We are always looking for new and innovative ways to further speed up and optimize your sites. As you may already know, WP Rocket and Kinsta have been fully compatible for a while.
Check out everything you need to know below about using WP Rocket at Kinsta and how it can be an excellent match for you and your clients.
Using WP Rocket at Kinsta
For those of you who aren’t familiar with WP Rocket, it’s a popular all-in-one premium performance plugin for WordPress that offers caching in the first place. We usually don’t allow caching plugins in our environment because they conflict with our built-in caching solution.
However, WP Rocket page caching functionality will automatically be disabled when running on Kinsta servers. As a result, we allow WP Rocket on our platform because there are no longer any incompatibilities.
This allows you to use Kinsta’s caching solution but still take advantage of WP Rocket’s amazing optimization features (we will dive into these below).
Why is caching important? Caching is the process of storing resources from one request and reusing those resources for subsequent requests. Basically, it reduces the amount of work required to generate a page view and decreases the load on the web server. It’s the number one way to negate the delay from the dependency WordPress has on PHP and a database (read more about WordPress vs static HTML).
WP Rocket features
WP Rocket is a powerful and easy-performance plugin—its UI is beautiful while still being simple to use and navigate! Below, we’ll dive into a few of the recommended features you can utilize from WP Rocket to speed up your WordPress site and how it’s synced with the Kinsta environment.
We will also run some speed tests to see which options have the most impact on a live site. Remember that results can vary from site to site, so make sure to test on your own site or staging.
If you’re using a staging site at Kinsta, WP Rocket has whitelisted our URL structure (staging-sitename.kinsta.cloud), which means it will not count as a site against your overall license count. The same goes for running on localhost.
Clearing cache
Even though caching is automatically disabled in WP Rocket when running on Kinsta, the “Clear and preload cache” option in the WP Rocket menu is synced up with the Kinsta environment. If you clear your WP Rocket cache, it actually clears your entire site’s Kinsta cache instead. How cool is that? As always, you can clear your Kinsta cache from the top right-hand side of the admin bar.
When activating or deactivating a plugin, WP Rocket prompts you to clear the cache. This is advisable only if the plugin adds frontend content, such as a cookie banner plugin.
Lastly, clicking on the “Clear and Preload cache” button from the WP Rocket dashboard also clears the Kinsta cache.
Cache
As we mentioned earlier, WP Rocket page caching is automatically disabled for sites hosted on Kinsta. Thus, we recommend leaving WP Rocket’s cache settings as is with “Enable Caching for Mobile Devices” – which is the default option coming with WP Rocket 3.16.
File Optimization
Under the “File Optimization” menu, WP Rocket gives you the ability to optimize your CSS and JavaScript files. Let’s dive into each of these a bit.
CSS Files
- Minify CSS files remove whitespace and comments to reduce the file size. With this option enabled, we ran speed tests and saw a 0.87% decrease in load time. ⏱ Due to the way CSS works, this could break your site, so make sure to test it. Again, in general, less whitespace and code is a good thing.
- Optimize CSS delivery eliminates render-blocking CSS on your website for faster-perceived load time. We recommend enabling the Remove Unused CSS feature.
Read more about this in our in-depth articles on render-blocking CSS and optimizing critical rendering path. With this option enabled, we ran speed tests and saw a 56.36% decrease in load time. ⏱ Remember, though, this is more about perceived load time rather than actual load time.
JavaScript files
- Minify JavaScript files removes whitespace and comments to reduce the file size. In the test we ran, this feature had a low impact, as there was little that wasn’t previously minified by the page builder’s developers. However, due to the way JavaScript works, this could break functionality with your plugins or theme, so make sure to test it.
- Load JavaScript deferred eliminates render-blocking JS on your site and can improve load time. Read more about this in our in-depth articles on render-blocking JavaScript. However, if you aren’t careful, this can also break your site, so make sure to test.
- Delay JavaScript execution improves performance by delaying the loading of JavaScript files until the first user interacts, such as with a scroll and a click. With this option enabled, we ran speed tests and saw a 33.33% decrease in load time.
