WP Rocket Review – The Fastest Way To Speed Up Your Site

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Speed is key!

What do I mean by this?

In a year, that one-second delay leads to $2.5 million missed revenue if you make $100,000 per month.

Yup. The performance boost is significant!

I’m sure you’re aware of how important speed is.

And contrary to popular belief, there is no reason to hire expensive web developers or agencies to help you speed things up.

Because there’s another easier, faster and much more affordable option.

Doing it yourself.

And you can set it up within 5 minutes.

How can you do this?

WP Rocket is one of the best WordPress caching plugins in terms of support, updates, performance and facility of use.

Its only ‘weakness’ is that it’s more expensive than its concurrence. However, for all the features you get, it worths every dollar!

In this WP Rocket review, I’ll show you how it works and how to install the WordPress plugin. I’ll also go through all the settings included in this user-friendly package.

But remember, WP Rocket pricing plans offer 3 packages so all you have to do is find the one right for you.

Let’s get started!

What Is WP Rocket?

WP Rocket is a premium Wordpress caching plugin that helps you speed up your website and improve your core web vitals. It delivers superior performance than any paid or free options you can find on the market right now.

All the tools you need to improve user experience and increase website load time are together in one package.

This way, you can  quickly optimize your Wordpress website with just one plugin , instead of downloading and configuring many.

That’s how I’ve optimized my WordPress site.

Yup.

I have WP Rocket plugin installed on the blog you are reading right now!

Feel free to click around the blog, the load times are pretty quick, right?

WP Rocket also offers a 14-day 100% no-risk money-back guarantee. So if you’re not getting the results you want, simply contact WP Rocket to get your money back.

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.

But let me go through a real-life example, and then break it down from there.

You know that a one-second delay in website speed decreases conversions by 7%.

So if I could load my website 1 second faster…

…I would make an extra $28,464 according to Google.

Not convinced? Keep reading…

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:

2. People Don’t Like Slow-Loading Websites

Did you know that 47% of visitors expect to view a website 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.

What Do I Get For My Money?

Investing in a premium Wordpress plugin to boost website speed is a worthy investment.

I’ll show you why in this WP Rocket Review-

5 Minute Setup

Let’s begin by setting up the plugin.

Go to WP Rocket, and purchase the plugin.

In this WP Rocket Review, I’ll introduce you to the “single site license” package but you can get more details about WP Rocket pricing plans, here.

Under My Account and licenses, you should see this.

You can do this by installing the zip file version of WP Rocket.

After uploading, you should activate the plugin.

Once it’s activated, go to the settings panel.

And… that’s it! You are ready to make your site load faster.

WP Rocket is probably the simplest WordPress cache plugin for anyone to configure.

Transforms Website Speed Scores

Now that we’ve got WP Rocket installed, I’ll show you what a difference it can make to my website…and to yours.

Here, I’ll show you my site speed before using WP Rocket.

To test website speed, I went to GTMetrix.

And I scored pretty low according to the test data.

Yeah…they’re terrible.

That’s something I want to change.

So I hopped onto WP Rocket and tinkered with the settings area.

And then…this happened.

It jumped from an E with 57%… to an A with 96%!

Best of all, the fully loaded time went down from 14 to 4.5 seconds!

Yup.

It only took me 5 minutes to install and around 10 minutes to tinker with the settings area!

If you want to know how you can optimize these features below, then make sure you continue reading on.

Advanced Caching Features

To begin, we’re going to dive into caching.

Caching may sound a bit complicated, but the underlying concept is simple.

If I asked you what 2 x 5 is, you’d know the answer is 10.

You didn’t need to calculate the equation because you’ve performed this multiplication so many times, that you’ve instinctively remembered the answer.

That’s kind of how caching works.

Every time a browser requests a web page, the server has to undergo many complicated and time-consuming calculations.

But, with page caching, the server can store the HTML file.

The first time someone visits your website, they’ll receive the process normally.

The next time, they won’t have to go through and process all the files requests again.

Page caching not only makes your website faster.

