WP Rocket – WordPress Best Caching Plugin is one of the most popular premium products out there. But is it effective? Is it worth the price you pay? And what difference will it make to your site? This product has consistently been rated as the easiest and fastest way to improve your site’s loading speed. And our full WP Rocket review will explain why.
But why is such a plugin so important to your site?
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Having fast loading pages is the forgotten hero of a website’s success. It’s a critical part of your user experience – people will quickly disconnect if a site they visit is not agile.
Often times when creating an online presence, speed can be sacrificed for the sake of aesthetic design and appeal.
What people don’t always realize is that as long as your website doesn’t look like it’s from the 90’s, has a clean, legible font and size, and has the right colors and layout, your audience will be satisfied.
Remember that your visitors don’t come to your site to admire how beautiful your designs are and how intricate your JS tricks are. They come to your site to fulfill their need for something – be it a need for information or a need for your products and services.
It is important to note that the out-of-the-box WordPress core is fast.
But with tons of plugins and complex themes available to us, it’s tempting to create an attractive website with complex features and leave out one of the most important things: performance – which is second only to its content in terms of importance.
Complex themes (like Divi, see our review) and plugins require multiple CSS and JavaScript files, these usually add several dozen additional files, substantially increasing the size of your page and the number of HTTP requests required, all of which do your pages load more slowly. It is the WordPress Best Caching Plugin.
Not to mention that there are some themes and plugins that are poorly written which could greatly affect the performance of your site.
Fortunately, there are caching plugins that make WordPress sites load much faster. In fact, there are quite a few of them on the market, including some that are very popular.
There are paid and free ones and there are some that offer paid and free versions of their plugin. Some of the most popular ones are W3 Total Cache (the most popular free caching plugin for WordPress), WP Super Cache, Hyper Cache, and WP Fastest Cache.
So why would you want to opt for WP Rocket?
A caching plugin is essential for a WordPress site. Even the free ones will offer noticeable improvements in the loading speed of your site. It really is a must if you want to maximize the potential of your website because 47% of your visitors expect your site to load in about 2 seconds, according to this. investigations. It also states that you can lose up to 79% of your customers if your site takes too long to load.
Speed also affects your SEO ranking. Google made it clear when they said they want to build a better and faster web. So if you don’t pay attention to your site’s loading speed, the repercussions can be severe and your bottom line can be hit hard.
What is WP Rocket? Why WP Rocket is the best caching plugin?
WP Rocket is a WordPress speed optimization and caching plugin. It implements several advanced mechanisms to increase the loading speed of your website, such as several levels of advanced caching, minification, and concatenation through an easy-to-use interface. One of the top-rated caching plugins, priced starting at $ 49. But is it worth it?
WP Rocket is fairly new to the WordPress caching scene compared to its peers that appeared on the scene in 2013, but even though it was a relatively new entrant in a very competitive niche, it still gained significant attention and was it has easily made its way. the top. Many people say that WP Rocket removes every other caching plugin in terms of performance and ease of use.
One of the best caching plugins for WordPress right now is WP Rocket.
So what is the real difference? Unlike most other offerings, this one is extremely simple to set up (it does everything for you automatically without having to fiddle with anything) but incredibly effective at increasing WP speed!
Among some of the few features it offers:
→ Page caching – creates a temporary copy that will be loaded from disk, which is faster than accessing the WordPress database every time
→ Cache preload – does not wait for visitors to create the cache copy, which makes the user experience faster
→Sitemap preload – goes through ALL pages to make sure every important page is always cached
→GZIP compression – compress content for faster download
→Browser caching – set the settings on your server so that static files like images, CSS, and JS can be reused, not downloaded every time
→Database optimization. – clean the WP database of bloat and excess stuff that slows it down
→Google Fonts Optimization – optimizes the download of popular fonts, for faster access in general
→Remove query strings from static resources. – this is a technique that ensures files are cached and measured correctly
→Lazy loading – another technique that ensures heavy images load only if the user scrolls down the page to the particular image, ensuring a more streamlined experience
→Minification / Concatenation – reduces the size and weight of static files by removing useless content and minimizing requests
→Defer JS Load – Push Javascript to the end of the load timeline to ensure the user can see the site is loading quickly. See more here.