If you are a Kinsta customer using the code minification feature built into the MyKinsta dashboard, double-check with support to see if using both options is fine.
As you may have noticed, the impact of features related to minification on performance is small. This is because most themes and plugins now add minified CSS and JavaScript, and related features usually yield little to no change in performance unless the theme or plugin is awfully coded with a total disregard for performance, which is extremely rare. Other techniques, such as removing unused CSS and deferring and delaying JavaScript, make a difference in code optimization.
Media
Under the “Media” menu, they allow you to lazy load your images, videos, and frames. You also have the possibility to lazyload CSS background images and add missing image dimensions.
Let’s dive into each of these a bit.
Lazy Load
Lazy loading is an optimization technique that loads visible content but delays the downloading and rendering of content that appears below the fold. Enabling the lazy load option can improve actual and perceived loading time, as images, iframes, and videos will be loaded only as they enter (or are about to enter) the viewport, reducing the number of HTTP requests.
- Enable for images: With this option enabled, we ran speed tests and saw an 8.55% decrease in load time. The impact of such a feature is limited because WordPress core is now adding native lazyload on all images. The slight improvement on the test came from CSS background image optimization.
- Enable for iframes and videos: WP Rocket has an option to replace a YouTube video with its preview image automatically. This is a powerful option to reduce the impact of YouTube-related files and heavy scripting, which impacts both the loading speed and the page’s web vitals performance.
Check out our in-depth tutorial on lazy loading in WordPress.
Preload
Under the “Preload” menu they give you an option to enable cache preload, preload links, DNS prefetch, and preload fonts. Not all of these will work at Kinsta. But let’s dive into each of these a bit.
Preload cache
We don’t recommend this option for sites hosted on Kinsta because it can actually reduce performance by overloading PHP workers.
Prefetch DNS requests
DNS prefetching allows you to resolve domain names (perform a DNS lookup in the background) before a user clicks on a link, which in turn can help improve performance. It is done by adding a rel="dns-prefetch" tag in the header of your WordPress site. We recommend adding prefetch to external requests from your CDN, Google Fonts, and Google Analytics. Here is an example below:
<link rel="dns-prefetch" href="//cdn.domain.com/">
<link rel="dns-prefetch" href="//fonts.googleapis.com/">
<link rel="dns-prefetch" href="//www.google-analytics.com">This is harder to speed test, but you can rest assured it will help speed up your site.
Preload fonts
If you’re hosting fonts on your own domain and not on an external service like Google Fonts, we recommend adding them to the “Preload Fonts” list in WP Rocket. By preloading fonts in your HTML’s head element, web browsers can download fonts before they are discovered in your CSS file.
Advanced rules
Due to the fact that WP Rocket syncs to the Kinsta environment cache, you can’t use the advanced rules. If you need to exclude a URL or directory from caching or force cache a certain query string, you can always reach out to the Kinsta support team.
Database
Under the “Database” menu, WP Rocket allows you to perform cleanups on posts, comments, transients, and tables.
When combined with our automatic weekly database optimizations, keeping your database clean by removing unnecessary post revisions and transients will ensure your database is working at peak performance.
Post cleanup
It is not uncommon for older sites to have 100+ revisions on their main pages. This is simply due to years of editing and updating content. Let’s say, for example, a site has 700 pages or posts with 150 revisions on each. This would be over 100,000 entries in the database. This takes up storage space, and even with database indexes, this can sometimes harm performance.
WP Rocket gives you the option to delete the following:
- Revisions
- Auto-drafts
- Trashed posts
Check out our in-depth post on how to optimize revisions for faster performance.
Comments cleanup
Similarly to revisions, spam and trashed comments can add to wasted space over time. WP Rocket gives you the option to delete the following:
- Spam comments
- Trashed comments
If you aren’t using comments on your WordPress site we recommend simply disabling comments to prevent spam from coming through at all. You then also don’t have to worry about installing spam plugins.
