WP Rocket Review: How to Speed Up Your WordPress Website?

WP Rocket Plugin

Website plugins are software that enhances the website’s existing functionality or puts in new features to it. WordPress plugins are an essential aspect of creating a WordPress website as users can add additional features without disturbing a single line of code. Plugins make it the most popular content management system as it is today which is easy to use, flexible, and feature-rich.

WordPress has many types of plugins, such as small tools or large-scale extensions, and mainly include security, website optimization, contact form plugins, caching plugins, booking plugins, Google Analytics plugins, SEO plugins, pop-up plugins, and image optimization plugins. WP Rocket is a full-service WordPress caching plugin that can handle almost everything to optimize your site for performance apart from image compression.

WP Rocket plugin is the premium and most powerful caching tool in WordPress plugins. It has a wide range of options and automatic optimization features due to which it can be effortlessly used by experienced WordPress users as well as beginners.

The List of Some of the Main Features in WP Rocket

·         Easy Installation and Setup

WP Rocket is a user-friendly plugin that is easy to install and configure and you don’t really need any technical skills or coding knowledge.

·         Caching

With page caching and other types of WordPress caching it gets easy to trim down server processing time and speed up the site. Page caching helps generate static HTML files for each page on the website. It also allows the hosting to better handle high-traffic spikes.

·         Code Optimization

It allows optimizing the site’s CSS and JavaScript code in many different ways.

·         Lazy Loading

This media optimization feature allows you to delay the loading of images and videos until they are visible on the screen. This minimizes the initial page load time and enhances the overall user experience.

·         Content Delivery Network (CDN)

The seamless integration with popular Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) like Cloudflare and MaxCDN helps deliver static files from multiple locations worldwide enhancing the speed and performance of the website.

·         Database Optimization

It helps to clean your database to remove bloat and thus optimizes your WordPress database to improve performance.

·         Smaller Optimizations

You can also make some other minor tweaks such as controlling the WordPress Heartbeat API.

More importantly, WP Rocket includes some special features as compared to other WordPress caching and performance plugins that help improve your site’s Core Web Vitals metrics.

WP Rocket includes some more features linked with the other areas of WP Rocket’s dashboard such as Preload, Advanced Rules, and Add-Ons.

Why WP Rocket is the best Web Performance Plugin?

WordPress experts propose WP Rocket as the best Web Performance Plugin to achieve far-fetched speed results and optimize the website for the Core Web Vitals.

1.  Spikes Page Speed Performance Score Instantly

WP Rocket greatly improves website performance, loading time, and Google PageSpeed Insights score including Core Web Vitals. It is designed for WordPress and is frequently updated to keep up with the latest web performance requirements.

2.  Default Configuration of WP Rocket helps Save the Time  

WP Rocket applies 80% of web performance best practices right upon activation which makes it the best WordPress caching Plugin. You don’t have to worry about configuration as the setup takes just 3 minutes and you get a faster website in a few clicks.

3.  Speed Optimization with a Cutting-edge Technology

Its most powerful features make the website superfast from the get-go. Features such as page caching, browser caching, or GZIP compression make it faster whereas a set of advanced options including delayed JavaScript execution, removal of unused CSS, minification, and LazyLoad boost the performance even more. WP Rocket has all the best optimization options that you would normally find with 3-5 plugins!

How to Use WP Rocket Plugin to Speed Up Your Site?

·        Basic Setup

After the first activation of WP Rocket, its core optimization features get enabled automatically and your site starts loading faster right away. WP Rocket activates some default features such as Page caching, Browser caching, Gzip compression, Cross-Origin support for web fonts, Combination of inline and 3rd party scripts, and Google Fonts optimization.

After detecting your hosting environment and some popular plugins, WP Rocket can automatically configure itself for maximum compatibility.

For example, when you install WP Rocket on WordPress, WP Rocket will identify it and configure itself to work with WordPress.

You can go for the tabs on the side of the WP Rocket interface if you want to configure additional settings.

·        Cache Setup

It allows you to fine-tune with the WP Rocket cache functions such as creating a separate cache for mobile users or logged-in users. However, these settings aren’t applicable if using WordPress because WP Rocket disables its cache function for the same.

With this section, you can showcase WP Rocket’s help documentation.

·        File Optimization Setup

File Optimization settings have some of its most unique features where you can optimize your site’s CSS and JavaScript code. To perk up users’ experience on your site, it’s good to reduce the amount of CSS and JavaScript code on your site and also optimize the order in which the loading of code takes place.

Here, you can also get Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, such as eliminating unused JavaScript, minimizing main-thread work, reducing JavaScript execution time, and reducing unused CSS.

·        Media Setup

This helps optimize how your site’s images, videos, and iframes load with its lazyloading.

If you embed a lot of videos from YouTube, WP Rocket replaces the full YouTube player with a static image thumbnail with a play icon which loads only if a visitor clicks to play the video resulting in improved performance.

WP Rocket can add missing image dimensions that help with the Cumulative Layout Shift metric in Core Web Vitals.

Pricing of WP Rocket

WP Rocket comes with three pricing plans and each plan gives all of the features. The only difference here is the number of sites on which you can activate the plugin:

·         Single plan for one site – $59/year.

·         Plus plan for three sites – $119/year.

·         Infinite plan for unlimited sites – $299/year.

Thus, WP Rocket only comes in a premium version and this is probably the main drawback as compared to other popular WordPress performance plugins.

However, WP Rocket offers a 14-day money-back guarantee, where you can fully test out the plugin freely and easily. Also, if you continue with the WP Rocket after the first year, you’ll get a 30% discount on the renewal of your license.

WP Rocket: Pros and Cons

Pros of WP Rocket Plugin

·         Easy to Use: It eases the complexity of performance optimization and also provides an excellent interface.
 
·         Core Web Vitals is the Most Unique Feature: It can take out unused CSS on a page-by-page basis and delay JavaScript execution. This feature is not found in most WordPress performance plugins. However, it can make a big enhancement in the site’s performance and Core Web Vitals metrics.

·         Well-documented Settings: It has thorough documentation for every setting which can be accessed directly from your WP Admin.

·         Automatic Compatibility: WP Rocket can configure itself automatically to fit well with popular plugins and hosting environments such as WordPress and WooCommerce.

·         Dedicated Support: Being a premium plugin, dedicated support is always given if you run into any issues.

Cons of WP Rocket Plugin

·         WP Rocket Comes only in a Premium Version: As it doesn’t provide a free version, it could be better to find other free quality tools if you’re on a budget.
   
·         Lack of Custom Script Management: WP Rocket does not have a mechanism for managing custom scripts, which is present in some other plugins.

Wrapping Up

If you’re already using the WordPress.com plugin-enabled plans with lightweight themes and plugins then there won’t be a remarkable improvement for you with WP Rocket. This is because WordPress has already implemented many of these tactics via its built-in optimizations and the bundled Page Optimize plugin.

Well, WP Rocket still contains some unique tricks that go beyond WordPress optimizations, such as it can remove unused CSS on a page-by-page basis and delaying JavaScript until there is a user interaction. This enhances Core Web Vitals metrics more than WordPress implementation.

So, if you are ready to pay for a premium plugin in exchange for simplicity, dedicated support, and some unique Core Web Vitals features, then you can surely go for WP Rocket!  


Gangadhar Kulkarni

Gangadhar Kulkarni is an internet marketing expert and consultant having extensive experience in digital marketing. He is also the founder of Seogdk and Director at DigiTechMantra Solutions, a one-stop shop for all that your website needs. It provides you cost-effective and efficient content writing and digital marketing services.

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