→Compatible with Cloudflare – can be integrated with Cloudflare to quickly enable this service
→CDN – seamlessly integrates with content delivery networks like StackPath / MaxCDN, etc.
→DNS pre-lookup – to avoid latency from using third-party services, send a DNS request as soon as the page starts to load
If you see any articles intended to speed up your WordPress installation, you will probably see recommendations are made to install most or all of the above. This plugin does all of this automatically, for you, without you having to do any retouching yourself.
Few of the other plugins can enable a variety of advanced features so easily. Truth be told, you will find many of the other incredibly complex or complicated options to work with that require extensive knowledge of what you are using. You may also need to install multiple plugins that will start to conflict with each other in order to enable all of the above features.
WP Rocket is the opposite, it is incredibly easy to set up, but it is more effective than most other plugins combined.
Setting up WP Rocket
This is the part where we know a lot of you hate the most: settings. It can be time-consuming, especially for a highly functional plugin like WP Rocket.
It is also a waste of time for a user who has more important things to do. How to manage your business.
But complex as it may sound, it is actually very easy to set up. In fact, if you don’t feel like doing anything, you can simply upload the plugin to your website, activate it, enter your license, and voila!
These are the steps you need to follow:
- Visit the website (https://wp-rocket.me), and download the plugin
- Login to your website’s WP manager
- Go to Plugins> Add New
- Install the plugin file you just downloaded
- Activate it and enter your license key
- Walkthrough the setup wizard (optional)
You will already see noticeable improvements even with just the default options enabled.
In this section, we will see what features and options WP Rocket has to offer. We’ll go through everything you have and explain what each setting and option does along with the potential risks you may encounter.
To access the WP Rocket dashboard, you can click the “WP Rocket” menu on the admin bar.
Or you can go to Settings> WP Rocket.
Once you click on that, you will be taken to the dashboard, which will look like the image below if this is your first time activating the plugin.
As you can see, some options are already enabled by default and those options alone will already give you noticeable speed improvements with little to no risk.
However, if you want to maximize WP Rocket while learning a little more about what makes a website faster, go ahead!
If you scroll down a bit, you can see details about your WP Rocket account along with buttons that allow you to clear and regenerate cache files.
Under My Status, you can see two toggle buttons for Rocket Tester and Rocket Analysis.
If you want cutting-edge features (things that are still in development and testing phases), you’ll want to enable the Rocket Tester option. Rocket Analytics, on the other hand, means that it allows the WP Rocket team to collect anonymous data for development purposes.
Under My Status, you can see the FAQs along with a button that takes you directly to their support page. There is also a helpful link to its extensive documentation.
On the right of the panel, you can also access the Quick Actions section where you can clear all cache files.
This is useful if you have just configured or reconfigured WP Rocket, or if you installed a new plugin. You can also force cache preload, regenerate critical CSS, and purge OPCache content.
Generally, you would use these buttons once you’ve changed something on your site and haven’t gotten the results you expected. They are also useful for troubleshooting.
Cache settings
The next section that we are going to explore is the cache settings. You can access this through the menu on the left of the WP Rocket page.
There are only a few settings here. We’ll see.
👉Mobile cache – this must be enabled to speed up your website for mobile device users. This is very important because mobile device users are often on a slower network. Below that is a sub-option called Separate Cache Files for Mobile Devices, which should also be enabled if the desktop and mobile versions of your website have different features enabled depending on the type of device the visitor is accessing from.
👉User cache – if you have a membership site or if you have user registrations enabled, it is a great idea to enable this feature.
👉Cache Lifespan – It’s best to leave this at the default setting unless you can understand the implications of changing those settings (making the time a page stays in cache longer or shorter, which depends on how often you are cached). the one that changes ALL your pages)
File optimization
The next section that we will look at is the File Optimization section. Here, you can configure your HTML, CSS, and JS file optimization settings.
Basic settings
At the top is the Basic Settings where you can:
Minify HTML – Minimizing your HTML removes extra white space and comments, reducing the file size of your page. The smaller the file size of your web pages, the faster they will load.
