source
Across 199 public websites carrying Sitecore fingerprints, measured from a probe inside mainland China (Alibaba Cloud `cn-zhangjiakou`) in four windows over a continuous 17-hour period on 2026-08-29~30, 113 (56.8%) completed in every window and 66 (33.2%) completed in none. The never-completing share was 33.1% XP classic, 35.0% headless, 31.6% hybrid — deployment shape did not change the outcome.	21YunBox — Sitecore China census, 199 public sites measured across four time windows
Time of day moved completion by only 5.5 percentage points across that day (65.3% at 03:00 to 59.8% at the evening peak), so the dominant share of failure is structural rather than congestion.	21YunBox — Sitecore China census, 199 public sites measured across four time windows
Of 965 distinct third-party hosts observed in that census, 782 never failed and 183 failed at least once. The most consequential were functional dependencies rather than marketing tags — `ajax.googleapis.com` failed 28 of 28 observations and `maps.googleapis.com` 24 of 24.	21YunBox — Sitecore China census, 199 public sites measured across four time windows

Sources verified by the 21YunBox China engineering team on 2026-08-30.

Make Your Digital Experience Platforms Work in China

Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) do not support China by default. With 21YunBox, we bring back your DXP in China with high-speed and fully compliant with Chinese laws.

We've written several dozen posts for making your online presence, apps, web apps, and games work in China using 21YunBox.

Don't see your needs represented here? Send us an email explaining what you do (or are trying to do) and we'll happily write a new one!