WP Rocket Review Summary
Pro’s:
- Great Results with a few adjustments to the settings
- Easily export and import settings to a new website
- Lazy Loading for iframes, images and videos
- Great documentation and videos to help new users
Con’s:
What Is Website Caching?
WP Rocket does a great job at speeding up your WordPress website. If you’re already familiar with WordPress caching, then feel free to skip to the next section of the review.
YouTube Video from WP Eagle explaining what browser cache is and why it’s important.
Basically, when someone visits one of your web pages, files and data are exchanged between the web server, WordPress and the database to create the content for the page the visitor requested. There can be multiple requests to display your theme and load in required files for your plugins. This unfortunately slows down your site.
To speed up your website, we can use caching that creates a file with the generated content of your page alojg with the corresponding HTML tags. Whenever you have a website visitor, instead of having to load your content from the database, WP Rocket serves the cached content, which typically loads faster.
Apart from website performance improvements, visitors should not see any differences between the dynamic content and the content from the cache. If you make any changes to your website’s pages, like posting new content or updating existing pages, the best caching plugins will automatically regenerate the cached files so the content is up to date.
What is WP Rocket?
WP Rocket is a premium caching plugin for WordPress. WordPress experts recognise it as the most powerful caching tool. Thanks to its wide range of options and automatic optimisation features, it can be easily used by experienced WordPress users as well as beginners.
WP Rocket caching ensures websites will load blazing fast, which is essential to improve SEO rankings and increase conversions. We’ve aimed to make it the most user-friendly caching plugin around, with the easiest set up.
Ed Herzog showing a demo of WP Rocket 3.6
- Generates static HTML cached files
- Makes full use of web browser and device file caching
- Adds Cross-Origin support for external web fonts
- Adds support for various 3rd Party plugins and themes for WordPress
- Can easily combine inline and 3rd party script files
- WooCommerce support that automatically excludes certain WooCommerce pages from the cache to avoid issues
There are tons of settings for you to customise the caching plugin for your individual needs. The features you get from one plugin is amazing and the plugin is 100x better than free alternatives. Every cost to a small business has to be justified, and we would always recommend prioritising website speed improvements.
- Image lazy loading, where the website only loads images in the current view and then fetches the other images on demand when the user scrolls down the page.
- Preload your XML sitemaps, which tell search engines what pages, posts and products you have on your website.
- Prefetch fonts hosted locally on your website and external Google Fonts. WP Rocket will cache these so they load faster on subsequent page loads
- Minifying and compressing your CSS and JavaScript files.
- Provides the option to defer the loading of JavaScript files.
- Database optimisation and more…
Included Add-Ons For WP Rocket
Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics
WP Rocket adds support for Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Varnish Cache, Cloudflare and Sucuri services. You may not need any of these, but they are vital if you are running paid ads. Activating some of these options will allow you to correctly track visits and conversions without them being cached.
WP Rocket Speed Test Results
When it comes to choosing a caching plugin for your WordPress website, the deciding factor will probably be whether or not it reduces the loading times of your site.Here we ran our own tests to show you real world examples of what WP Rocket can do for you. We had some reservations about buying the plugin, but given the low cost and the money back guarantee we bought it and took it for a test drive.
Test Website 1
This is a lightweight, small business WordPress website with just a few posts and pages was optimized and cached with WP Rocket. Before installing WP Rocket, the average loading time of the site after 24 hours of monitoring with Pingdom was 1.65 seconds. When we enabled some of the caching options, the average load time was improved by 1.12 seconds (68%).
Benefits of WP Rocket
Easy To Use – To stand out from the crowd, WP Rocket has been built to make caching as foolproof as possible, so everyone can start speeding up their WordPress website, regardless of their technical ability.
Quick setup – As soon as the plugin is activated, it will start caching your web pages to supercharge your load times. WP Rocket automatically applies good overall caching when you enable it with default settings.
Advanced Settings – WP Rocket has settings and features that would interest advanced users. The caching plugin provides plenty of settings to customise content caching to your needs.
Great Results – We have used the WP Rocket WordPress caching plugin on all our websites. It is now one of our recommended plugins for business and E-Commerce websites.
Fantastic Documentation – When we build websites, we often find new plugins that meet our clients needs. If you have never used the plugin before, having a user guide and good documentation is essential. WP Rocket post videos on their YouTube channel and have written guides to walk you through the different options.
What You Get With WP Rocket
E-Commerce Plugin Integration
No matter what E-Commerce plugin you’re using, WP Rocket’s got your back. It will automatically exclude the cart, basket, my account and checkout pages from being cached. This means your customers won’t have any problems using buy online features with caching enabled.
Multilingual Plugin Integration
This cool feature allows you to customise the website cache rules and settings for certain languages. If you update translated pages infrequently then you can set a longer cache refresh interval for that content.
Advanced Caching Features
You can easily adapt the caching rules to suit your needs. Every website will have different caching requirements with different plugins installed. In the settings you can also optimise the database and remove redundant data left over from past plugin installations, which bulk out the database and slows things down.
WP Rocket CDN
A CDN stands for Content Delivery Network and its goal is to provide high availability. It’s aim is to reduce any delays when loading the content on your website. Your website content is duplicated across servers all over the world.
For example, if your website was hosted in the UK and you had a visitor from Spain, then the load times would be slower as the physical distance between the visitor and the web server is greater.
With a CDN enabled, if a Spanish visitor viewed your website it would load your website’s cached content from a web server in Spain, making the load times faster.
