Wp Rocket Review – Best Wp Caching Plugin

There are thousands of Wp Plugins with added blog functionalities and features. But there are a few Wp Plugins that most WordPress blog really needs. Page speed, website performance, and user experience are what every single WordPress site needs to work and improve upon.

A caching and performance optimization WordPress plugin falls into the latter categories. Every WordPress blog needs caching and optimization features.

This is where Wp Rocket plugin comes in.

In this Wp Rocket review, you’re going to discover why Wp Rocket is such a great caching and website performance optimization plugin for WordPress blogs. And why it’s such an essential WordPress plugin worthy of your investment.

Why Speed Matters.

Website performance is very important because it affects many aspects of your online business. From user experience to Google ranking, customer retention, and conversion rate…

Everything is to tied to the performance and speed of your web pages.

The overall performance of your WordPress website affects your business growth and revenue in the long-run.

According to a stat on page speed, a 1-second delay can drastically reduce conversion rate by 7%. And 47% of consumers expect a page to load in under 2 seconds or less.

If you’re an e-commerce site, making an average of $100,000 per day. A 1-seconds delay in page loading time may cost you $2.5 million lost in potential sales yearly.

Putting all these together, it is no more news that Google ranking factors now include website performance and page speed metrics. So speed optimization is now a necessity and an aspect you should consider giving utmost attention.

A WordPress caching and optimization plugin like Wp Rocket will give better user experience, increase website performance, and boost page speed to its best.

The better your website performance and page speed, the more sales potential and revenue you could possibly make.

What is Wp Rocket?

Wp Rocket is a premium caching and performance optimization WordPress plugin created by the Wp Media team back in 2013. The team, Wp Media boldly mission is to make the web better, faster, and lighter.

So they created a caching and performance optimization plugin, Wp Rocket. All the tools, features, and setup you need to achieve faster page speed are put together in one single package.

Instead of having multiple performance optimization WordPress plugins, you can have just one plugin that handles all the dirty work effectively. That’s one of the benefits or advantages of Wp Rocket over its competitors in the market.

The activation of Wp Rocket will save you from installing many other known WordPress plugins.

For instance, you don’t need another lazy load plugin, HTML, CSS, and JS minification plugin, or hosting Google analytics locally if you have Wp Rocket installed and active on your site.

Wp Rocket has all these features and many more built into it. Continue reading, you will find a list of all it’s features below.

According to a stat on the website, there are over 130,000 happy Wp Rocket customers.

This tells how helpful the caching and performance optimization WordPress plugin is for better website performance.

How Does Wp Rocket Work?

In this Wp Rocket review, I talk you through how Wp Rocket work.

Wp Rocket, like any other caching plugin, optimizes your website page speed by caching your web pages for a quick view without users having to download a fresh copy of your web pages at every single visit.

The plugin by default automatically enabled Gzip compression to reduce the file size of your web pages through htaccess file. This improve performance and page speed greatly.

Page cache is enable to automatically cache pages for visitors. Mobile visitors get separate cache pages. This helps to optimize mobile traffic better.

Wp Rocket is one of the few cache plugins that is allowed in many of the tops managed WordPress hosting environment. In the plugin documentation, you will find a list of WordPress hosting provider that works seamlessly with Wp Rocket.

A minimum of PHP 5.6 is required for Wp Rocket to work effectively on any of these servers:

• NGINX.
• Litespeed or Windows.
• Apache server with mod_rewrite, mod_expires, mod_deflate.

Wp Rocket has so many caching and optimization features that set it apart from other optimization and caching plugins.

Here are some of the features of Wp Rocket WordPress plugin.

• Pages cache for quick viewing.
• Separate caching for mobile visitors.
• Option to cache logged in users.
• Preloading the cache of pages in user browsers.
• Reduction of HTTP requests numbers to reduce loading time.
• Decreasing bandwidth usage with GZIP compression.
• Apply optimal browser caching header’s expiration time.
• Minification and concatenation of JS and CSS files
• LazyLoad images for optimal performance and page speed.
• WebP compatibility for supported browsers.
• Deferred loading of JavaScript files.
• Generation of Critical Path CSS and deferred loading of CSS files
• Database optimization.
• Heartbeat WordPress API control.
• DNS prefetch
• CDN integration
• Cloudflare integration
• Sucuri integration
• Host Google Analytics code locally.
• Host Facebook Pixel code locally.
• Import/export option of settings.
• Option to roll back to a previous version.

