Recommended Reading: Optimizing Google Web Font Identifying User Location We will be using an alternative font library that mirrors Google Fonts and libraries, but first, we will need to put in some measures to identify users who hail from China. In this post, we will see how to bypass China’s 'digital' Great Wall, so our website can run like it is viewed outside of China.
Chances are that your website may appear partially broken in China because the jQuery and web fonts hosted in Google are inaccessible. The China government closed access to many of Google’s services including Google API in 2014. Unfortunately, that is not the case in China. It is used almost everywhere, and so much so that some users may already have the cache stored in their browser, which makes the libraries load even faster. We are using Google API to serve libraries such as jQuery and Web Fonts because it serves fast through Google’s reliable infrastructures.