Image and Media Optimisation
Large image and video files can slow down your website, WP Rocket has some features to help with this potential problem. Firstly, the plugin includes an optional Lazy Loading feature to stop all images and video loading until the visitor has scrolled down the page.
Without Lazy Loading, all media files, iframes and video loads as soon as the page is displayed in the browser. This slows down the page and the visitor might not need to see all the images and video. With users browsing more from mobile devices, you want to do as much as you can to restrict the loading of large files.
This also works for content loaded into the website using Iframes for things like embedded Google Forms. You can also lazy load videos using the WordPress video Gutenberg block or video embed code from YouTube and Vimeo.
Database Optimisation
Over time, your WordPress database will grow, with the potential to slow down your website. To help to combat this, WP Rocket has some database optimization features, including the ability to clear out old post revisions, drafts and trashed posts, as well as comments that have been deleted or marked as spam.
You can schedule the database cleanup to run on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. There are free plugins to handle WordPress database optimisation, but we recommend using what WP Rocket provides.
This is because having a large number of plugins active slows your site down. You may as well install plugins that add new features rather than using a ton of free plugins for site administration tasks.
File Minification
Through this optional feature, you can get rid of unnecessary white space, blank lines and comments from your CSS and JavaScript files. This reduces their file size and will mean they load faster when requested by a visitors web browser. WordPress website themes and plugins can add their own CSS and JavaScript files to your website, and each file request reduces your initial page speed.
Premium Support Options
This is one of many aspects that separates WP Rocket from free alternative caching plugins for WordPress. With free plugins you are limited to forums, contacting the plugin developers (without priority support) or seeking help from Facebook groups.
It is great that you can send a help desk message from inside your WordPress dashboard instead of having to login to your WP Rocket account on their website. than having to visit the plugin website. This certainly makes it easier for site owners to get support.
Easily Export & Import Your Settings
You can apply the same optimisation settings to multiple websites quickly and easily. Just set up the website with the settings you want, export the configuration and then simply import on another website. It really doesn’t get more complicated than that, and it is a real time saver.
Custom Cache Refresh Intervals
WP Rocket will clear the cache whenever new content is published on your website or you modify your site in some other way, to ensure your visitors always experience the most up-to-date version. You can also empty the cache yourself or set the plugin to delete the cache files at regular intervals.
You can set the cache to expire to ensure the cached files are always up to date.By setting a cache lifespan of multiple minutes, hours or days, you can take action to make sure that the version of your website your visitors see is as fresh as possible.
Through the other cache settings, you can also enable or disable caching for logged-in users – something that may be useful if you’re running a membership site or other type of project where logged-in users see different content from that seen by website visitors.
Excluding Content From The Cache
Some parts of a WordPress website shouldn’t be cached, such as the login page or a shopping cart. While WP Rocket will automatically exclude these URLs from its cache, you can also specify any other URLs that you don’t want to be cached.Simply enter the address of posts, pages and other content that should never be cached in the appropriate section of the plugin dashboard, and WP Rocket will do the rest.
You can also use regular expressions to exclude a group of pages from the cache at once.Alternatively, you can exclude a piece of content from the cache through the WP Rocket Options panel that the plugin adds to the WordPress editor screen. Using WP Rocket, you can exclude specific web browsers from seeing the cached version of your content.
Why Do We Use WP Rocket?
- WebP image compatibility for smaller files and faster load speeds
- Lazy Loading features for iframes, images and video content
- Included use of their content distribution network
- Browser Caching for Google Analytics and Facebook Pixels
- Lots of caching customisation options available
- Easily export and import your settings to multiple websites
Other WP Rocket Reviews
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Is There A Free Trial of WP Rocket?
The creators of the WP Rocket plugin don’t provide a free trial version. Instead they have a no quibble 14-day refund policy. They also offer a 100% money back guarantee, for added peace of mind.
Who should use WP Rocket?
WP Rocket would only be a consideration for businesses and E-Commerce websites. This is because website performance can prove your website’s position in the search results and lead to more sales conversions. WP Rocket is really easy for non-technical users to enable settings and see the results.
Can You Upgrade Your License?
The team at WP Rocket makes it simple to change your plan from a single site licence if you have more websites. When you add more websites to your account you just pay the difference in cost. You can get an unlimited licence to install and use this caching plugin on any number of sites.
Does WP Rocket Provide Support?
Yes they provide a support ticket system where you can contact their support team at any time from the Support tab in your WP Rocket account.
Can WP Rocket Speed Up Sites On Shared Hosting?
WP Rocket can only do so much, and if you are using low-cost web hosting then you may need to upgrade or switch hosting services. Making sure you are running on PHP version 7.0 – 7.4 would give you performance benefits over older PHP versions.Shared hosting is a cost-effective way to have a web presence.
You may have 50 other websites on the same server or you may 200+ all competing for server resources. This is why shared hosting is not recommended for business websites.Ideally, you should be paying between £15 – £30 on a web hosting service. This would normally give you your own virtual private server (VPS) and that allows your website to use all available resources of that server.
You can host sub-domains as separate sites from a VPS and only you will have access to the server.Another advantage of a VPS is that you often get dedicated Solid State Drive storage. This is 10x faster than conventional hard drives and this can have a big impact on website performance.
Does WP Rocket Work on WordPress.com?
Yes, if you have a Business or eCommerce plan on WordPress.com, you can install WP Rocket on your websites. If you have opted for a Personal or Premium plan, you cannot add WP Rocket or other plugins to your websites.
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Disclaimer:Lacey Tech Solutions publish blog articles to help small businesses. We are not liable for any damages if you choose to follow the advice from our blog.