Transients cleanup
Transients in WordPress are sometimes overlooked, but they are very important! In fact, we’ve seen corrupted transient cache completely take down a WordPress site. These are meant to be temporary and so it’s safe to remove them and we do recommend it. If they are needed by a plugin they will automatically be regenerated. WP Rocket gives you the option to delete all transients.
Database cleanup
The database cleanup option reduces the overhead of database tables. However, at Kinsta, we utilize InnoDB instead of MyISAM and therefore, this is not usually needed. InnoDB has been shown to perform better and be more reliable. A big reason to use InnoDB over MyISAM, is to take advantage of row-level locking. This allows your database queries to process faster. If you migrate your WordPress site to Kinsta, this is one of the many optimizations our engineers make on your site.
Automatic cleanup
WP Rocket also gives you the option to schedule automatic cleanup of your database on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. This is scheduled with a cron job behind the scenes.
CDN
Under the “CDN” menu you can enable a third-party content delivery network. This is really a no-brainer when it comes to performance. They take the load off of your web server while speeding up the delivery of content to your visitors thus making their experience better. Check out why we think every site should be using a CDN.
If you’re a Kinsta client, this menu won’t be needed as the Kinsta CDN is automatically deployed on your site behind the scenes.
We recommend running your WordPress site first through a website speed test tool to confirm all of your assets (JS, CSS, and images) are loading from the Kinsta CDN.
Heartbeat
Heartbeat is a WordPress Core API for server-polling. It’s used by many themes and plugins to maintain a stream of connection with your server. This allows WordPress developers to build real-time updates into their products.
By default, the client-side Heartbeat code runs every 15-60 seconds. Depending on your site and server configuration, frequent Heartbeat server pings may not be necessary.
With WP Rocket, you can reduce Heartbeat ping intervals to 2 minutes or completely disable pings altogether for your site’s backend (WP dashboard), frontend, and post editor.
For most sites, we recommend using the “Reduce Activity” option. Many modern plugins and themes ensure Heartbeat for core functionalities, so disabling it completely could break your site.
Add-ons
Under the “Add-Ons” WP Rocket gives you the ability to add additional services to your site like Cloudflare, Sucuri, Google Analytics, and Facebook Pixel. If you use any of these services on your site, we recommend setting them up through WP Rocket to ensure you are benefiting from the most optimized integration for these services.
If you’re already using other plugins to integrate these services into your site, you can safely remove those plugins after configuring the add-on in WP Rocket.
Image optimization
The developers of WP Rocket are the same people behind Imagify, one of our favorite image optimization services. If you’re looking for an easy-to-use WordPress plugin for optimizing images, take a look at Imagify. Click to learn more about image optimization and other optimization plugins and solutions.
Final speed tests
We then ran some final speed tests with everything enabled so you could see a before-and-after. Note: This WordPress site is hosted at Kinsta.
Before WP Rocket
We ran five tests in PageSpeed Insights without WP Rocket.
After WP Rocket
We ran a new test in Google PageSpeed Insights with WP Rocket.
We also ran a PageSpeed Insights test with edge cache activated on Kinsta. We noticed that the initial server response time improved from ~370ms without edge cache to 30ms. It’s handy when serving an audience from multiple geographical zones.
Here is the takeaway from the results above:
- WP Rocket goes beyond caching options and offers powerful features to optimize CSS and JS files, images, and more.
- The site we were utilizing for the test is already fairly optimized. However, it still requires some fine-tuning to ensure results and compliance with Core Web Vitals.
- If you’re using YouTube videos, you could see load time decreases of up to 50% or more. This is accomplished by utilizing WP Rockets feature that replaces YouTube videos with clickable preview thumbnails. This is really handy!
- In our Google PageSpeed Insights tests, we saw an increase in our score from 69/100 to 100/100. While scores are not as important as overall load times –we discuss this in our article about Google PageSpeed Insights–, Core Web Vitals are part of the latest SEO ranking factor and we saw a big improvement in their grades as well.
As you can see above, WP Rocket makes it incredibly easy to speed up your WordPress site with just a few simple clicks!
