Anyone who has used the Internet from within mainland China has noticed, how foreign websites tend to be clunky and load slowly. Unlike Chinese websites which load much faster, unless you are abroad.

While overcrowded internet and insufficient connections between overseas networks can be blamed. It is often left unnoticed that most foreign websites connect to several tracking websites that are blocked in China. Trying to access several of these servers while loading the website is bound to disturb your browsing experience!

A simple trick that can have a significant impact on your browsing experience is to block all connections to blocked social networking websites, such as Facebook &  Twitter which are used for “analytics” of browsing activity. Also for some reason a user avatar image hosting service “Gravatar”, that almost all WordPress hosted websites use, is being blocked. However, Gravatar can be turned off which is a good idea for WordPress sites that serve mainland visitors.

To get an idea of what I mean. Just look at this list of 26 tracking websites detected by “Ghostery“, that Tripadvisor connects to when you open up their home page. Not all of these are “Analytics” trackers or blocked of course but you can be sure that Facebook and Twitter are on the Chinese ban list. Luckily Google Analytics which is extremely popular on the web seems to have a good working record.

So all you need to do is to Grab the browser extension/add-on, which is available for most major browsers such as Safari, Firefox, Chrome & Internet Exploder. They even have a browser app for the iOS and Android to smoothen your smartphone browsing.

In the settings, simply block all “Analytics” sites to be on the safe side or manually tune it one by one. The ones I mentioned above are the biggest culprits. Turning of all of the trackers can cause many websites not to function properly, disable commenting and so on. So use with care!

Thanks for reading, and comments welcome too!