How To Keep WordPress Vulnerability Threats Away With Incapsula?

Incapsula

8.5

Easy to use

8.8/10

Settings

9.2/10

Price

7.0/10

Overall quality

8.9/10

Pros

  • Offers protection against SQL injection
  • Enhances website’s performance by using a global CDN
  • Interface is easy to understand and use
  • Good security options in the free version
  • Does not require name server change

Cons

  • Blocked user have no way of notifying site owner of false positives
  • Advanced performance options only available starting from $59/mo
  • Support pages and support forum still a bit lacking in volume

If you own or manage a WP website, your two biggest concerns should be to keep WordPress vulnerability and threats away while making it faster. Using Incapsula, a cloud-based service, these goals can be fully met. Setup is simple and without installing hardware or software.

Incapsula service protects and accelerates websites. The service includes a bot detection technology to identify and filter malicious bots, a PCI-certified Web Application Firewall (WAF) to provide Enterprise-grade website security against malicious attacks and hackers, and a content delivery network (CDN) to accelerate websites.

Since this application runs on the cloud and doesn’t use any of your system resources, your site will run smoothly for your visitors, and you will still receive advanced protection.

With Incapsula, you can have basic security protections and performance enhancements for free, or a robust set of protective services for a monthly fee depending which pricing plan you pick.

 

Keep WordPress Vulnerability Threats Away

When you sign up for Incapsula, your website traffic is routed through its globally distributed network of authoritative servers. Your inbound traffic is intelligently profiled in real-time. Latest web threats (e.g., SQL injection attacks, scrapers, malicious bots, comment spammers) are blocked.

On higher level pricing plans, you can protect your site from DDoS attacks. Your outbound traffic is increased thanks to the Incapsula CDN and Optimizer features.

Incapsula has also developed special software to monitor outbound traffic and help you detect any pre‑existing backdoors in your website. It’s called Backdoor Protect. Many features are provided for free. But for better security settings, you will need to pick one of paid pricing plans.

 

How Incapsula Works?

When you sign up for Incapsula, you will get easyto follow directions to change website’s DNS records in order to route the traffic through Incapsula’s global network of data centers.

After you make neccesary DNS changes, the incoming traffic is profiled in real-time by Incapsula. This allows Incapsula to block all threats to the website. Meanwhile, the outgoing traffic is accelerated and optimized by Incapsula CDN (Content delivery network).

Incapsula offers a complete demonstration site which you can browse. The site is a copy of an actual Incapsula account showing all of its services. Demo does not allow you to actually use the interface.

There is much more to Incapsula than just redirecting traffic flow via DNS changes.

Features list includes:

  • Bot protection: The service prevents automated malware from botnets
  • Access control: Clients, countries, ISPs, and IP addresses can be blacklisted
  • Login protection: Adds layers of protection to the login process and can validate using email, SMS and Google Authenticator
  • Web application firewall: Incorporates a NGFW that can protect from numerous attacks, including SQL injection, backdoor intrusions, XSS, and remote file injection
  • SSL support: Includes the capabilities to enforce SSL encryption
  • CDN: Place resources as close as possible to users, helping to balance loads while reducing latency
  • Performance enhancements: The service combines technologies such as dynamic content caching, dynamic content compression, pre-pooling, and progressive image rendering
  • DDoS protection: Incapsula uses automatically triggered network-level and application-level protection
  • Load balancing and failover: Layer 7 load balancing allowis loads to be balanced dynamically across multiple resources
  • Real-time and automated monitoring: Incapsula Enterprise provides dashboard-based monitoring of resources in real time

Accessing features is straightforward. The design of the management console makes it easy to navigate features and perform changes.

 

wordpress ddos attack

 

The primary dashboard offers a real-time view into performance showing the amount of traffic and where access is occurring.

All of the elements on the dashboard can be further customized using menu selections. You can tweak settings and redefine rules to further enhance performance and leverage the value offered by the service. Extensive security reporting provides insight into incidents, giving the necessary information into attacks.

 

wordpress bot protection

 

Incapsula offers its IncapRules proprietary scripting language, which allows administrators to create custom safety and access control rules.

Learning the scripting language and defining rules comes with a steep learning curve, but a rules editor offers a shortcut into rules definition by providing pulldowns for conditions and Boolean logic controls to determine what rules should accomplish.

The result is the ability to leverage granular control over application security, something rarely offered by hosted application security services.

From a performance perspective, Incapusla offers many different options and controls. The management console uses simple dialog boxes to control the caching modes with just a mouse click.

The overall caching policy choices include static caching, dynamic caching, aggressive caching and no caching at all. Rules and policies can also be defined to control content caching. Other performance options include content optimization, content minification, TCP pre-pooling and a few other capabilities.

 

wordpress load balancing

 

Performance is a key concern for those making resources available via the cloud. Incapsula offers a comprehensive threat dashboard which makes easy to deploy security policies.

Administrators can define whitelists and blacklists, block IPs, control the aggressiveness of security services, and set the rules for protecting web applications. You get real-time notifications when there is an issue with your site. You can also see all reports and the traffic statistics.

 

What Is Incapsula Enterprise?

