WP Rocket Review – Best WordPress Cache Plugin

Are you searching for the best WordPress cache plugin? You’re on the right page. In this WP Rocket review, you’re going to find the answer to your slow WordPress pages.

There are over 59,000+ WordPress Plugins with added blog functionalities and features. But there are a few that most WordPress blogs really need.

Improving page speed, website performance, and user experience are some of the vital areas every WordPress blog needs to work and improve upon.

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

A plugin that’s straight out-of-the-box optimized enabled. No complex configuration setup is required. Download, install, activate, set it, and forget it.

This is where the WP Rocket comes in. One of the best WordPress cache plugins.

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

Going by the sheer amount of its customer database, WP-Rocket is undoubtedly one of the best caching plugins today.

In the era of Google mobile-first indexing, speed is no longer an option, but an integral part of online marketing strategies.

Why Speed Matters

Website performance is essential because it affects many aspects of your online business. From on-site experience, Google ranking, customer retention, and conversion rate…

Everything is tied to the performance and speed of your website.

The overall experience 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 the 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, make an average of $100,000 per day. A 1-second delay in 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 load time metrics. So, speed optimization is now a necessity and an aspect you should consider giving utmost attention to.

A WordPress caching plugin like WP Rocket will give a better on-site experience and boost site speed to its best.

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

But first, let’s start with this question…

What is WP Rocket?

WP Rocket is a premium cache and performance optimization tool created by the WP Media team back in 2013. The team, WP Media’s bold 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 website speed are together in one package.

Instead of having multiple WordPress cache plugins, you can have one that effectively handles all the dirty work. 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 other known WordPress caching and performance tools.

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

It has all these features and many more built into it.

Continue reading; you will find a list of all the WP Rocket features below.

According to stats on the website, there are over 130,000 happy WP Rocket customers.

This tells how helpful the WordPress cache plugin is for a better website experience.

How Does WP Rocket Work?

For every visitor that requests information on your site, WordPress runs a PHP call to the database to retrieve the information. This process involves a lot of steps, connections, stops, and HTTP requests to the origin servers.

To simplify the process and make the information available to the users quicker, there is a need to enable caching features on the host server.

Like any other WordPress cache plugin, WP Rocket optimizes page load by enabling caching on your server to keep a copy of your website pages.

When a user visits the first time, the server downloads a fresh copy of the request to the client browser. For subsequent visits/requests, the cached copy is compressed and served to the user to make the download process faster.

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

WP Rocket automatically enables caching upon activation for desktop traffic. Mobile visitors get separate cache pages. This helps to optimize mobile traffic better.

WP Rocket is one of the few cache plugins allowed in top managed WordPress hosting environments.

In its documentation, you will find a list of WordPress hosting providers that work seamlessly with WP Rocket.

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

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

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

WP Rocket Core Features

• Pages cache for quick viewing.
• Separate caching setup for mobile visitors.
• Option to cache logged-in users.
• Preloading the cache of pages in user browsers.
• Fix Leverage browser caching errors in speed testing tools like GtMetrix, Google Page Speed Insights, Pingdom, etc.
• Reduce HTTP requests to improve the site speed.
• Decreasing bandwidth usage with GZIP compression.
• Apply optimal browser caching header’s expiration time.
• Minification and concatenation of JS and CSS files
• Lazy Loading images for optimal performance and load times.
• 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 (content delivery network) 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 explains how WP Rocket Work. Please take a moment to watch it.

How to Setup WP Rocket and Price

First, you’ll need to get the plugin installed on your blog.

Since the WP Rocket is not available in the WordPress.org repository, you’ll need to buy a WP Rocket license from the official website.

Here is the official WP Rocket pricing, as shown in the image below.

After completing your order, download the plugin from the website to your computer and upload it to your WordPress blog.

To upload the zip file, 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 the “upload plugin” button.

Click on it. This action will reveal a panel just below the page.

Click on the “choose file” button and select the WP Rocket plugin in a zip file from your computer.

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.

Activating your WP Rocket license takes place in the background. Unlike others, where you need to enter API keys and other details, you don’t need to do anything to validate your WP Rocket license.

It will be activated automatically. But in the event that your license validation failed, here are a few troubleshooting tips to help.

How to Troubleshoot WP Rocket License validation Error

There are a few reasons your license validation might fail, but taking this step will in most cases, resolve the issues.

Save Changes

99% of the time, simply clicking on the save changes button on the validation page is all that is needed to resolve the issue.

Before trying any other tip on this list, give this one a go first.

IP Address

Some web hosts have a list of blocked IP addresses. Check with your hosting provider to allow WP Rocket IP address. The IP address is given here; 146.59.192.120

Check WP Rocket status

If the above options didn’t solve the license validation error, next is to check the WP Rocket status.

