Installing a cache plugin on your WordPress website is one of the most effective strategies to optimize its loading times. Even slashing a few milliseconds from your loading times can improve conversion rates and search engine rankings.
If you’ve been considering using a cache plugin to speed up your WordPress site, WP Rocket is a name you’ve definitely heard across. It’s a plugin that’s said to produce excellent outcomes with little effort. Is it, however, the best caching plugin for your website?
In this review, we’ll assist you in answering that question. We’ll offer you everything you need to make an informed choice on whether WP Rocket is the best approach to enable caching on a WordPress website by reviewing the features, researching the user experience, and sharing the results of installing this plugin on our test sites.
What Is WordPress Caching and How Does It Work?
This section of our study will rapidly get you up to speed if you’ve heard that WP Rocket can speed up your WordPress website but aren’t sure how. Feel free to skip to the next section if you’re already familiar with the notion of WordPress caching or don’t care how it works.
To put it another way, when someone views a page on your website, a lot of data is passed back and forth between the server, the WordPress software, and the WordPress database in order to dynamically construct the webpage that the user has requested. As you might expect, this slows things down — particularly if you’re utilizing a low-cost budget hosting plan.
Caching can be used to produce a static version of your site and its content to speed things up. Instead of being generated dynamically, the static material is displayed each time someone visits the site. Visitors should see faster loading times because the static version of the information takes less time to show.
Aside from enhanced site speed, there should be no additional differences between dynamic and cached static content for visitors to detect. If you make any modifications to your website, such as adding new material or changing the design, the finest caching plugins will automatically update the cached files, ensuring that the static copies of the content are always current.
On a WordPress Website, How Do You Enable Caching?
Choosing a web host that includes caching as part of their hosting package or installing a caching plugin are the two major choices for implementing caching on your WordPress website. For maximum site speed, depending on your web host, you may be able to utilize your preferred caching plugin in conjunction with their in-house caching technology.
Caching is a well-known and well-proven method of making WordPress load quicker, but is WP Rocket the correct choice for your site? Let’s find out right now…
WP Rocket is a WordPress plugin that enables caching on websites in order to improve loading speeds. WP Rocket offers some other features that can help websites load faster, which we’ll go over in this review.
While there are a number of excellent free WordPress caching plugins available, WP Rocket is a commercial solution that starts at $49. However, once you’ve completed reading our evaluation, you’ll know whether or not WP Rocket is worth your money.
Can Wp Rocket Really Improve Performance?
Before we get into what this plugin can do and how it works, if all you care about is whether WP Rocket will speed up your website, the short answer is yes, based on our experience.
After using this plugin on three different sites, all of them noticed speed improvements ranging from 530 milliseconds to 1.5 seconds, or a 15 to 82 % improvement.
As a result, if money isn’t an issue, buying WP Rocket is definitely the best option. For the rest of you, this review will help you determine whether or not buying this premium caching plugin is a wise investment, or if you should save your money and go elsewhere.
Here are the best features of WP Rocket to assist you to make that selection.
WP Rocket’s Features
When it comes to choosing a caching plugin for your WordPress website, the most important consideration will most likely be whether or not it reduces your site’s loading times.
However, it’s also crucial to know if you’ll be able to properly configure the plugin to achieve the best outcomes from it, in addition to the potential gains in site speed.
So, with that in mind, let’s start with an overview of the WP Rocket user experience before diving into its core features.
WP Rocket was created to stand out from the pack by making caching as simple as possible, so anyone, regardless of technical ability, can start speeding up their WordPress website.
WP Rocket, on the other hand, seeks to appeal to power users by giving them enough tools and settings to enable caching on their website exactly the way they want it.
Easy to use
WP Rocket was created to stand out from the pack by making caching as simple as possible, so anyone, regardless of technical ability, can start speeding up their WordPress website.
WP Rocket, on the other hand, seeks to appeal to power users by giving them enough tools and settings to enable caching on their website exactly the way they want it.
WP Rocket’s user-friendly dashboard makes activating and managing caching for WordPress websites a breeze. Furthermore, the plugin will begin caching your site as soon as it is activated, which will reduce loading times.
If you’re unsure whether you have the technical skills to properly speed up your WordPress website using caching, you can start optimizing your site with WP Rocket if you can install and activate a plugin.
The WP Rocket plugin dashboard is simple to use and browse.
There are video guides that cover all of the functionality of WP Rocket if and when you’re ready to go beyond using it in its default state. These guides will not only show you how to utilize these capabilities, but they will also help you understand how WP Rocket works and what it can achieve.
These videos, which you can view from your WordPress dashboard, explain what WP Rocket does by default and how to best configure the plugin for your site.
When it comes to adopting a more hands-on approach to optimizing your website with WP Rocket, the dashboard settings and controls are well-organized, with clear explanations shown inside the plugin’s user interface. As a result, if you wish to activate extra features like mobile caching or HTML and CSS file minification, you can easily do so.