This video best explain how Wp Rocket Work. Take a moment to watch it.

How to Set up Wp Rocket.

First, you’ll need get Wp Rocket installed on your blog.

Since the Wp Rocket plugin is not available in the WordPress.org plugins repository, you’ll need to purchase a license from the official Wp Rocket website.

After completing your order, download the plugin from the website to your computer. This is the easier way to upload a plugin to your WordPress blog.

Go to the WordPress admin dashboard and hover your mouse on “Plugins”. It will reveal 3 menu options:

• Installed Plugins.
• Add New.
• Plugin Editors.

Click on “add new”, it will open a new tab where you will see “upload plugin”. Click on it. This action will reveal a panel just below the page.

Click on the “choose file” button and select the downloaded Wp Rocket plugin from your computer download folder. If you’d save it there.

Wait for the upload to complete. It may take a few seconds or minutes, depending on your network quality. Once the upload is completed, click on activate.

That’s it.

Upon activation, Wp Rocket immediately applies 80% of its set up to your website. You don’t need to be a tech guru to configure Wp Rocket.

With the default set up or configuration, most WordPress blogs are good to go. But if you’re an advanced WordPress user, you may want to fine-tune things a bit further.

Watch the video below to learn more about how to set up Wp Rocket and what it can do to your WordPress blog. But seriously, Wp Rocket default set up is good for most WordPress blogs.

You don’t need to change or configure anything at most. This is one of the advantages of Wp Rocket over other popular caching plugins like W3 total cache, Super cache, etc.

Can I Use Autoptimize With Wp Rocket?

The simple answer to this question is, Yes.

You can use Autoptimize with Wp Rocket. Each plugin primary function is quite differ.

Autoptimize primary function is the minification of HTML, CSS, and Javascript codes. While page caching is the main feature of Wp Rocket. So the two plugins do not have compatibility issues.

Thinking about using another plugin for HTML, CSS, and JS minification, Wp Rocket also has minification features. This saves you the installation of yet, another WordPress plugin.

An ideal blog maintenance culture is reducing the number of installed plugins to the barest minimum. Where one plugin can handle multiple tasks effectively, don’t install another plugin for one of the tasks.

For instance, I used image optimization plugins on this blog like Smush.it, image optimization, and lazy load by Optimole, etc.

But during an experiment I ran on this blog, I tested Jetpack site accelerator and lazy load. It works fine. So I uninstall other image optimization plugins and stick with Jetpack.

That alone saves the installation of another WordPress plugin.

But you don’t have to worry about compatibility issues if you’re keen on using Autoptimize WordPress plugin. Wp Rocket has an in-built compatibility check that auto-detect if minification features are enabled in Autoptimize and prevent the activation of the same in Wp Rocket.

Wp Rocket vs W3 Total Cache vs Wp Super Cache vs Hyper Cache

Being a premium cache and performance optimization plugin, it is important to see how Wp Rocket compares with other popular cache plugins. This gives us the data to use in making the right buying decision.

It is important to note that other cache plugins offer a free version of their premium plugin, but Wp Rocket does not offer a free version of its plugin.

Wp Rocket is only available for 14-day money-back guarantee. This means if you’re not satisfied with the plugin performance, you can request a refund within 14 days of purchase.

So you have nothing to lose, anyway.

Now, let us compare Wp Rocket with other 3 well-known popular WordPress cache plugins.

• W3 total cache.
• Wp Super cache.
• Hyper cache.

Wp Rocket offers many advanced cache features not found in others. One of them is the one-click quick set up. Upon activation, the Wp rocket deplores the recommended configuration.

Cache plugin like W3 total cache needs user work-around to get it working. For beginners WordPress users, finding your way around the right configuration set up may not be easy.

Wp Super cache is a very popular plugin with more than 2 million active installs. But it is best for offering a beginner-friendly approach to caching.

This is not so with Wp Rocket.

It is easy to set up and simple to play around with for WordPress users of any level and experience.

Let’s take a look at how Wp Rocket compares with the other 3 popular cache plugins.

As you can see from the image above, Wp Rocket stands above its competitor’s features wise. It is a feature-rich WordPress cache and performance plugin.

This makes your investment worthwhile.

Conclusion…

If you’re looking to achieve maximum page speed, increase website performance, and give better user experience, a caching plugin like Wp Rocket will give better return on your investment.

If you’ve discover something useful in this Wp Rocket review, or want to share your Wp Rocket experience, leave us a message in the comment box below.