Summary
The team at WP Rocket consistently releases new features that directly align with the web performance recommendations we share at Kinsta. We are excited that clients can now use this plugin without additional modifications.
We would love to hear what you think. Do you use WP Rocket? Let us know below in the comments.
Brian has a huge passion for WordPress, has been using it for over a decade, and even develops a couple of premium plugins. Brian enjoys blogging, movies, and hiking. Connect with Brian on Twitter.
I was worrying many things of wp-rocket settings for my kinsta hosted website. this post solved everything.
Thank you
Great, glad it was helpful David!
That is a really great news, I love an use WP Rocket on all my sites and I was a little annoyed to not be able to use it on Kinsta, now I can remove four plugins and just use WP Rocket :)
Kinsta is even better with this plugin.
Glad to hear it Nicolas! This is exactly why we wanted to make sure WP Rocket would work at Kinsta :)
I just let my WP Rocket lapse and not get my renewal discount and the BOOM, you guys support it now. DOH.
I hope I can get that discount back as WP Rocket is by far my favorite optimisation tool.
Haha, sorry for the bad timing Matt. Hopefully, you can get your discount back for WP Rocket.
Brian, thanks for writing! I LOVE seeing the additional opportunity for speed improvement. I installed WP Rocket on our SkyrocketWP (https://skyrocketwp.com) site and noticed that (1) the speed of our site improved and (2) the WP Rocket lazy load feature fails to load images over CDN. Any idea how to force that to happen?
Hey Chad, I haven’t seen that happen. In fact, my test site up for writing this post is still live. https://wpdev.ink/lazy-load-test/ You can see that the lazy loaded image is loading from Kinsta CDN. I took a quick look at your site and your images are loading from Kinsta CDN and they are lazy loaded. Perhaps you figured something out :)
Weird deal. I just ran another performance test using GTMetrix and it shows that the following URL isn’t loading over CDN:
– https://skyrocketwp.com/wp-content/themes/Divi/core/admin/fonts/modules.ttf
Pingdom reports that the following URLs are loading over CDN:
– https://skyrocketwp.com/wp-content/cache/min/1/21e4094d083dc22c787ce2ff220885c6.js
– https://skyrocketwp.com/wp-content/cache/min/1/c59adce6ca56000c913e56e9ad4b2def.js
– https://skyrocketwp.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-rocket/inc/front/js/lazyload-8.6.0.min.js
Peculiar that:
– The tests show different URLs
– Pingdom produces radically different scores for “Combine external JavaScript” each time I perform the test. Scores are typically either 80-something or 40-something
– My fullwidth images (e.g. header) don’t load properly on the initial load on mobile, but display on the second load on mobile (presumably serving a cached version at that point)
Correction: Pingdom reports that the following URLs AREN’T loading over CDN:
Oh, I thought you meant your images themselves. Now that you mention it, I do see an issue with lazyload-8.6.0.min.js not loading over Kinsta CDN. Most likely the issue is same for the other URLs and if we fix one it will fix the others. I’ll pass this issue along to dev team. Thanks for the heads up!
The very same happened to us, once we enabled LazyLoad for images all our images failed to load across the site. Chad explained with more detail.
Thanks Alex. We are looking into this.
Temporary workaround. Simply go into WP Rocket settings and enable their “CDN” option. No need to input the Kinsta CDN URL. Just enable CDN and you’ll see those JS deferred and lazy load files load from Kinsta CDN :) Make sure to clear cache after. We’ll work with WP Rocket team to get this fixed, but hopefully, that should resolve your issue for now.
I did say images initially. Sorry for the confusion and thanks for looking into it!
On our top bar – besides WordPress standard options – have Script Manager (perfmatters), Ad Health (Advanced Ads), Forms (Gravity Forms), WP Rocket, and Clean Cache (Kinsta Cache), which altogether takes a lot of space.
Kinsta Cache Plugin is extremely needed because it establishes some kind of direct connection with WordPress, or can we ask support to have the plugin removed, and just flush the cache when needed using My.Kinsta?