Merge Google Fonts Files – Instead of making multiple HTTP requests to upload multiple Google Fonts files, this option combines all of your Google Fonts files so that there is only one request to make. However, this option is not completely necessary if your site is running on HTTP / 2. Check with your host if it is using HTTP / 2 and if it is enabled for your site.
Remove query strings from static resources: External files, such as CSS and JS files, often include their version number at the end of their URLs. They look like this: example.com/scripts/jquery.js?ver=1.1. If you enable this option, the URL will look like example.com/scripts/jquery-1.1.js instead of. Although it doesn’t seem like it really offers any logical performance improvements, there are servers and proxies that cannot cache query strings, so they exclude these files from the cache, which obviously affects the performance of your site.
CSS files
The following is the configuration of your CSS files.
Minify CSS files – just like HTML files, remove extra blanks and comments to reduce file size.
Combine CSS files – If you have multiple CSS files to load, it is a good idea to enable this option if your site uses HTTP / 1. This will combine all of your external CSS files into one.
Exclusions – this is important. If you enable any of the above options, they could damage your site. For example, the styles are not applied correctly or, in the worst case, the pages appear blank. If that happens, try excluding any CSS files that you think might be the culprit. Also, don’t forget to use the Quick Actions menu on the WP Rocket home panel to regenerate cache files after making changes.
Optimize CSS delivery: Enabling this option removes CSS that is blocking rendering. This greatly improves the perceived load time, but your page will load without CSS styles for a brief moment the first time it loads in your user’s browser, causing it to display FOUC (unstyled content flash), an instance where a web page appears briefly with the default browser styles.
You can work around this by using critical path CSS. There is detailed information on that in this article. Fortunately, WP Rocket automatically generates Critical Path CSS for your site, but if problems occur, you can use the fallback Critical CSS to provide your own Critical Path CSS, which will be used instead of the auto-generated version if things fail.
JavaScript files
The last one in the File Optimization section is the JavaScript file settings.
👉Minify JavaScript files – this works the same as the previous setting: remove comments and whitespace to reduce file size.
👉Merge JavaScript files – works the same as its CSS counterpart, helping to reduce the number of HTTP requests. Remember, if you are on HTTP / 2, enabling this option is not recommended.
👉Exclusions – These are self-explanatory. Minification and concatenation could break some JS scripts, like its CSS counterpart. Using this feature allows you to control which online and/or external JS files are excluded from the JS optimization options so that you can use WP Rocket’s JS optimization features without breaking your site or having to remove some functionality from it.
👉Loading Delayed JavaScript – deferring your JavaScript improves your load time, which can range from a noticeable improvement to a dramatic improvement depending on the number or size of your JavaScript files. Below this, there is a Safe Mode for jQuery option, which you should never disable unless you have a very good reason to do so.
In the media
Too many media files can seriously slow down a website. If you have a website with many media, then you will want to focus on this section.
Slow charge
Lazy loading can dramatically improve actual and perceived loading time. This is an optimization technique that prevents media files from being processed and downloaded until the user scrolls down to them (or until they are visible in your user’s browser). This reduces the number of HTTP requests and the bandwidth required to load your web page. It is recommended to enable both options if you have videos, iframes, and images.
Emoji Of WordPress Best Caching Plugin
Enabling this option disables the WordPress emoji and uses the built-in emoji of the user’s browser instead. This reduces HTTP requests.
Embeds
Enabling this option removes all forms of feature embedding on your site. You cannot embed content from others and others cannot embed content from you. This also eliminates JavaScript requests related to WordPress embeds. Enabling this is not recommended unless you are sure you don’t need to use any type of content embedding.
WPRocket WordPress Best Caching Plugin Preload
Preloading generates cache files starting from your home page and then all the links found on it. This will be triggered whenever you save changes to WP Rocket, when the cache life expires, or when you manually activate it via the WP Rocket admin toolbar or via the WP Rocket dashboard.
Under Enable preloading you can also choose Enable sitemap-based cache preloading.
You must specify the XML sitemaps that you want to use for preloading. If you have a Yoast SEO XML sitemap (or other sitemap extensions), WP Rocket will automatically detect it and you will have the option to preload it or not. Once these options are enabled, WP Rocket will crawl all the URLs found on your sitemap. If you send it later, you have finished preloading your home page and all the links it contains. If you are concerned about duplication, it is not necessary because any URLs that already have a cache will be skipped.