Incapsula Enterprise is an excellent choice for those looking to move load balancing and application security over to the cloud.

Pricing for the Enterprise level of service requires a call to the company. The “Business+” package is available for $299 per site per month but lacks key features such as load balancing, failover, and monitoring.

Understanding the value of Incapsula Enterprise requires a deeper look into the technology. One of the best examples of Incapsula Enterprise’s value is the ease with which the service can be deployed.

Moving a website and its associated applications over to the Incapsula is simple if you follow the instructions given by an easy to understand setup wizard. Setup basically consists of adding an existing website to the service by entering the URL.

Once the URL is entered, Incapsula automatically scans the site for any needed host, DNS and IP information. After scanning completes, you are offered instructions on how to change DNS records to activate the service. Once you change DNS settings, the service will start to work automatically, and your site will get all security benefits.

 

Incapsula Security Tools

With Incapsula you get online website security that covers all of the bases. SQL injection is a method hackers use to enter their own malicious code in a website’s programming.

The hacker can then make changes to your website and collect your users’ passwords and credit card numbers. Incapsula protects you from such attempts.

Some of the other important features Incapsula includes that should be part of any good website security service, are cross-site scripting security, comment spam protection, and malicious bot blocking.

Cross-site scripting is when hackers can use scripts to get access to your private information. It is critical to have a website security service that protects sensitive information like credit card or account numbers.

If you have a section of your website that relies on customer comments, you will want a service that provides comment spam protection. Incapsula offers your site protection against comment spam.

Malicious bots as well harvest email addresses or embed viruses and worms. Not exactly what you want to be known for when people visit your website. With Incapsula the bots are kept from your site, so your customers don’t have to worry.

Advanced security settings in Incapsula dashboard give you complete control over the security for your website.

Incapsula has support for SSL sites. SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer. It is a type of secure website that starts with “https” instead of the more commonly used “HTTP.” This is an important feature for security. Especially if you operate an online shop. Check my tutorial how to add free SSL certificate to WordPress website if you still don’t have SSL installed.

 

Incapsula Performance Features

Not only do you keep the performance you already had, but your performance is improved. You don’t have to worry about slow page loading thanks to CDN, caching, minification and compression features.

 There are a variety of ways they give you website performance, one of which includes a global CDN. A content delivery network (CDN) uses a variety of servers to spread out the impact on the site thus decreasing the loadtime.

 It reduces bandwidth and helps with data caching. Caching is the process of temporarily storing information so if it is requested again it doesn’t take as long to load on the page.

 You may have noticed that when you go to a website that you’ve already visited it doesn’t always take as long to load as it did the first time. This is because of caching.

 Compression works similarly. It makes the files smaller, so they don’t take as much time to load. Especially if you use image compression (check best free WordPress image optimization plugins).

Content minification will remove all unnecessary characters from your source code. This won’t change how your website functions. When you eliminate the unnecessary characters there is less data to transfer, which translates into faster loading times.

 

Incapsula Help and Support

For most people, including me, support is very important part of any service. It is normal to expect top support and fast answers if you pay for tools or services. Especially if you pay high amounts.

Incapsula offers a community so you can communicate with other people who are also using Incapsula services. This is an excellent way to get tips about improving your website for maximizing performance.

There are also videos that give an introduction to the various parts of the service.  If you need to get in touch with anyone they provide an email address and phone support depending which pricing plan you use.

 

Which Incapsula Pricing Plan to Choose?

If you have a low traffic personal website, you can sign up for Incapsula’s Free plan.

To get all optimization features like enterprise-grade Web Application Firewall, live stats, advanced caching features or if your website has SSL, you should you sign up for the Pro plan.

The Business plan would be best for limited DDoS Protection or if your site has custom SSL. For unlimited bandwidth, premium support, DDoS protection with load balancing, or multiple websites you need to contact Incapsula to get a quote for the Enterprise plan.

 

wordpress load balancing

wordpress waf

wordpress failover

wordpress ssl support

 

Incapsula Pros & Cons

Here are advantages and disadvantages of using Incapsula service on your website:

PROS

  • Offers protection against SQL injection
  • Enhances website’s performance by using a global CDN
  • Interface is Easy to understand and use
  • Good security options in the basic FREE version
  • Does not require name server change

 

CONS

  • Blocked user have no way of notifying site owner of false positives
  • Advanced performance options only available starting from $59/mo
  • Support pages and support forum still a bit lacking in volume

 