Hey Alex, I’ll pass this feedback along regarding the toolbar. Thanks!
I could really see the difference in page loading speed after enabling wprocket with kinsta.
But I am getting errors on my google webmaster for amp pages after using wprocket on my site http://hinditracks.in . That is for The tag ‘amp-facebook-like’ requires including the ‘amp-facebook-like’ extension JavaScript. Plese suggest me how could I correct the errors?
Hey Angraj,
We haven’t done a combination of tests with other third-party plugins. I’m assuming you’re using the popular AMP plugin? You might try disabling the JavaScript optimizations in WP Rocket to see if things go back to normal… then enable them one by one. Or ping the WP Rocket team, as they might already know of a conflict somewhere with the AMP plugin.
Hello
I just set Kinsta cache expire intervals to 6 months.Support team took more than 15 minutes to set it up. I don’t know what they did?
So now Should I install Wp-rocket Page cache disable plugin?
or
Still, Wp-Rocket work well?
Thank you
Hey David,
If you have any questions about how your cache is configured, our support team can always help. In regards to WP Rocket partnership, you can install and use it without any additional configuration. Your site will still use Kinsta cache, and you can use the other optimization features of WP Rocket. Thanks
What is Kinsta’s recommendation regarding combining WP Rocket + Autoptimize + perfmatters? It used to be you recommended Autoptimize + perfmatters but with the partnership with WP Rocket, is Autoptimize not necessary? What about perfmatters?
Hey Steve! It really depends on what you are trying to accomplish and what works best for your site. If you have a license for WP Rocket, Autoptimize might not be necessary. Perfmatters also has slightly different features, such as the Script manager, local analytics, etc.
Either way, they are all great plugins.
If you don’t need the cache Autoptimize does 99% of what WP Rocket does and it’s free. You’re basically setting money on fire.
Hey Zeoliter!
WP Rocket does a lot more than Autoptimize does. With that being said, they are both great plugins.
Hi team Kinsta,
it’s great to see you support WP-Rocket. One issue I’d like to bring up though is Cache Preloading. When testing one of our sites hosted @ Kinsta (testing done with webpagetest.org) it looked like not all pages were cached. Your support confirmed that you don’t pre-warm your cache.
This has a major negative effect on SEO performance. Google is constantly recrawling sites and because you set your cache expiration interval to 1 hour by default, Google is hitting a bunch of pages that are not loading as fast as they could.
We have done extensive research with big clients and partnering SEO experts and our conclusion is fairly simple: Loading speed is the foundation for a website’s SEO performance. I’m talking about loading speed from Google’s perspective. Visitors are not the issue here, because their experience with Kinsta hosted sites is going to be great no question. It’s different with Google though. They crawl sites from the perspective of a first-time visitor every time. Resources are therefore never cached. Even more importantly they recrawl all pages regularly. Many of those pages might not get visited that often. Therefore they are most like not cached once Google comes along. This affects Google’s whole perception of the website’s speed.
I’m not trying to look like somebody who has inside information on Google. Nobody outside Google does and most SEO advice online is utter bullshit. My argument/experience is purely based on tons of testing and Google’s own documentation.
These are the webpagetest.org speed parameters we usually aim for:
– First Byte less than 400ms
– Start Render less than 700ms
– Speed Index 600ms
– Start Render greater than 1200ms
– Speed Index greater than 1500
It would be awesome if you could look into a sitemap based preloading technique like the one WP Rocket employs and implement it at Kinsta. It would generate tons of additional SEO value to all your clients who chose to turn on preloading. As a long time WP Rocket customer we’d be more than happy if you simply made Kinsta work with their Preloading option ;-)
cheers and props to your support team, they are far and above the best I have ever experienced.
Thanks for the detailed feedback David! Passing this along to the team to consider. Also, you can ask our support team to increase the cache duration on your WordPress site.
Hi Brian,
I already did that, like I said, the support team was helpful as always ;-) Hope preloading will make it to Kinsta soon,
cheers
This plugin has literally amazing speed. when we were not using this plugin the average load time was 1.2 sec and after using the plugin the time got reduced to 0.566 s. This change was very beneficial for us as it helped us to rank higher in Google.
