WP Rocket Review: How to Speed Up Your Website With WP Rocket
Giving a slow browsing experience to your visitors can be frustrating for them and can lead to reduced traffic and sales. A slow website also affects your ranking in search engine results. This is where the WP Rocket Plugin comes into play.
The speed of your website is paramount to your website’s success. One of the most efficient ways of speeding up a WordPress website is to install a cache plugin. A caching plugin will make static HTML copies of all of your pages.
These plugins also implement other optimization techniques such as mininify, to reduce the speed of your page loading time even further.
Why I Chose WP Rocket for My Blog
For many years, I have been using W3 Total Cache to cache files; however, I recently ran into a problem in which the plugin caused a 403 response error code. This resulted in Google deindexing my pages and stopping them from tracking my traffic through Google Analytics.
After disabling W3 Total Cache, I tried a few different plugins. Now, the one that I am finally using for my blogs is WP Rocket. It is the first premium plugin I have ever used, yet it is very affordable.
It includes many features, which are still missing from other plugins. WordPress experts recommend using WP Rocket to boost your website speed.
WP Rocket Review
WP Rocket only takes a minute or two to configure. In the basic options page, you can enable lazy loading so that images only load once an image is visible. This greatly reduces your initial page loading time.
Minification can be applied to HTML, Javascript, and CSS. This technique will remove all the space and comments that are within these files. File caching can also be enabled for mobile users and logged-in users.
The advanced options page allows you to exclude certain pages and files from caching and minification. You can also delete the cache of certain pages whenever you update a post.
The plugin also supports content delivery networks such as MaxCDN. This is something I plan on configuring over the next few weeks as it will reduce the speed of my website even more.
Whenever you make a change to your website, be it a template change or activation of a new plugin, you should delete the page cache. This ensures that new cache files are generated using your current configuration.
Their website has a features page that illustrates what it can do against its main competitors. This includes W3 Total Cache, Hyper Cache, and WP Super Cache.
Comparison
As you can see, WP Rocket offers a lot of features that other caching plugins do not, such as lazy loading of images, image optimization, and DNS prefetching.
Of course, comparison tables such as this are usually biased and make a point of showing what a product can do and what it cannot. I am sure if WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache were to compile a table such as this, it would highlight features that WP Rocket does not have.
That being said, I think it is important to note that WP Rocket offers features that the others do not, as it saves you from installing another plugin. When I used W3 Total Cache, I had to install a plugin to lazy load images. With WP Rocket, I uninstalled several unnecessary optimization plugins.
As you can see from the GTmetrix report above, my blog loads in under a second and has an A-A rating. I’d still love to reduce the speed of my website even more, though I am happy with the way it is currently performing.
Conclusion
All in all, I am impressed with what WP Rocket can do. It works directly out of the box, therefore you do not have to spend time configuring the plugin.
A single license for WP Rocket retails at $59 and comes with one year of updates and support. It also comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. A license for three websites for a year can be purchased for $119 and an unlimited number of websites for $299.
I recommend checking out WP Rocket if you’re looking for a user-friendly cache plugin for your website.
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