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Read out this WP Rocket review to learn more about how the best WordPress cache plugin can help you with SEO and Core Web Vitals optimization.
Price: 49
Price Currency: USD
Operating System: Wordpress
Application Category: Speed Optimization
WP Rocket is the best premium WordPress caching plugin on the market as it offers a very complete set of tools to help speed up your website. In other words, this is a plugin that will help you speed up the page load of a site “on the fly” without having to be an expert in this technology.
Technically, WP Rocket is a caching plugin, a system that collects the pages of a website that are already loaded in memory so that they can then be delivered to visitors faster.
So in a nutshell, this puglin won’t allow you to implement page caching, combine CSS and JS files, apply some resource hints, minify CSS and JavaScript files and optimize the served code.
The origin of WP Rocket dates back to 2013, where its creators were unhappy with the cache add-on offerings on the market and set out to fix the issues that were causing the user experience to be sub-optimal.
Especially since there being so many options, the configuration was still time-consuming even for advanced and tech-savvy users. So to overcome this problem they created WP Rocket, which currently has over 2,400,000 sites optimized with plugins.
WP Rocket is a premium optimization plugin that you can use to speed up your WordPress site as we have did.
As the Core Web vitals have been recently a ranking factor for Google SEO, it is important that you take care of this metric.
The good things or advantages about WP Rocket is that it can easily be combined with other performance optimization plugin such as Asset Clean up to find the best combination to configure your site to deliver the best results.
You can configure the plugin easily after installing WP rocket, and choose to optimize the Javascript on it, and the CSS from Asset Clean up, which if you are using Elementor, it can be really helpful to load faster.
Asset Clean Up has free options that can help you to optimize WordPress, but without WP rocket, it could be more difficult to speed up your site.
WP Rocket plugin is actually pretty easy to use, and if there are some techie stuff, you can easily find out on their documentation, the steps to follow to learn more about its optimization features and what you should do to take out the maximum of this premium plugin.
WP Rocket also helps you to create separate cache for mobile devices and desktop if you have a different subdomain.
Another great thing about WP Rocket is that it can integrate with Cloudflare, which is one of the most popular free CDN available.
What also really help us to pass the Core Web Vitals tests was also to activate the Automatic Platform Optimization for WordPress and Automatic Signed Exchanges (SXGs) from Cloudflare.
It costs 5 USD per month, but it has worth it, since previously without it, and using a plugin such Elementor that might not be well known for website speed, we had stressful moments to achieve passing the Core Web Vitals.
As well, we are using a LiteSpeed Server on Vultr, which has been a part of our speed optimization.
We did test out LiteSpeed Cache WordPress plugin, but we had better results on our website with WP rocket.
Another crucial free plugin for images optimization has been Statically, which is as well a CDN service.
It’s worth pointing out that the mix of the plugins have been what has helped us to reach out such results, and of course, it could be better, but in our experience with WP rocket and the other plugins, it is also better to focus on the website itself, and not obsess with reducing the loading times as much as possible.
It is not worth to lose some scripts that affect the user experience and might help with the speed.
Being a premium add-on, WP Rocket has a cost to pay for the tools it offers. It offers three plans:
The Individual plan, is the cheapest license with a cost of $49 per year for this moment and so you can use it on a single site. The Plus plan is the intermediate license, with a cost of $99 per year that allows you to use it in three different sites.
And finally the infinite plan, with a cost of $249 per year for use on an unlimited number of sites.
It depends on you and your needs which plan you want to hire, such as how many WordPress you have, if you need to use WP Rocket for them and if you are serious about optimizing your WordPress, enough to make an investment in it.
In each of the plans comes included a year of support and updates, being a fairly consistent price if we analyze the amount of tools offered.
The only drawback is that there is no trial version, so if you are interested, you will automatically have to pay to try the product. What it does include, however, is a 14-day money back guarantee.
We know that most of WP Rocket’s competitors are free, but users agree that it is a worthwhile investment, where also if we analyze the price, with its cheapest plan you would only be investing a little more than $ 4 per month.
In addition, WP Rocket is used to make promotional offers several times a year and as a bonus we remind you that the add-on offers you to renew your license at 50% to 30% cheaper compared to the original price, within 30 days prior to the expiration date.
Chances are, if your sites don’t make you money or aren’t a source of income in any way, you won’t be interested in WP Rocket. On the other hand, if your WordPress has started to get visitors, the best option will always be to invest, and among the paid plugins, this is the one with the best prices and the most tools.
WP Rocket called in WordPress terms a cache puglin, stores this data on disks with CSS and JS file optimization functionalities. Operating on two types of storage:
The first is the browser cache, where the directive allows the browser to store the static resources of the website (CSS files, images and JavaScript).
And the second option is site caching, where the plugin creates a static HTML page to avoid any PHP processing. This will (usually) improve the loading time of your site. But when WP Rocket has a caching add-on, it is much more.
In addition, the plugin allows you to implement other WPO techniques, such as optimizing CSS and JS by minifying it, performing file concatenation, making loading asynchronous, among others.
At the same time, it performs cleaning of CSS classes not used in the loading of the web as well as the database, implements Lazy Load in images and iframes, improves the CLS adding the dimensions as a character to the images, implements a CDN that can be own or RocketCDN and manages the Heartbeat API pulses or admin-ajax.php-.
It also includes several options to improve the performance of global websites: deferred loading of images and JavaScript, minification of HTML code.
