How to Optimize and Accelerate Your Website With Imperva Incapsula

Introduction to Our Imperva Incapsula Series

This is the third of a series of sponsored tutorialscovering Incapsula Website Security and performance services.In this tutorial, I'llintroduce you to Incapsula CDN & Optimizer, showing you how easy it is to increase the speed of your website with its services.

If you'd like to start at the beginning of the series, read part one which provides anintroduction to Incapsula Website Securityand part two, which reviewsIncapsula DDoS Protectionwith special attention to applications hosted byAmazon Web Services.

If you're ready, you can visit theIncapsula websiteand learn more about theplans and pricing optionsas you read through our tutorial series.If you're not quite ready to sign up,Incapsula offers a complete demonstration sitewhich you can browse.The demo site is a copy of anactual Incapsula accountshowing all of its services and functionality, but does not allow you to actually use the interface.If you have more detailed questions already, check out theIncapsula FAQs and Knowledge Base.

Please let me know if you have any requests for future episodes in this series or questions and comments on this tutorial. Either post them below as comments or reach me on Twitter@reifmanoremail medirectly.

Incapsula Optimization Features

With just a few minutes of simple integration steps, Incapsula provides a broad array of performance enhancements to your website.Here are some of the ways Incapsula speeds up your website:

• A network of globally distributed data centers ensures that content is always delivered from a data center close to your users.
• Application-aware Content Delivery Network (CDN) for what they call "Full Site Acceleration," also known as static and dynamic content caching (free for all account levels).
• Dynamic profiling and frequency analysis ensure that your most frequently accessed resources are served directly from physical memory, completely bypassing the file system.
• Maximizing cacheable content with the application-aware traffic analysis technologies which were developed for Incapsula Website Security.
• Sophisticated content and networking optimization which minimizes latency.

The average Incapsula supported website is 50% faster and consumes 40–70% less bandwidth.

You may remember from part onethat the Incapsula network's free subscription levelprovides a content delivery network for you. And, if you use thePro account(available for free with a 14-day trial), there are additional performance optimizations. TheEnterprise accountprovides more sophisticated load balancing features aswell.

The Incapsula Content Delivery Network

Incapsula offers aGlobal CDNto all of its accounts. Its servers are located around the world to optimize content delivery to your site visitors:

The Incapsula application-aware CDN dynamically profiles your website resources and identifies all cacheable content (dynamic and static)—including content that other CDNs are unable to cache. Its dynamic profiling and frequency analysis ensure that the most frequently accessed resources are identified and fetched directly from memory, speeding up content delivery by bypassing the file system.

Here are a few more performance-enhancing features offered to free accounts (we'll review all of these in more detail below):

• Static file compression
• Content minification
• On-the-fly image optimization
• Async validation
• Custom cache headers

Its Pro level plans offer theseAdvanced Performancefeatures:

• Advanced dynamic content caching
• Dynamic content compression
• Purging your cache
• Force additional static resources
• Pre-pooling
• Progressive image rendering
• Image compression

Finally, the Incapsula solution's Enterprise-level plans offer sophisticatedLoad Balancingcapability as well:

Exploring Incapsula Optimization Features

Now, let's walk through the Incapsula administrative interface so you can see how these optimization features are observed and managed. You may remember the Dashboard from part one of our series. It provides you a summary of activity and security issues with your site:

For this tutorial, I chose myLookahead Consultingwebsite. It's a fairly simple WordPress website which I currently host atDigital Oceanand optimize with Varnish and W3 Total Cache; I've written about this inearliertutorials. I integrated the Incapsula solution in just a few minutes and gain all the additional benefits of their security and performance features.Incapsula is a fantastic enhancement to run fast, secure, scalable hosting off any low-cost hosting provider's basic plan.