But it’ll help it perform significantly better.

WP Rocket has a few different caching features.

You can find the enable caching here.

But there are a few advanced caching features I’d love to dive into.

Preloading

Preloading ensures your visitors get the speedier cached version of your site right away.

WP Rocket automatically takes care of this.

How?

When you activate WP Rocket for the first time, the plugin generates a cached version of your content right away.

Under active preloading, there are several other options.

You can activate sitemap-based cache preloading options, as well.

Sitemap preloading means that WP Rocket will automatically detect sitemaps generated by popular caching plugins and preload it for you.

So all the hard work is taken care of by the cache preloading.

Alternatively, you can specify your own sitemap by entering it in the sitemaps for pre-loading text field.

GZip Compression

GZIP is a free and open-source algorithm that compresses and decompresses files.

It reduces the page size as well as the size of a website’s HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

The reduction in size helps save storage space.

This speeds up your website’s load time.

If you want to see if your site has this feature, scan it on GTMetrix.

Scroll down and see what you score here.

What I love about using WP Rocket is that….it automates it for you.

You don’t actually have to do anything.

While it doesn’t appear in the plugin settings, it’s working behind the scenes.

Browser Caching

Browser caching speeds up your site for returning visitors who visit many pages.

WP Rocket resolves this by storing the necessary files on your server.

For example:

This feature marks certain pages and parts of pages, like those that need updating at different intervals.

Your logo on the website doesn’t need to change daily. By caching the logo, it’s telling the user’s browser to download this image periodically (like once a month).

It therefore, reduces the amount of data the user’s browser has to download.

This saves users:

To enable this feature with WP Rocket, all you need to do is install and activate.

WP Rocket will set expiration lengths on certain files and will modify your htaccess files.

Database Optimization

Here’s a great analogy.

Think of your Wordpress database as a filing cabinet for your website.

It stores all the content, including:

So if you’ve been using Wordpress for a while, there’s a good chance your database contains content you don’t necessarily need such as trashed posts or auto drafts.

Useless data and content take up space and queries take longer.

So it’s good to clean your database as your site ages.

Database optimization clears out junk in your site’s database – Not only will you have more space, but your website will also load up faster.

With WP Rocket, all you need to do is click on Database.

And you will see this.

On Database, you will see five sections.

They include:

To optimize your database, simply check the options you want to clean.

Then click save and optimize to complete the process of database optimization.

Google Fonts Optimization

Google fonts are popular.

They’ve been viewed over 29 trillion times on the web.

But even though they’re easy to implement…

If your website uses Google fonts, your browser will try to download all the relevant font files to the browser’s cache before loading the page.

WP Rocket can ensure your Google fonts won’t have a significant impact on load times.

How?

The WordPress caching plugin will combine Google fonts files by default when you activate WP Rocket for the first time.

This enables fewer HTTP requests and leads to a faster loading website.

Google Analytics Optimization

If you’ve ever analyzed your site with Google Analytics, you might have come across this message:

Yeah.

The Google Analytics script file has a cache period of only 2 hours.

So you’re not really taking advantage of caching at all.

That’s because if your website is making a 3rd party request to another domain, it will slow your site down.

So what can you do about it?

If you go onto Add-ons, you can see the Google Analytics symbol.

Switch Google Tracking, so it’s on.

And that’s it!

Facebook Pixel Optimization

Installing a Facebook Pixel on your website has a lot of benefits.

But it will cause a warning in many performance testing tools.

WP Rocket resolves this by storing the necessary files on your server.

To begin, click on Add-Ons.

Then toggle the Facebook Pixel Add-on to on.

Lazy Loading

To Lazy load is to delay the loading of images or other media files on your site until the user scrolls down the page and actually needs to see them.

In fact:

I am using it on this blog – you might not even have noticed the images loading as you scroll.

Let me give you another example.

You have five image files on your website that take up a total of 5MB.

If your website needs to download 5MB all at once, it will impact the overall page load time and performance.

…Slowing your site down.

Instead… you can lazy load your images and videos.

