This article delves into Imperva CDN, its features, and how you can optimise your set up to consider your audience in and outside of China.

What is Imperva?

Imperva, a cybersecurity and data protection company founded in 2002. One of their offerings is the Imperva Content Delivery Network (CDN), which integrates advanced security features. This includes protection against DDoS attacks, web application vulnerabilities, and other cyber threats, making it a comprehensive solution for businesses seeking both speed and security.

Imperva CDN: How it’s used & key benefits

Enhanced Performance and Resilience

Imperva's Points of Presence (PoPs) are strategically placed in 50 global locations, designed as full-stack solutions. This distribution minimizes the distance between user requests and data, ensuring the lowest possible latency.

Dynamic Content Acceleration (DCA) uses the strong connectivity between Imperva PoPs to enhance response times. Instead of sending website user requests directly to your origin server, the traffic is routed through our network.

The Imperva CDN is built for resilience, providing customers with fast content delivery, enhanced website performance, and comprehensive edge protection.

Secure and Fast Content Delivery

Imperva CDN uses intelligent caching, load balancing, and automated failover to efficiently deliver web applications worldwide. By profiling website resources dynamically, analyzing frequency, and identifying cacheable content (both dynamic and static), the Imperva CDN ensures that frequently accessed resources are fetched directly from memory, improving speed compared to slower access mechanisms like buffer cache.

Imperva not only improves website speed and reliability but also ensures security through its leading Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) platform, protecting against the latest threats. Imperva solutions operate on a globally distributed network of data centers, providing full site acceleration through intelligent caching and content optimization.

Custom Rules Engine

With advanced delivery rules and load balancing algorithms, Imperva’s custom engine allows you to adapt rules to your environment. Featuring options like Response Header Override, the custom rules engine minimizes latency, enhances security, and boosts overall operational performance.

Imperva Waiting Room

Designed to keep your website online during peak times, it allows you to control traffic flow by directing visitors to a virtual waiting room until it's their turn to access the site. This results in an improved user experience, resulting in reduced bounced rates or exits during peak hours.

Imperva CDN Challenges in China

Imperva, although a robust CDN, faces specific challenges in China's digital environment. This is due to the inherent limitations of CDNs, which do not address nor resolve inaccessible or slow 3rd party resources that lead to the accessibility and functionality issues websites face when accessed from China.

What are code-based issues when it comes to China?

Websites have many resources, including widely used libraries, plugins, and more.

Some of these third-party resources are blocked in China (like Google APIs, Vimeo, Youtube, Facebook), while others may simply load slowly.

Relying on a CDN alone will likely mean that some portions of your website might load acceptably fast, but not all of it. In fact, your website may even appear broken or unusable for a visitor coming to your website from China.

How to Achieve Further Optimization with Imperva CDN

It’s clear that Imperva CDN offers many fantastic features, except one: code-based optimization for China.

Traditionally, resolving code-based incompatibility for China requires multiple in-house experts, not to mention a tedious, time, and costly process.

The optimization process includes but is not limited to -

Running website diagnostics and identifying slow and or blocked resources. The list of these resources are not widely available, not to mention, often evolve.

Researching development best practices and service providers in the China web ecosystem.

Setting up monitoring on an ongoing basis, and more…

Not to mention, making a change to optimise for the China website ecosystem may include compromises for the global audience and vice versa. For example, removing Vimeo from your website may negatively impact your global audience while benefiting your China audience.

Considerations may include changing your hosting stack. Should it be hosted in China, this would also require an ICP license, PSB filing and more.

All to say, the manual approach is a partial solution that may be an option for some, but not everyone.

For those looking for a more cost-efficient and lean solution, try Chinafy.

Chinafy is a website optimization platform that intelligently re-engineers websites into their China-friendly version. Chinafy enables Rule-Based Smart Action to resolve slow and inaccessible resources including YouTube/Vimeo embeds, Google Maps and more.

Many users turn to Chinafy even after integrating a CDN into their website, because it goes beyond typical CDN capabilities.

While not a CDN itself, Chinafy incorporates fully-managed CDNs (either in China* and or near-China ) into its platform through partnerships with globally recognized CDN providers.

These partnerships are thoroughly tested for optimal performance in China, with different prerequisites for utilizing various CDN points of presence.

How Chinafy works:

Chinafy creates a 'China-specific' version of your site using publicly accessible HTML, CSS, and JS from your original site.

The Smart Actions feature in Chinafy suggests rule-based modifications, addressing approximately 75% of the most blocked or slow resources. It replaces them with Chinese equivalents or removes blocked resources without a China-compatible replacement, ensuring minimal impact on the website's functionality. Then, Chinafy’s expert engineers create a custom subset of rules for each website - as no website is exactly the same.

Enterprise users have the option to create entirely customized technical stacks based on their needs.

Chinafy automatically incorporates China-friendly infrastructure for your site, including hosting, load balancers for managing traffic, and near-China premium CDN or in-China CDN should onshore hosting prerequisites be met.

The Chinafy version stays automatically updated to match your original site, ensuring timely reflection of any changes. Enterprise users benefit from ongoing change management, such as custom configuration with Imperva CDN or other providers.

By using Chinafy, websites on average become 30%-40% faster compared to relying solely on CDNs near China, as it effectively addresses resource compatibility issues impacting the loading process.

Check out “CDN or Chinafy? Which One Do You Need?”

(*Note: Different CDN platforms have specific prerequisites for use.)

Chinafy for Imperva CDN: PandaDoc Test Study

PandaDoc is cloud-based document management software, aiding in proposal, quote, and contract creation. Pandadoc’s website uses Imperva CDN.

We’ve run a page comparison test versus its Chinafy-optimized version and here are the results:

In the one-page comparison, the findings indicate problems with the site's consistency in its current state. With Chinafy, PandaDoc’s website loads efficiently in 4 seconds.

Ready to optimize your website for China? Click Get Started to evaluate your website with Chinafy.