Incapsula Performance Features

Click on thePerformance navigation to review the benefits of Incapula's optimizations on your website. You can see the percentage of bandwidth that's cached and how much bandwidth you've saved:

To manage these features, click on the Settings button and then thePerformanceicon on the left sidebar:

Content Caching

Incapsula provides four caching modes:

1. Static Content Caching:This can cache your static content, such as HTML files, images or JavaScript resources and allows them to be served directly from the Incapsula network's globally distributed data centers. It also takes the load off your servers for these resources.
2. Dynamic Content Caching: TheIncapsula solution's patent-pending advanced learning continuously profiles website resources, gathering intelligence on each resource. Some of these resources, of course, are dynamically generated, rarely changing over time and for different users. This intelligence allows for optimized caching and ensures resource accuracy. Dynamic caching is only available with paid plans.
3. Serving Pages from Memory: The Incapsula advanced learning and frequency analysis offer the added benefit of identifying the most frequently accessed resources, and serving them directly from physical memory, completely bypassing the file system and other generic mechanisms (such as buffer-cache). This speeds the experience for your customers more than other caching systems might provide.
4. Client-Side Caching: Incapsula optimizes client-side caching by making sure that as much content as possible is cached on the visitor's browser or mobile device. Client-side caching ensures instant loading of resources and the best possible user experience. Based on the same advanced algorithms used for dynamic caching, Incapsula enriches browser caching instructions while setting the right refresh policy, so content always stays fresh—other browser caching products often fail because of their limitations, leaving users with stale content.
   

You can read about these caching modes in more detail atthe Incapsula Global CDN & Caching pageand itsCaching Support page.

Your account level will control which caching modes you have available:

As you scroll down the page, you'll see more advancedContent Optimizationsettings available:

Minification: This is the process of removing all unnecessary characters from source code, without changing its functionality. In JavaScript, CSS and HTML code, these unnecessary characters usually include white spaces, new line characters and comments, often used to add readability to the code but not required for its execution. Incapsula removes these characters, minimizing web page size and weight, and reducing load time.

Image Compression: You can choose the types of image files you want to compress (JPG, PNG). Using aggressive compression for JPG files maximizes performance but may have a minor effect on picture quality. Alternatively, lossless JPG compression keeps the image itself intact, while stripping the metadata embedded in the image. Progressive image rendering allows pages to load more quickly while rendering multiple images in parallel.

"On the Fly" Compression:Common web servers and browsers support content compression; however, configuring server resource compression requires technical expertise and consumes valuable web server processing power. Incapsula dynamically compresses HTML, CSS and JavaScript files stored on its servers "on the fly" using GZIP (and HTTP/1.1 chunked transfer encoding where possible) to accelerate page load times. By compressing your website resources, Incapsula reduces the amount of data sent over the network without the hassle of server configuration.

You can read more about these settings in theIncapsula Content and Networking Optimizationsummary.

Finally, there are a variety of Advanced Settings available to customize as well:

You can addAdvanced Caching Rules to customize caching as shown in the example below:

If you'd like a specific page or set of pages to be cached, it's easy to define a URL matching pattern for them. Similarly, you can exclude pages with the same kinds of patterns.

Purging Your Cache:Whenever you need to, you can purge your entire cache or a specific URL as shown below:

Using the Incapsula API for Caching Control

Incapsula provides an API that enables you to control caching policies in an efficient and automated manner. The API can be used to change caching modes, create custom caching rules, purge the cache, purge a specific resource or configure content optimization settings. The API enables easy integration and is particularly useful for companies managing large numbers of product or country-specific sites.

In Summary

Now that you've covered the series to see all of Incapsula's offering, why not take a look at what Incapsula can do for you?

I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial series enough to giveIncapsulaa try.I've written a number of sponsored tutorials for Tuts+ but I was uniquely impressed with the ease of integration that Incapsula provides while offeringan affordable yet rich set of vital services.

When yousign up for Incapsula,your website traffic is seamlessly routed through its globally distributed network of powerful servers. Your inbound traffic is intelligently profiled in real time, blocking the latest web threats (e.g., SQL injection attacks, scrapers, malicious bots, comment spammers), and with higher-level plans,thwarting DDoS attacks. Meanwhile your outbound traffic is sped up with the Incapsula network's global CDN. A lot of these features are provided for free, and you can try all of it without cost during their 14-day trials.

Incapsula is an impressive service that developers, consultants and publishers should know about.

As always, please feel free to post your questions and comments below. You can also reach me on Twitter@reifmanoremail medirectly.Please check outmy Tuts+ instructor pageto read my other tutorials.

Related Links

• The Incapsula Website
• Incapsula: Global CDN & Optimizer
  
• Incapsula: Content and Networking Optimization
• Incapsula Frequently Asked Questions
  
• The Incapsula Video Channel