Traditional Chinese has no spaces between words, so WordPress's built-in search — which splits on whitespace — treats an entire sentence as one term and returns nothing.
Most of the difficulty is not translation. It is that the assumptions behind search, fonts and text handling were written for space-separated languages.
WordPress splits queries on whitespace. In Traditional Chinese there is none, so a three-word question becomes a single term that matches nothing at all.
A Traditional Chinese webfont is megabytes before subsetting — an order of magnitude beyond a Latin face. Unsubsetted, it is the single slowest asset on the page.
International routes from Taiwan vary considerably by destination. Serving from a nearby edge removes the part of the latency that has nothing to do with your site.
Numbers and Latin letters appear in both widths, and visitors type either. Matching them as the same character is the difference between a search result and an empty page.
Minguo-era dates still appear on official and financial sites, and the lunar calendar drives the traffic peaks. Neither is a formatting default anywhere.
The tell for a foreign-hosted Taiwanese site is rarely the writing. It is a search box that never finds anything and a font that arrives after the text.
The text is ready long before the font that renders it, which is why an unsubsetted CJK face dominates every other cost on the page.
These differ from a standard WordPress site on the same plan, and each follows from Traditional Chinese rather than from geography alone.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Search indexing | Word segmentation for Chinese instead of whitespace splitting | Traditional Chinese is written without spaces, so WordPress's default tokeniser treats a whole query as one term and returns nothing for a perfectly reasonable search. |
| Webfont delivery | Subset to the glyphs the site actually uses, served from the edge | A complete Traditional Chinese face runs to several megabytes, which makes it the dominant cost of a page rather than a rounding error as a Latin font would be. |
| Character width normalisation | Full-width and half-width forms folded together when matching | Numbers and Latin letters exist in both widths and visitors type whichever their input method produces, so treating them as distinct silently halves every search result. |
| Origin placement | Nearest available region with edge caching in front | International routing out of Taiwan varies enough by destination that origin distance shows up in real page timings rather than only in synthetic tests. |
| Date handling | Minguo-era and lunar calendar formats available alongside Gregorian | Official and financial content in Taiwan still uses the Minguo era, and the traffic calendar follows lunar holidays that no default locale accounts for. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Free migration, search that matches Chinese text, and fonts that arrive before the reader gives up.