DNS prior request
Enabling this option allows you to resolve domain names before your user clicks on a link. This can improve performance, especially on mobile networks. It is recommended to get external requests from Google Fonts, Facebook, Google Analytics, Google Ads, etc. to maximize the performance of your site. Note that you must remove this http: from the urls you want to get previously. So for example, https://www.google.com will become //www.google.com instead.
Advanced Rules
In the magazine advanced rules section, you can configure cache exclusions.
Never cache URLs – allows you to specify which URLs should never be cached. It is recommended to exclude the login pages and the shopping cart, as well as other sensitive pages.
Never store cookies – here you can specify the IDs of cookies that, when set in the visitor’s browser, should prevent a page from being cached.
Never cache user agent (s) – If you want to exclude certain user agent strings from seeing a cached page, you can specify them here.
Always purge URL (s) – any URL specified here will be removed from the cache every time you update a post or page.
Cache query string (s) – By default, WP Rocket never caches query strings. But in some cases, you need those query strings. For example, the URL: youritio.com/page/?country=italy contains a query string: “? Country = italy”. As you can see in this example, it could be a crucial piece of information that can help you display the page correct or display the appropriate information to a certain visitor, which in this case a visitor from Italy To exclude this, you will put the country in the Cache Query String (s) box.
database
Over time, your database will grow in size, which could seriously affect the performance of your site.
The larger your database, the longer it will take to complete database queries and searches, which will affect your website loading time. WP Rocket has a tool to clean and optimize your database tables to improve your site performance.
Post cleanup – every time you delete and edit a post, an entry is created in the database. You can clean them by checking these options. However, keep in mind that you will lose revisions or drafts after doing a post-cleanup, so make sure you have everything backed up, just in case.
Comment cleaning – Spam and deleted comments also take up space in your database. Check this option to clean them.
Transient cleanup – Transients are temporary data that can be safely removed. They will regenerate if your theme or plugin needs them again. You can clean only the expired transients or all transients, which should be safe to remove.
Database cleanup – this reduces the overhead of the database tables to reduce their size.
Automatic cleaning – if you want to schedule automatic cleaning, you can do so by checking this option. You can choose between daily, weekly or monthly.
Once you have checked all the desired options, click on the Optimize and the database optimization will begin.
CDN
If you have a CDN, you can configure it here by checking the Enable content delivery network and then put your CDN (s) CNAME (s) in the boxes.
Exclude files from CDN
If you don’t want your CDN to provide certain files, you can put them here.
Heartbeat
Heartbeat API provides a real-time connection and synchronization between your server and the user’s (or his) browser. This API is used to:
Automatic saving and revisions in the post editor
Notifications in WP admin panel
Post-blocking: when someone else is editing a post or page
Real-time data visualization (i.e. charts, sales, analysis by eCommerce plugins, and the like)
The API runs in 15-60 second intervals using the admin-ajax.php file in the WP admin panel, post editor, or interface. While this is certainly useful, there are cases where it can cause server overload depending on your hosting provider, hosting plan, and server type.
If you are running your site on a provider or host that is not that great, you may want to set this option.
You can configure not to limit, reduce activity or completely disable Heartbeat API in the backend, post editor, or frontend. However, keep in mind that it could break or affect certain themes and plugins. Therefore, it is not recommended to monitor your heartbeat, unless you are absolutely desperate for additional performance. Use it as a last resort.
Add-Ons
These are additional plugins that can further improve the performance of your website.
One-click rocket add-ons
This is probably the easiest part of the WP Rocket setup. Just enable or disable the plugins to enable or disable them. No settings are needed and most of them are self-explanatory.
Rocket add-ons
At the time of writing, there are two Rocket plugins available: Cloudflare and Sucuri.
Cloudflare – By toggling this option, you will need to provide your Cloudflare account email, global API key, and domain. This will allow you to clear the Cloudflare cache and apply the optimal WP-Rocket settings for Cloudflare.