It might get be that the server itself is down for some reason. If this is so, you need to check the status to confirm. You can always check the status in real-time from this link.

Deactivate WordPress security plugins

WordPress security firewall applications like Wordfence blocked malicious or suspicious logins IP on your site.

Sometimes, legitimate requests to your origin server might be blocked too. If you have a security application active on your site, disable it first before trying to validate your license.

Reinstall The Plugin

If all the above didn’t work, it’s time to deactivate the plugin, delete, reinstall, and activate it again.

Probably, there is something wrong along the way. Taking this step might fix the problem.

For more troubleshooting guides, visit the helper page.

Best WP Rocket Settings

Upon successful activation, WP Rocket immediately applies 80% of the best WP Rocket settings for WordPress blogs. You don’t need to be a tech guru to apply the WP Rocket best configuration settings.

With the default settings 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 setting up WP Rocket and what it can do for your blog. But seriously, WP Rocket’s default configuration setup 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, Litespeed 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’s primary function is quite different.

Autoptimize’s primary function is the minification of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript codes. In comparison, page caching is the main feature of WP Rocket.

So, there are no compatibility issues between WP Rocket vs Autoptimize.

Thinking about using another tool 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 execute multiple tasks efficiently, don’t install another for the same tasks.

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

But during an experiment, I ran on this blog.

I tested the Jetpack site accelerator and lazy load features. It works fine. So, I uninstall other image optimization plugins and stuck with Jetpack.

WP Rocket image optimization features – Lazy Load – will reduce the number of installed plugins and free more space on your server.

You don’t have to worry about compatibility issues if you’re keen on using Autoptimize.

WP Rocket has an in-built compatibility check that auto-detects if minification features are enabled in Autoptimize and prevents the same activation in WP Rocket.

WP Rocket vs W3 Total Cache vs WP Super Cache

Being a premium cache plugin, it is important to see how WP Rocket compares with other popular cache plugins. This gives you the data to compare and make better decisions.

Other cache plugins offer a free version, but WP Rocket does not.

WP Rocket is only available to try for a 14-day money-back guarantee. This means if you’re not satisfied with the plugin’s 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 the other 2 well-known popular WordPress cache plugins.

WP Rocket vs WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is a 100% free viral plugin from Automatic with more than 2 million active installs. Created by the same people behind your WordPress Core installation. So, you rest assured of the quality and attention to what really matters.

The plugin improves performance in 3 ways:

With a simple click, you can turn the on/off caching function on its setup page. The advanced tab gives you more control over the setup.

It offers a simpler and straightforward approach to WordPress cache.

But with all these, WP Super cache is best for page and browser caching functions only. If you want more advanced features like database optimization, DNS prefetching, great customer support, WP Rocket justifies its price.

As a 100% free service, the support is not always on the ground to provide timely responses to users’ queries.

On the other hand, WP Rocket offers a great support system, quick response, more features, and regular updates.

WP Rocket vs W3 Total Cache

The most popular free WordPress caching plugin by far. W3 Total cache offers extensive features in its freemium version that you will find in some premium cache plugins.

Like WP Rocket, W3 Total cache has minification and concatenation enabled. It comes with mobile detention, browser, and page-level caching features.

But it does not offer database optimization and cache preloading features like WP Rocket.

Another advantage of WP Rocket is in the setup process.

Both the Pro and free version of the W3 Total cache does not support automatic configuration settings. You have to manually fine-tune the settings to work with your host server.

It is stated on the website that, if you’re serious about performance, you should consider hiring the support team for the configuration setup.

This is not something everyone may be comfortable with.

As a premium WordPress cache plugin, WP Rocket is auto-enabled upon activation. It makes it easy for everyone to use regardless of their technical knowledge. Whether you’re a beginners, intermediate, or seasonal marketer, anyone can set up WP Rocket in less than 3 minutes.

The premium version of W3 Total cache has an in-built capability to leverage either Brotli (lossless data compression algorithm) or GZip for compressing static files on your server. If you want the full benefits and features, buy the premium version.

However, WP Rocket currently does not add the Brotli rules to htaccess files. This is because Brotli is currently not supported by most browsers.

But this is not an issue with compressing static files in WP Rocket since most web browsers support GZip. It is the most popular and supported data compression application today.

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.

Frequently Asked Questions About WP Rocket Review

Conclusion…

If you’re looking to achieve maximum page speed, increase website performance, and give a better user experience, a caching plugin like WP Rocket is all you need.

In this WP Rocket plugin review, I have given you much of the information you need to decide if the cache plugin will help boost page speed, increase site performance and revenue of your site.

WP Rocket is the choice cache plugin for top marketing gurus like Neil Patel, Yoast, Ana Couto, Topher DeRosia, and more.

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