WP Rocket serves the page cache in a very optimized way, so just activating the plugin already improves the speed of your website, because the cache is automatically activated when you activate the plugin and in the interface there is no option to disable this feature.
That said, if we go specifically into the WP Rocket settings, we will have several panels with options that directly affect the cache settings.
Logically, the part called “cache” is what will help us with this configuration, but if we want to get more out of it, we will still have to go deeper to modify some things.
For example, choose whether you want to serve the cache on mobile devices or use separate versions of the cache for mobile and desktop devices. This is done in cases where there is some dynamic code that runs conditionally, or if we have a specific mobile version.
You should also choose whether cached pages are shown to authenticated or logged-in visitors. This is useful for you to improve the performance of dynamic sites created with WordPress, but you must pay close attention and be careful with the LOPD, correctly excluding certain URLs.
You will also be able to define the cache time to live, also known as TTL. This is the time it takes to create a new “expired” cached version.
You will quickly realize one of the huge advantages of WP Rocket that sets it apart from other tools of the same nature, is that the creators of this add-on took simplicity as their priority.
Because of this you do not need great knowledge in the field to use it, it is ultra simple to use, in fact, you do not even have to activate any function for the plugin to work, just install it, turn it on and that’s it, no time wasted.
As stated in its documentation, WP Rocket incorporates more than 80% of web performance best practices, even if no options are activated. Its options can be considered as an extra since their activation is not mandatory to improve the loading time of your site.
So by default, it will always activate features such as caching of all pages for fast display, bandwidth reduction thanks to GZIP compression, header optimization (expires, etags, etc.).
Also optimization of site files for browser caching and reduction of the number of requests and optimization of Google Fonts files.
Some default settings will also be enabled when the add-on is first used, such as disabling emojis and embeds, cache preloading, mobile cache and cache lifetime (10 hours).
To increase performance a bit more and go further, you’ll need to use the “bonus” options.
We know that nowadays most things are handled online, from businesses, companies, ventures or information pages.
No one likes slow websites.
In fact, a performance study found that a single second delay in page load time costs 7% fewer conversions, 11% fewer page views and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.
And it’s not just users, search engines like Google don’t like slow websites either, in fact the search engine gives priority to faster websites in terms of search rankings.
Therein lies the importance of plugins to improve the performance of a website, and this is where WP Rocket comes into play.
Being the best WordPress caching plugin on the market and will allow you to quickly improve the speed and performance of your WordPress website.
This plugin is suitable for all types of users:
First of all beginners will appreciate its simplicity and ease of use, while at the same time more experienced users will enjoy its developer-friendly side, with many hooks for advanced customizations.
Following up, we will share our WP Rocket interface settings that has helped us to get the following results so far.
Our site with WP rocket has reached loading times of around 500ms, which considering that we use plugins such as Elementor and WPML, this is a quite good number.
As well as you can see, the Core Web Vitals have now turned out to have green URL, meaning that most of them are now passing the speed test.
Now on the WP rocket settings, we have activated the cache for mobile devices.
You can also have a separate cache for mobile visitors, but this is recommended if you have a specific site for mobile devices.
In the file optimization and CSS files, we only have selected to optimize the CSS delivery with the Load CSS asynchronously.
In our website, we noticed errors after selecting to remove unused CSS.
In the Javascript section, we have selected to load deferred and added the lazyload there, as it was not actually working properly.
And in the Delay Javascript Execution we have to add some Elementor URL so that they work correctly, as we were having issued with the menu loading.
Activate WP rocket lazy loading, so that websites don’t load the images only after the user starts scrolling down.
In the case of logos, or any other important image of your website, you can add the url on the text box, so that it doesn’t apply to it.
Sometimes lazy loading can also affect the LCP of the Core Web Vitals.
In the Preload section of the WP Rocket WordPress Dashboard, we have activated the recent update on the WP Rocket 3.10 of Preload Caching, which was not available on such section in the WP Rocket 3.9.
We also have activated to preload links, and in the Preload DNS we have added the URL of statically, Google Analytics and Tag Manager, which are meant to request faster the connection with such websites.
If there is a URL that your site has to conect to for every post or page, then it would be recommended to add it in this section.
WP rocket can help to use the Cloudflare addon, but we are using the Cloudflare WordPress Plugin, to have the direct conection and activate the APO.
As well, directly in Cloudflare, we haven’t activated the minify of Javascript to eliminate any issues that it generate.
As well, directly in Cloudflare, we haven’t activated the minify of Javascript to eliminate any issues that it generate.
It is activated the Brotli, APO, Railgun and Automatic Signed Exchanges.
It will be required to purge Cache whenever you do some changes on your website.
WP Rocket will automatically purge cache from a server side, but also Cloudflare will store on their servers, therefore it is recommended as well to clear the cache every time you want to see the change right on the instant.
In the case of Asset Clean Up, the CSS minify is activated, but the combination of CSS is not due to the fact that it also affected how the website looked.
Some CSS inline was done as well to speed up the site.
As you have seen, to configure WP rocket is actually quite easy, and if it is combined with other great plugins such as Cloudflare, Statically and Asset Clean Up, you can pass the Core Web Vitals.
Probably as many, we did obsessed on getting everything perfect on the PageSpeed Insights, but without observing any improvemend on passing the CWV test.
Now with the Cloudflare APO, and Vultr in LiteSpeed it certainly has contributed.
WP rocket works pretty well, that is why it is one of the wordpress caching plugins most recommended, even over the free plugins that are available because it does worth to pay for it.
Configure WP rocket and see by yourself the results you can get.