Sucuri – By toggling this option, you will need to provide your Sucuri API key so that when you clear the WP-Rocket cache, the Sucuri cache is cleared as well.
Cloudflare
Under Plugins, you can configure your Cloudflare settings.
Cloudflare Credentials – You must provide your global API key, account email, and zone ID for the Cloudflare plugin to work.
Cloudflare Configuration:
Development mode – this will temporarily suspend Cloudflare’s edge minification and caching, which takes 3 hours. This is useful if you are editing cached content like CSS, JS, HTML files, etc.
Optimal Configuration – WP Rocket automatically configures your Cloudflare with the perfect settings for maximum compatibility and performance.
Relative Protocol – If you have Cloudflare’s flexible SSL feature enabled, enable this option.
Cloudflare Cache – This allows you to clear your Cloudflare cache without having to log into your Cloudflare account dashboard.
Image optimizations
This is more of a plugin than the WP-Rocket feature itself. Basically, this will allow you to connect your Imagify account to WP-Rocket so that you can optimize your images by compressing them without noticeable losses. This will offer significant performance improvements, especially if you are using tons of images on your site.
Imagify is also created and maintained by the same people who develop WP-Rocket.
The tool
Finally, we have the tools section. Here, you can import and export your current WP-Rocket configuration, which is useful if you want to try things out and aren’t sure if something will break or go crazy. There is also the Rollback feature that allows you to roll back to the previous major versions of WP-Rocket in case you suddenly experience problems after updating to the latest one.
And we’ve surpassed everything WP-Rocket has to offer! As you can see, there are tons of powerful features that you can play with. Some are risk-free, others require intensive testing to make sure nothing breaks after activating.
Although there are so many functions and they may seem too complex, especially for the untrained, they are actually very easy to understand. There are descriptions for everything and there are helpful links pointing to their extensive documentation that thoroughly covers a single option along with the potential risks that may be involved if you recklessly activate them.
With tons of features available, are they available for other caching plugins as well? Let’s see the comparison with some of the most popular on the market.
WP Rocket Feature Comparison
WP Rocket has so many basic and advanced features compared to its peers. For comparison, here is a table that compares WP Rocket to other popular WordPress caching plugins in terms of features offered.
Off the list, only W3 Total Cache can stand up to WP Rocket in terms of the number of features, although it is incredibly complex and complicated to work with, so let’s put them against each other in the next section.
W3 Total Cache vs WP Rocket
Now here comes the dilemma.
Why pay for a premium plugin when there is a popular free plugin that seems to do the same thing? We are talking about W3 Total Cache, one of the most popular WordPress caching plugins and one of the oldest and most tested on the market. It has never failed to deliver good results to most websites.
Let’s look at a brief comparison of WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache and see if WP Rocket is worth paying for.
Setting
This is where WP Rocket wins against W3 Total Cache hands down.
In fact, WP Rocket doesn’t need any configuration. It comes out of the box.
W3 Total Cache, on the other hand, requires you to adjust its settings before it actually becomes usable. At the very least, you can improve your performance, but without knowing which settings to configure or which option to toggle, you won’t be able to maximize your performance.
Sometimes, in fact, you can make it worse, due to conflicts between various technologies that can be enabled!
Above is the screenshot of the W3 Total Cache configuration. That’s just a preview of how many settings you would have to configure. In addition to that, each page contains dozens of options to configure. It does not end there. W3 Total Cache requires you to be able to play with its server and other advanced hosting features in order to use all it has to offer, as seen below.
If you are not familiar with these, you will have to ask someone else to do it for you, or you can look up tutorials online, although that would be time consuming and effortless. There is also the risk of messing things up that could harm your site. This list goes on, from editing your .htaccess to installing / enabling other PHP modules.
Pricing and support
W3 Total Cache wins here just because it’s free. However, its complexity can be a deciding factor. On top of that, some of its advanced features can only be unlocked by upgrading to the pro version, which costs $ 99 / year and can only be used for a single site. Also, it doesn’t matter if you are using the free or pro version, you will still have to pay for the premium support.
WP Rocket, on the other hand, starts at $ 49 per year and you can get an infinite site license (you can use the license for as many sites as you want) for just $ 299 a year. This includes premium support, which is often praised by its users as one of the best out there.