Here’s a lazy loading example from Medium.

As you can see, Medium uses a blurry placeholder image as “preview image” until the actual high-res image has completely loaded.

This way, visitors know that an image is coming.

They also don’t have to wait for a long time for the web page to load.

So how do you enable lazy loading on your site?

Click on the Media tab.

And you should see Lazy Load, right at the top.

Here, check the box for enable images.

You can also enable iframes and videos, as well.

You can also choose to disable emojis and disable Wordpress embeds as well.

Minification

Minification helps reduce the size of your:

It does so by removing any unnecessary features from the original source code.

For example:

The typical source code of a Javascript file looks like this.

But when you apply minimisation, it looks like this.

The source code may have whitespace and comments to help the developer, but they’re unnecessary for the final user.

Getting rid of them will make the source code lighter and compact.

…Allowing browsers to load the page quickly!

You can do this by clicking on File Optimization.

Here, you can see three different sub-headings:

Here, you can check all the basic settings.

But if you decide to check the CSS Files, you might see this:

Activating the Minify CSS Files can result in errors on your site.

If this does happen, simply deactivate the setting

And your site will return to normal.

You’ll also see a similar message when it comes to JavaScript Files.

You can play around with the options to see which one works best for your site.

Defer JS Loading

Defer JS Loading stands for defer JavaScript loading.

Browsers normally load JavaScript files before they render your website.

This means that visitors can’t see your site until all of the JavaScript and CSS files before they’ve completely loaded.

But, if you choose to defer a JavaScript file, the HTML document can load before the JavaScript file.

What are the benefits of this?

To activate deferJS Loading click on File Optimization.

Select Load Javascript Deferred.

I recommend you also tick safe mode for JQuery, as deactivating this option can result in broken functionality.

By all means, please test these options to see which ones work best for your site.

Heartbeat Optimization

The Wordpress Heartbeat API provides real-time communication between the server and browser when you log into your Wordpress admin panel.

Don’t get me wrong.

This is tremendously helpful.

But it will generate high CPU usage for logged in users who are on Wordpress for an extended period of time.

This leads to server performance issues.

With WP Rocket, you can choose to limit or completely stop the activity of the Wordpress Heartbeat API.

Let me show you how.

Go to Heartbeat.

To begin, check the control heartbeat option.

This will help you reduce or disable the Heartbeat API’s activity.

You can also reduce or disable heartbeat activity behavior:

But be careful.

If you disable heartbeat entirely, you could be breaking plugins and themes using this API.

Once again, please test to see which options work best for your website.

WP Rocket Vs. The Competition

To complete this WP Rocket review, let’s compare it with the competition.

WP Rocket offers many outstanding optimization features.

And it also has many extra features most cache plugins don’t offer.

Plus, it’s compatible with e-commerce plugins like Woocomerce, Easy Digital Download, and translation plugins like qTranslate, Polylang, and WPML, etc…

See how WP Rocket fares, compared to three other popular WordPress caching plugins: Hyper Cache, WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache.

✔ – Enabled      ☑ – Partially      X – Not Available

WP Rocket Review: Final Thoughts

If you’re looking for a safe and quick solution to keep your website fast and optimized, WP Rocket is an option you should seriously consider.

Even though WP Rocket doesn’t propose a free version or a free trial, I assure you their plugin is the easiest way to load faster WordPress websites you can get for the money. It also has some great features that make site optimization effortless.

Not only is it user-friendly.

And…It’s also the plugin I’m using to power the blog you are reading right now!

Instead of installing six to ten other caching plugins that can cause compatibility issues, you just need WP Rocket.

It’s super easy to use thanks to its simple and nice user interface. It’s great for users of all levels. And…if you get stuck in the process, they have fantastic email support & customer support team.

So if you want to get started, click here to start optimizing your site’s speed and benefit from the great speed boost that WP Rocket provides.

And say hello to more traffic, leads and sales.

It’s time to take advantage of the amazing optimization features WP Rocket has to offer, otherwise, you might want to consider my Nitropack review and case study as an alternative.