Google always wants its users to get the best experience with the sites ranked on its search engine. If the user’s experience for the websites is bad then Google doesn’t like to rank those sites.
Now, talking about user experience, page loading speed has a direct impact on deciding the user experience. In 2010, Google announced officially that page speed is directly linked with your website rankings.
There are a variety of WordPress plugins available that promise they can speed up your WordPress website but this is not everyone’s cup of cake.
Now, The question arises, which WordPress plugin can you use to scale up your page load speed? Sit back and relax, there is an excellent WordPress plugin tool that helped a lot of people, businesses and we have also used and experienced all the benefits of it. This tool is called WP Rocket.
Here we’re gonna give the full WP Rocket Review and tell you about its features, pros and cons, and pricing. We also gonna display the actual performance data to tell you how it helped us, So let’s talk about WP Rocket:
What is WP Rocket?
WP Rocket is a popular all in one cache plugin specially designed for websites that helps you to speed up your website and solve messy caching problems. Despite being the most powerful plugin, it’s very easy to use. You don’t need any kind of technical or extraordinary skills to operate it.
It has a wide range of options and automatic optimization features so it can be easily used by experienced and as well as beginners. It ensures the users that the website will load fast and you get the desired amount of traffic with improved SEO and increased conversions.
What does this WordPress plugin WP Rocket do?
Another good thing about the WP rocket is, it automatically starts caching your website when you install it. All of the main features are enabled by default. It does most of the part without any need to change the setting, but if you want to enable more features then you can enable them in the dashboard under settings.
When you install the WP Rocket plugin, you will get to see this dashboard. Here you can see all the menu and settings. For better performance, you can tweak the settings.
In this, we will take a closer look at all the settings and menu and explain how they can improve the page load speed of your website. Here we go:
Cache
In the Cache area, there are three caching options:
1. Mobile Cache
To make the website more responsive on mobile devices, you should turn on this option. When you activate this option, it creates a separate cache file for mobile users only, to make a great user experience on mobile.
2. User Cache
You have to turn on this option when you want the people to get access to the restricted content on your website when they log in. In simple, this feature comes into play if you have a membership site so that they only get access to the features when they log in. So, the site will be cached separately for normal users that are not logged in and another set of cache files will be created for logged in users.
3. Cache Lifespan
Cache lifespan is the time that cached files remain cached until it gets deleted and WP Rocket builds a new cache file.
The default limit is set for 10 hours which works fine for most websites, but if you have a very busy site with a lot of users and new content is updated many times throughout a day then you can reduce the number of hours.
File Optimization
In this section minification and concatenation takes place.
WP Rocket reduces the weight of CSS and JavaScript files through minification. So, lighter files load faster.
The source code of JavaScript may have whitespace and comments to make it easy for the developers, but the users don’t need them. So, WP Rocket removes them and makes the source code lighter which allows the browsers to load pages faster.
There is also an option of deferring JS loading.
If you turn on the load JavaScript deferred then the HTML document can load before the JavaScript file. It means visitors can’t see your site until JavaScript and CSS files are completely loaded. The benefit of this is that your site will load much quicker and the user can see all the websites loaded once which means they don’t have to see partially loaded pages.
Media
The primary feature of the media section is Lazy Load to delay the loading of images or other media files until they are needed by the user.
If a user doesn’t scroll down then the images at that part will not be loaded hence the loading time will be faster.
If you have a lot of YouTube videos on your page then WP Rocket can replace them with preview images which can significantly improve your loading time.
Preload
The Preload feature creates a cached file for the first time users. You can also activate sitemap-based cache preloading which will automatically detect sitemap generated and preloads for the users.
Advanced Rules
The default cache works fine for most of the websites, but if you are an advanced user and you have a very complex website then you can add some pages that you never want to be cached. If you don’t want to do that then it’s fine. It is just an advanced level option for more precision.
Database
WordPress websites can slow down due to the accumulation of a lot of junk data which is not necessary, it consists of revisions, drafts, and trashed posts.
So, by clicking these options all the junk files will be deleted from your database resulting in fast loading of the page.
It can also delete spam and trash comments, transient clean up, and optimize tables.
CDN
CDN provides you an option to add CNAME for all URLs of static files consisting of CSS, js, images, and other resources.
So, this way you can get maximum speed from your CDN.
Heartbeat
Heartbeat is a WordPress API which supplies communication between the website and the server in real-time to sync data between both of them.
The problem arises when the users are logged in the website for longer periods resulting in a large number of requests being sent to the server. This generates heavy load on the CPU leads to server performance issues.
With the help of WP Rocket, you can limit or completely stop the activity of the WordPress Heartbeat API by choosing among the below three options:
- Do not limit
- Reduce activity
- Disable
Add-ons
By using this feature you can improve browser caching for Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel. You can use this feature by just turning on the slider and you are good to go.
Image Optimization
WP Rocket has an image optimization feature called Imagify. It helps to optimize the images by compressing the images while maintaining image quality.
Pricing of imagify is : $8.99 p/month – 2 GB data per/month
Tools
There are various options in the tool tab that can help you to manage the plugin. You can export and import settings. You can also roll back to the previous version of WordPress Rocket
Comparison between with or without WP Rocket
I know you want to see the actual comparison with or without WP Rocket.
Here is our Pingdom speed test of the home page when WP Rocket was deactivated
Here are the google page insights of our home page:
page insights image without WP Rocket plugin
Now, below is the screenshot of a Pingdom speed test of our home page with WP Rocket Activated.
And, here is the screenshot of google page insights of our home page with WP Rocket activated.
Here is the table of performances on mobile and desktop via Pingdom and google page insights:
Looking at the Pingdom results the load time with WP Rocket deactivated is 1.50 sec and the load time after WP Rocket activated is 1.31 sec.
When you look at Google page insights, the score with WP Rocket deactivated is 66
After the activation of WP Rocket, the score is 81.
This is a very good difference knowing the fact that this will make a huge impact on the rankings of your page.
Pricing
WP Rocket has three packages of pricing:
- $49 for 1 year of support and updates for 1 website
- $99 for 1 year of support and updates for 3 websites
- $249 for 1 year of support and updates for unlimited websites.
Conclusion
Despite being the powerful WordPress plugin to get a fast loading WordPress site. It is also very simple and user friendly.
I think paying $49 for WP Rocket is a worthwhile investment, considering its simplicity and convenience.
Although if you think you can’t spend this money without any try, then you can take a free trial of WP Rocket for 14 days.
Decide what suits you the best and enjoy the faster WordPress website.