Performance- WPRocket wordpress Best Caching plugin
W3 Total Cache is outperformed by WP Rocket and proven with multiple tests, which we will cover in the next section.
Results vs Alternatives
Is WP Rocket Really The Best Caching Plugin for WordPress? Are all those options we’ve discussed before just for show? AThemes ran a full test comparing WP Rocket to other popular plugins and here are the results:
Fountain WordPress Best Caching Plugin
The image above represents the average load time improvement for each plugin in percentage. You can see that W3 Total Cache and WP Rocket are far from each other. The second, Comet Cache, is not actually completely free, most of its features are locked behind its PRO version.
The graph below shows the loading time improvement through the GTMetrix results.
Fountain
And the latter shows an improvement in load time through Pingdom results.
Fountain
The clear winner is WP Rocket, which beat all plugins in the test. If you compare W3 Total Cache and WP Rocket, the difference is clear. Now that WP Rocket has been proven to be currently the best caching plugin for WordPress today, let’s take a look at the pricing.
Prices of WPRocket WordPress Best Caching Plugin
While WP Rocket is not free and does not have a free trial, the price of $ 49 a year is cheap enough (that’s about $ 4 a month!) If we were to consider its ease of use and the number of features that have. has to offer.
There are actually 3 plans that you can buy, as you can see above.
👉Single ($ 49)
👉Plus (for 3 websites, the third site is free – $ 99)
👉Infinite (unlimited websites) at $249
If you need to use it for up to 3 sites you can get a 3 site license for just $ 99 a year, or if you are a web developer or designer or you own dozens of other WordPress sites you can even get an infinite license for just $ 199 year. The infinite license allows you to use WP Rocket on all the websites that you own (or that you do not own, such as your client’s sites) without limitation.
They even offer a 50% discount on license renewals, so it’s actually cheap in the long run.
Keep in mind that a fast website does wonders for your business. So the amount of traffic and sales / leads you will get from making your site faster and optimized through WP Rocket is worth the price.
Even if your license expires, you can still use the plugin; All of its functionalities will still work, but you won’t have access to future support and updates, which could be great if you want to take a break from your website while keeping it blazing. Quick. If you ever wanted to go back, you can buy a new license and you will have access to support and updates once again.
Another of the best things about WP Rocket, aside from its real-world performance, is its support, which is often praised by its users. So the price tag of $ 49 a year is really worth it.
WP Rocket Coupon / Discount Code of WordPress Best Caching Plugin
We mentioned that license renewals are currently offered at a 50% discount, but you can still save even on your first purchase. We are not aware of any current offerings, but please check below for seasonal discounts.
Click here for the lowest price
Get a faster website in a few clicks
Testimonials
WP Rocket has been proven to be the best caching plugin for WordPress today. Companies like Yoast, WP Engine, AdminColumns, and Site Ground recommend it.
Chris Lema, a prominent blogger, even said that WP Rocket is the best cache plugin for WordPress. He said:
“If you compare WP Rocket to W3 Total Cache, you will quickly determine that you don’t need an online course to set it up. I know that W3TC is amazing for people who are experts in using the product, but most of the people I talk to are not those experts. “
Which basically highlights the simplicity and ease of use that WP Rocket has.
To further solidify this is Facebook Comments on your page. Some of the reviews are as follows:
Click here to see more testimonials
Also, note that many WordPress-centric dedicated and managed hosts don’t allow plugin caching because they conflict with your server’s design and architecture, but what WP Rocket does is that it “works and doesn’t compete with “The server caching technologies that you are dedicated to. WordPress Hosts Offer. They have gone to great lengths to make WP Rocket compatible with many different vendors and these vendors often recommend WP Rocket as the go-to solution for plugin caching.
Conclusion
You now have a great understanding of how WP Rocket works, as well as the features it has to offer. You have seen that it is a cheap and reliable plugin that can help you optimize your website so that it can rank higher in search results and satisfy your target audience.
We give this plugin a 4.9-star rating, not because we find something wrong with it, but because we think there is always room for a little improvement.
If you really want to improve your website performance, the obvious answer is to use WP Rocket today!
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