Why Is Website Speed Important?
It is extremely important to know that the speed of your website can have a dramatic impact on your bottom line.
1. Google Confirmed Website Speed Is A Ranking Factor
In 2010, Google announced that site speed would be a new factor in its search ranking algorithms.
Google will penalize slower & lazy loading sites and push them down the SERPs as they add less value to visitors.
This will result in:
- Less traffic
- Less conversions
- Less sales
2. People Don’t Like Slow-Loading Websites
Did you know that 47% of visitors expect to view a website in two seconds or less? Any longer and 40% of users will abandon the site.
These statistics shouldn’t shock you.
People hate slow-loading websites.
But that’s something you can turn to your advantage.
Users spend 70% more time and have 60% more page views on fast loading websites.
So if you can increase website speed, you can attract more leads and sales
WP Rocket Overview
WP Rocket is a beginner-friendly WordPress caching and performance optimization plugin that promises to “make WordPress load fast in a few clicks”. Currently being used by 700K+ websites, it boosts your website loading time by:
- Creating page caches
- Compressing HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files
- Image lazyload
- And more optimization features
Since you can set it up in a few clicks without the need for complicated settings, it’s a great tool for non-techy beginners to have faster websites.
What Is WordPress Caching?
If you’ve heard that WP Rocket can speed up your WordPress website, but you’re not quite sure how this part of our review will quickly get you up to speed. If you’re already familiar with the concept of WordPress caching or aren’t interested in how it works, feel free to skip to the next section.
In short, each time someone visits a page on your website, lots of data is communicated back and forth between the server, the WordPress software and the WordPress database to dynamically generate the webpage being requested by the user. As you can probably imagine, this slows things down — especially if you’re using low-cost budget hosting.
To speed things up, caching can be used to create a static version of your site and its content. Each time someone visits the site, the static content is displayed, rather than it being generated dynamically. As it takes less time to display the static version of the content, visitors should experience faster loading times.
Apart from improved site speed, visitors should notice no other differences between dynamic content and cached static content. If you make any changes to your website, such as publishing new content or editing the design, the best caching plugins will automatically refresh the cached files to ensure the static versions of the content are fully up to date.
WP Rocket: Pricing and Licensing Scheme
WP Rocket has three pricing plans:
As seen here, the license for all packages lasts for one year. As long as your license is active, you’ll have access to support and plugin updates. Once the license is nearing expiration, you’ll receive an email prompting you to renew your license at a discount.
WP Rocket will continue running even when the license expires, but support and plugin updates will no longer be available.
They also have a 14-day money-back guarantee.
CAN WP ROCKET REALLY SPEED UP WORDPRESS WEBSITES?
Before we explore what this plugin can do and how it works, if all you’re interested in is whether WP Rocket is likely to speed up your website, based on our experience, the short answer is yes.
After installing this plugin on three sites, all of them saw increases in speed, ranging from 480 milliseconds to 1.18 seconds, or an improvement of 27 to 69 percent. You can see the full details of the tests later in this review, but, for a quick overview, here are the results from one of our tests:
The load time of one of the sites we tested WP Rocket on improved by 1.1 seconds, or 69%.
As mentioned, there are free caching plugins available. However, when we compared WP Rocket with WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache — two of the most popular free WordPress caching plugins — based on the test data, WP Rocket delivered the best results.
Therefore, if money is no object, purchasing WP Rocket is probably the right choice. For everyone else, though, this review will help you to decide if purchasing this premium caching plugin is a good investment, or if you should save your money and look elsewhere.
To help you to make that decision, here are the best features of WP Rocket.
EASE OF 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 abilities.
At the same time, WP Rocket also aims to appeal to power users by providing them with enough options and settings to enable caching on their website in exactly the way they want.
One way WP Rocket simplifies enabling and managing caching for WordPress websites is through its user-friendly dashboard. Furthermore, as soon as the plugin is activated, it will start caching your site to improve loading times.
If you’re concerned about whether you have the technical skills to effectively speed up your WordPress website with caching, provided you can install and activate a plugin, you’ll be able to start optimizing your site with WP Rocket.
The WP Rocket plugin dashboard is easy to navigate and interact with.
If and when you’re ready to go beyond using WP Rocket in its default mode, there are video guides that cover all of the features of this plugin. These guides not only show you how to use these features but should also give you a better understanding of how WP Rocket works and what this plugin can do.
These videos are accessible from within your WordPress dashboard and do a great job of explaining what WP Rocket does by default and how best to configure the plugin for your site.