COMPATIBILITY WITH CDN
Another effective technique to speed up your website is to use a content delivery network (CDN) to distribute your website files around the world. As a result, it’s encouraging to note that WP Rocket is compatible with the majority of CDN providers.
So, whether you’re using a CDN included with your hosting plan or you’ve signed up for one separately, you should be able to combine it with WP Rocket to increase the performance of your site even further.
OPTIMIZATION OF THE MEDIA
WP Rocket includes some options to aid with this potential problem, as huge picture files can slow down your website.
To begin, the plugin offers an optional LazyLoading feature that allows users to delay the loading and display of images and videos until they have scrolled down to their desired point on the page. This is in contrast to the browser automatically loading all of the media files as soon as the page is displayed.
LazyLoading delays the loading of photos and other content until the visitor reaches that section of the page.
The WP Rocket team has also built Imagify, a free image optimization plugin that compresses your website photos to reduce file sizes and speed up loading times.
OPTIMIZATION OF THE DATABASE
Your WordPress database will increase with time, potentially slowing down your site. WP Rocket includes various database optimization options to aid with this, including the ability to clean up old post revisions, drafts, and trashed posts, as well as deleted or designated as spam comments.
MINIFICATION
WP Rocket may help reduce the size of other files, such as JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files, in the same way, that it can help reduce the size of picture files.
WP Rocket may remove unneeded whitespace, comments, line breaks, and additional characters from code in the files that make up your website using the optional minification tool.
Once these files have been compressed, they should use less bandwidth and load faster when requested, offering you another opportunity to increase the speed of your website in addition to caching.
CACHING AND MOBILE DETECTION
With an increasing number of people visiting websites via smartphones and other mobile devices, it’s encouraging to discover that WP Rocket can optimize your site for this demographic.
You can enable caching for mobile devices and create separate cache files for mobile devices with these settings, which will assist to speed up loading times for smartphone and tablet users.
FRIENDLY TO ECOMMERCE
WP Rocket should perform with your selected e-commerce plugin whether you’re running an online store or selling a few products from your WordPress website.
WP Rocket assures that your consumers won’t have any issues while you’re speeding up your site by automatically excluding the view cart and checkout pages from the cache.
CACHE LIFESPAN CUSTOM
Although WP Rocket automatically clear the cache anytime new material is published on your website or you make other changes to your site, you can also empty the cache yourself or set the plugin to erase the cache files at regular intervals to ensure your visitors always see the most up-to-date version.
EXCLUDE CONTENT FROM THE CACHE
Some portions of a WordPress website, such as the login page or a shopping cart, should not be cached. While WP Rocket will automatically exclude these URLs from its cache, you may also specify any other URLs you don’t want WP Rocket to cache.
COMPATIBILITY WITH WEB HOSTING
Depending on the webserver you use, WP Rocket may or may not operate on your website. Some parts of WP Rocket may be automatically deactivated to ensure compliance with the way your host caches your website, as many hosts have their own in-house caching system.
WP Rocket is the only cache plugin allowed by WP Engine, and we found that utilizing WP Rocket with WP Engine provided an advantage in our tests. This was likewise the case when we used WP Rocket with BlueHost, Hawkhost, Stablehost, and Hostgator.
On the WP Rocket website, there’s a helpful comparison table that shows how WP Rocket’s features compare to those of some of the other popular WordPress caching plugins. Keep in mind, however, that because this table was prepared by the WP Rocket team, it may not give the whole picture about what the other plugins can achieve.
RESULTS OF WP ROCKET SPEED TESTING
We tested the performance of a few other WordPress websites to see if their loading speeds improved after activating WP Rocket to help you decide if it’s the best caching plugin for your site.
We enabled a few of WP Rocket’s additional features, such as file and image optimization through the user-friendly dashboard, which all WordPress users will be able to do.
WP Rocket was first put to the test on a brand fresh WordPress installation. The best-seller Avada theme was activated on the site once WordPress was installed, and the Agency demo was imported. Pingdom tracked the site’s homepage, which included videos, animations, and other components, for 24 hours to determine its average load time, which was 1.78 seconds.
WP Rocket was installed and activated on the test site after the average load time was recorded, and some of its capabilities were enabled using the plugin control panel. Pingdom was used to track the speed of the homepage for another 24 hours to observe if WP Rocket affected the average load time.
WP Rocket Pricing:
WP Rocket is a premium WordPress caching plugin, and there are three purchasing options and Save 20% OFF From March 15 to March 22, 2022.
DISCOUNT
20% OFF on new WP Rocket licenses:
• $39.20 (instead of $49) for Single – 1 website.
• $79.20 (instead of $99) for Plus – 3 websites.
• $199.20 (instead of $249) for Infinite – unlimited websites.
No coupon code required.