Incapsula vs Cloudflare vs Akamai vs MaxCDN vs KeyCDN

wordpress-cdn-providers-comparison
  • Content delivery network
  • Protection against the largest volumetric attacks
  • Full application-layer visibility
  • Mitigation of attacks against DNS servers
  • Protection of non-web infrastructure services
    (FTP, SMTP, VOIP, etc.)
  • Detection and mitigation of Application Layer attacks
  • Instant customization and propagation of security rules
  • Real-time visibility and control
  • Protection of origin IP addresses against DDoS attacks
  • External DDoS attack monitoring for network infrastructure
  • Compression and minification
  • Content and network optimization
  • Caching of both static and dynamically generated content
  • Serving cached resources directly from physical memory
  • Secondary level caching on SSD's for real-time cache updates
  • PCI-compliant Web Application Firewall (WAF)
  • Access Control
  • IP reputation-based monitoring system
  • Self Service Customization of security rules
  • 60-second security rule propagation
  • Backdoor protection to guard against malware infection
  • API Integration
  • Two factor authentication to prevent stolen passwords
  • Global server load balancing
  • Application layer Local server load balancing
  • Application layer site failover
  • Real-time application layer health monitoring
  • Application delivery rules
    (e.g. redirections based on cookies, header, etc)
  • Ticket System
  • Phone support
  • HTTP/2 Support
    HTTP/2 is the latest evolution of the HTTP protocol, which offers significant improvements to website load speeds and responsiveness.
  • Data Centers
  • Origin-Pull
  • Push (upload to CDN servers)
  • Purge/Purge all
  • Gzip
  • Honors all origin server headers
  • Can override origin server headers
  • Set caching headers for pushed files
  • Custom CNAMEs
  • HTTPS
  • Hotlink Protection
  • Live chat
  • Free backups
  • Integration with WordPress
  • Price
incapsula-vs-maxcdn-vs-cloudflare-vs-akamai
  • Incapsula
  • Always-on
  • 30
  • Resend from origin, or compress on edge
  • Shared certificate is free on all except free plan.
  • Shared certificate is free on all except free plan.
  • Integrates independently of WordPress. You need to change DNS settings. You will get all instructions in email and on Incapsula dashboard.
  • Free and paid plans
    A free plan includes bot protection, access control, login protect, CDN and Optimizer, website analytics, and community support. A paid PRO plan starts at $59 per month and includes the same features as the free plan, plus SSL support, advanced performance and email support.
cloudflare-vs-maxcdn-vs-keycdn-vs-cdnsun
  • CloudFlare
  • Manual
  • 86
  • Integrates independently of WordPress. You just need to sing up to CloudFlare and then assign new DNS servers to your domain name. CloudFlare picks up from there.
  • Free and paid plans
    They offer a free basic plan suitable for small websites and blogs and paid packages which vary from $20 – $200.
akamai-vs-incapsula-vs-maxcdn
  • Akamai
  • More than 100,000
  • Resend from origin, or compress on edge
  • To get pricing for Akamai's products you need to contact them.
maxcdn-vs-keycdn-vs-cloudflare-vs-cdnsun
  • MaxCDN
  • MaxCDN will start offering DDOS and WAF soon
  • MaxCDN will start offering DDOS and WAF soon
  • MaxCDN will start offering DDOS and WAF soon
  • MaxCDN will start offering DDOS and WAF soon
  • MaxCDN will start offering DDOS and WAF soon
  • MaxCDN will start offering DDOS and WAF soon
  • MaxCDN will start offering DDOS and WAF soon
  • 75
  • The CDN handles the gzipping
  • After setting up your pull zone, you can integrate MaxCDN through the cache plugin. For example W3 Total Cache, Super Cache or WP Rocket.
  • Starting from $9/month to $299/month
    There is also custom per-gigabyte pricing
keycdn-vs-cloudflare-vs-maxcdn-vs-incapsula
  • KeyCDN
  • 25
  • Only if origin server does Gzip
  • After setting you can integrate through the cache plugin. For example W3 Total Cache, Super Cache or WP Rocket.
  • Pay As You Go
    You don't need to buy any packages. Price starts from $0.04 / GB

 

Should I Secure My Website Using Incapsula?

With its ability to optimize, protect and enhance any site in a way that is both fast and cost-effective, Incapsula stands as one of these services that webmasters need to try out at one point.

Incapsula offers security and performance for any website. It can be a high-traffic site, PCI compliant e-commerce site, professional content site or small/ personal website. Making simple DNS settings change, website traffic will be routed through Incapsula’s global network of high-powered servers.

Incoming traffic is intelligently profiled, in real-time, to block the latest web threats ranging from sophisticated SQL injection attacks to malicious bots and comment spammers. Outgoing traffic is optimized and accelerated for fast page loading to keep you and your visitors satisfied.

Concrete benefits:

  •  Safer and better business – Enterprise-grade WAF protects sensitive business information from application attacks
  • Improved performance – By using the Incapsula CDN and by filtering out unwanted bot traffic,you are able to accelerate website and improve the user experience
  • Zero downtime – DDoS attacks are mitigated by Incapsula before reaching your servers, ensuring business continuity while reducing bandwidth costs
  • Transparent mitigation of application level DDoS attacks– Incapsula protects website application from DDoS attacks without any impact on its user base

Enterprise solutions are available to fit the unique needs of large, multi-national, multi-site organizations. A full-featured free version is also available for small and personal websites.

If you want an effective website security and performance service, Incapsula is the best choice. It is one of the few services out there that improves not only security but performance as well.

Incapsula is cloud-based which means you will get top security without sacrificing performance. You can keep your clients and customers safe without them even realizing it. Incapsula is first and foremost about web security, and second about website performance. While CloudFlare is for the masses, Incapsula is for business.


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