Why I am getting errors on my google webmaster tool for amp pages after using WP Rocket on my site. That is for The tag ‘amp-facebook-like’ requires including the ‘amp-facebook-like’ extension JavaScript. Please suggest to me how could I correct the errors?
Hey Manish! We recommend reaching out to the plugin developers for help. They can hopefully resolve that for you. 👍
I could really see the difference in page loading speed after enabling wprocket with Kinsta.Thanks a lot
But I am getting errors on my google webmaster for amp pages after using wprocket on my site. Please, suggest to me how could I correct the errors?
I was worrying many things about wp-rocket settings for my Kinsta hosted website. this post solved everything.
Thank you
I feel the difference in page loading speed after enabling wp rocket in my client websites.
and we are already working on some new projects and definitely try again wprocket.
I could really see the difference in page loading speed after enabling wprocket with Kinsta.
But I am getting errors on my google webmaster for amp pages after using wprocket on my site. That is for The tag ‘amp-facebook-like’ requires including the ‘amp-facebook-like’ extension JavaScript. Please suggest me how could I correct the errors?
Hi,
I’m evaluating buying WP Rocket OR PErfMatters. I already use Cloudflare and heavily cache everything.
Assuming money is no object (I wish) – which one would you recommend for Kintsa+Cloudflare+ShortPixel+?
PErformance is my highest priority on a highly transactional site.
Thanks
Actually, I have since discovered that caching in cloudflare is not possible on a Woocommerce site (or a site with dynamic user content (not talking about wp admin portal) unless you buy the $200 a month plan which has “cache by cookie”. So I will now how to choose a caching module which can also cache by user.
Sorry to bombard you, but I figured out how to use Cloudflare Workers to bypass CF cache when logged on – This might help someone: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/how-to-disable-cache-for-logged-in-users-on-dynamic-wordpress-site/142361
I would still love to see USER caching in Kinsta – WP Rocket has this ability (e.g. generate an HTML view per user) but according to your support it is disabled when on Kinsta. It means logged in users will not benefit from a page cache…
Performance is my highest priority on a highly transactional site.
I would still love to see USER caching on Kinsta.
I could really see the difference in page loading speed after enabling WP Rocket with Kinsta.
But I am getting errors on my google webmaster for amp pages after using WP Rocket on my site. That is for The tag ‘amp-facebook-like’ requires including the ‘amp-facebook-like’ extension JavaScript. Please suggest to me how could I correct the errors?
Hey Anwar!
We recommend reaching out to the WP Rocket team. They should be able to help you with that.
I could really see the difference in page loading speed after enabling wprocket with kinsta.
But I am getting errors on my google webmaster for amp pages after using wprocket on my site https://www.lyricsdjsong.com/ . That is for The tag ‘amp-facebook-like’ requires including the ‘amp-facebook-like’ extension JavaScript. Plese suggest me how could I correct the errors?
Thank you for your comment! Since WP-Rocket covers so many level of optimizations, it’s possible that a certain feature is not 100% compatible with your AMP setup. We recommend working with a developer to look into the issue more, or getting in touch with WP-Rocket directly to support a report.
I was worrying many things about wp-rocket settings for my Kinsta hosted website. this post solved everything.
Hello Gaana, glad you found the post helpful!
Under WPRocket “Add-Ons” for Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel, what if I’m using Google Tag Manager? Should I leave this off or on?
I was using wp rocket in one of my previous website. Now i have started using it with my website https://qzlyrics.com but it has litespeed server. I think LS cache has better compatibility than wp rocket. Share your thoughts please
Hi Bijay, I haven’t used LS Cache before, as we don’t use LiteSpeed. Can you clarify what you mean by “better compatibility”? At the end of the day, if LS Cache produces better page speed than WP Rocket, I’d recommend going with that.
I was worrying many things about wp-rocket settings for my Kinsta hosted website. this post solved everything.