When it comes to taking a more hands-on approach to optimize your website with WP Rocket, the settings and controls of the dashboard are nicely organized and accompanied by clear explanations that are displayed within the user interface of the plugin. Therefore, if you do want to enable additional features, such as mobile caching or HTML and CSS file minification, you can easily find out how to do so.
All of the settings and options are well organized, with explanations and links to relevant support pages.
When exploring the WP Rocket settings and options, you’ll notice that as well as being accompanied by helpful text, there are also links that display relevant support content in the pop-up assistant panel. Thanks to this, finding out if using specific features or settings of WP Rocket is right for your site is straightforward.
Links in the dashboard make it easy to find relevant documentation for researching the settings.
As premium support is another of the ways in which WP Rocket separates itself from the free WordPress caching plugins, it’s good to see that you can send a message to the help desk staff from inside your WordPress dashboard, rather than having to visit the plugin website.
You can quickly send a message to the support staff from inside your WordPress dashboard.
If you’re looking for a plugin that’ll start making your website faster as soon as it’s activated, while also providing lots of assistance to help you to take a more proactive approach to speed up your site, WP Rocket is hard to beat.
CDN COMPATIBILITY
Using a content delivery network (CDN) to distribute your website files around the world is another effective way to speed up your website. Because of this, it’s good to see that WP Rocket is compatible with most CDN providers.
So, whether you’re using the CDN service that’s included as part of your hosting plan, or you’ve signed up with a CDN independently, you should be able to integrate it with WP Rocket to improve the performance of your site even more.
MEDIA OPTIMIZATION
As large image files can slow down your website, WP Rocket has some features to help with this potential problem.
Firstly, the plugin includes an optional LazyLoading feature to delay the loading and display of images and videos until the user has scrolled down to their position on the page. This is as opposed to automatically loading all of the media files as soon as the page is displayed in the browser.
LazyLoading prevents images and other content from loading until the visitor has reached that part of the page.
With WP Rocket, you have the option of loading the emojis in your content from the visitor’s computer, rather than downloading them from WordPress.org. The WP Rocket team have also created Imagify, an image optimization plugin with a free plan that can compress your website images to reduce file sizes and improve loading times.
DATABASE OPTIMIZATION
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.
WP Rocket can clean up and optimize your database on command or according to a schedule.
In addition to optimizing your database tables on command, WP Rocket can also be scheduled to automatically clean up the database on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. While there are dedicated WordPress database optimization tools out there, letting WP Rocket take care of this is more convenient and, hopefully, more efficient than installing an additional plugin.
MINIFICATION
Just as WP Rocket can help to reduce the size of image files, it can also decrease the size of other files, including JavaScript, CSS and HTML files.
Through the optional minification feature, WP Rocket can remove unnecessary whitespace, comments, line-breaks and extra characters from code in the files that make up your website.
Once these files have been reduced in size, they should consume less bandwidth and load faster when requested, giving you another way, alongside caching, to improve the speed of your website.
MOBILE DETECTION AND CACHING
With more and more internet users accessing websites on smartphones and other mobile devices, it’s good to see that WP Rocket can optimize your site for this segment of your audience.
Through these settings, you have the option of enabling caching for mobile devices and also creating separate cache files for mobile devices to help to speed up loading times for smartphone and tablet users.
E-commerce Friendly
Many caching plugins are not compatible with e-commerce plugins like Woocommerce, causing all sorts of problems for the visitors.
Since these plugins cache all pages including the cart, checkout, and account data pages, visitors won’t be able to see their updated carts and other details. This will have serious repercussions on your business if left unchecked.
WP Rocket is fully compatible with e-commerce plugins like Woocomerce, Easy Digital Download, iThemes Exchange, Jigoshop, and WP-Shop. All Woocommerce pages are automatically detected and not cached.
Multilingual Compatibility
WP Rocket is also compatible with translation plugins like qTranslate, Polylang, and WPML.
Other features:
- Image optimization
- GZIP Compression
- Sitemap preloading
- Cache preloading
- Google Fonts optimization
- Deferred JS loading
- DNS Prefetching
- Mobile Detection
- Developer friendly
- Compatible with Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Varnish, Cloudflare, and Sucuri
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WP Rocket Review: Final Thoughts
If you’re looking for a sure and quick solution to keep your website fast and optimized, WP Rocket is the best thing you can get for your money.
Although they don’t offer a free trial or free version, you can be assured that it really is one of the simplest and most effective WordPress caching plugins out there. It also has nice add-on features that make website optimization a lot easier.
If you’re on the fence about spending money on a plugin you still aren’t sure about, you can take advantage of their 14-day money-back guarantee.
All in all, considering their features and user support, I’d highly recommend WP Rocket to anyone looking for a reliable WordPress caching plugin.