WP Rocket review

The future is online

Technology has advanced dramatically over the years. The transition from physical to virtual businesses has evolved faster than previously thought, especially with Covid. Today, many people have decided to adopt an Internet business model carried out through websites, blogs or online stores.

However, it is essential to note that not all people or companies who have made this transition have technical knowledge about creating a website. For that reason, many of them have opted for one of the platforms that facilitate this work, WordPress.

WordPress CMS

WordPress is a CMS (content management system) that allows you to easily create and manage a website, blog or online store. This platform was launched in 2003 as open-source software, which has allowed the creation of a vast community of developers who have worked over the years to improve it and offer more straightforward solutions to people and companies.

WordPress is a platform that can be used by both beginners and more experienced people or companies. Furthermore, this CMS has a great variety of plugins that can be used on any website to give it a specific feature. Thanks to that, the optimisation and performance of this platform have improved considerably.

Businesses who use WordPress are looking to improve their website speed and performance, and one of the best ways to achieve this today is by using a WordPress caching plugin called WP Rocket and in a moment will get to our WP Rocket review.

WordPress caching plugins are important because they enhance the speed and performance of your site. Static cached files load faster than dynamic database queries and this leads to better performance of your website. Caching can also help reduce the load on your hosting server. The WP Rocket plugin does exactly this for your WordPress blog or business website, as WordPress speed in 2024 is critical for not just user experience, but for SEO too, hence our WP Rocket review.

What is WP Rocket?

WP Rocket is recognised as a powerful cache plugin by WordPress experts. It was created in 2013 by Jean-Baptiste and Jonathan Buttigieg since there were not many options to optimise websites at that time.

Today, this WordPress plugin has optimised more than 1,380,000 websites achieving the satisfaction of more than 164,000 customers and this is what has prompted us to do a WP Rocket review.

It is intended for all people and businesses, especially beginners, to help them optimise the performance and caching of WordPress in order to make their websites, blogs or online stores load faster.

Caching consists of generating and storing a static version of the website on a server. That way, it will be ready to be shown to visitors at any time.

This process helps increase the website’s response speed since it does not have to continually communicate with the server to gather the information created by each web page.

WP Rocket can reduce the website’s loading time by creating page caches, compressing files (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) or through lazy loading of images.

That’s not the only thing WP Rocket can do to achieve this. It can also reduce bandwidth usage with GZIP compression and optimise Google fonts, which are becoming more necessary now for WordPress caching plugins.

Other tools to consider are NitroPack: read review

Key features

Many users decide to install this WordPress plugin just for the speed it can provide to their websites. However, WP Rocket has other features that they can take advantage of even more.

Page caching

It is the main feature of WP Rocket. The content of a web page visited for the first time by a user is stored in the cache memory so that it is loaded more quickly the second time. That is because the cache memory of that site remembers the stored content.

The static contents that can be stored are HTML, CSS, JavaScript files and even images.

CDN support

As we know, a CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a set of servers distributed at different points in a network with the aim of maximising the bandwidth for accessing customer data.

WP Rocket supports these services. This feature will allow any website, regardless of its size, to considerably reduce loading times by guaranteeing the distribution of its files to different servers located around the world. This process is carried out effectively to speed up the website, blog or online store.

Fortunately, WP Rocket is compatible with most CDN providers. Regardless of whether you use a separate CDN service or it comes as part of your hosting plan, you will be able to integrate it without any problem with WP Rocket.

Learn more about web hosting.

Easy to use

One of the most sought-after features by people or businesses in a CMS and its plugins is the ease of use. Remember that not all users have technical knowledge about these topics, so it is crucial that a plugin of this type is easy to use.

WP Rocket offers an easy-to-use control panel, which is a great advantage, especially for beginners. It is a very practical plugin that makes life easier for everyone who uses it in order to optimise a website without much effort automatically.

In addition to the control panel, it provides great documentation. That will allow users, through guides, to learn more about how to take advantage of the most powerful features of this plugin.

In the same way, advanced users can take advantage of all the options that WP Rocket offers in order to optimise their websites’ performance as they want.

Minification

This feature is very important to increase the speed of a website. WP Rocket is capable of reducing the size of all HTML, CSS and JavaScript files as well as multimedia files such as images. That will allow a lower bandwidth consumption, making the web page have a better performance when requested.

It should be noted that WP Rocket offers an additional minification option that allows removing comments, blank spaces, extra characters in files, line breaks, etc.

Optimisations

WP Rocket has been adding several optimisations. Some of them are

Media optimisation

We know that the multimedia content of websites can take time to load, affecting the user experience. WP Rocket has been in charge of solving this problem through the Lazy Load function, which delays the loading and display of both images and videos. That means that this multimedia content will only be loaded when the user scrolls the page to that position.

In the same way, this WP Rocket includes another plugin called Imagify that allows you to compress and reduce the size of the images on the website.

Database optimisation

One of the biggest problems that any WordPress website or any other CMS presents is the decrease in the database’s performance. That is mainly due to the fact that as the years go by, the database grows, which is normal, causing the website, blog or online store to slow down.

WP Rocket has incorporated certain optimization features that will allow you to perform regular cleanings so that everything works properly. The content that this plugin takes into account as expendable is:

• Drafts and posts in the trash.
• Old post reviews.
• Comments spam or deleted.

Google fonts optimisation

This optimisation reduces the number of HTTP requests making the website faster.

Loading times

WP Rocket is capable of reducing more than 50% the loading times of a website, blog or online store. In addition, it also reduces the size of the website page and the number of requests.

Custom cache lifespan

WP Rocket offers the option to modify the cache expiration interval. Keep in mind that the default cache is removed once new content is uploaded to the website. Generally, the default duration is 24 hours.

By being able to modify this interval, visitors will have the opportunity to visit the most up-to-date version of the website. The lifetime of the cache can be set in intervals of minutes, hours or days.

How does WP Rocket work?

Before knowing how to optimise with WP Rocket, it is important to understand how WordPress works in a basic way. This CMS obtains the content of the database of the website visited by a user. That causes a page to be generated, which is sent back to the user.

This simple process can slow down the website if many users visit it. WP Rocket takes care of this by tracking and caching a static copy of the site’s content. That allows WordPress not to reload the page once the user visits it again but instead shows the cache’s content.

Thanks to this process, the server frees up resources allowing load times to be reduced, providing a better user experience.

One of the advantages that WP Rocket has over other caching plugins is the ability to work automatically from the moment it is activated. That is, GZIP compression and caching of both the page and the browser are already configured by default.

How to set up WP Rocket?

Unlike many other caching plugins, the WP Rocket WordPress plugin allows easy installation and configuration not only for advanced users but also for beginners.

Before configuring this plugin, it is essential to know how to install it. Please note, WP Rocket is not a free plugin, so once you buy WP Rocket, a download link will appear regardless of the plan you have chosen. You just need to download the .zip file.

Once downloaded, go to your WordPress Dashboard, navigate to “Plugins” option that appears in the left bar of WordPress, click on “Add New” and then on “Upload Plugin.” Next, a button will appear to choose the file you want to upload. In this case, you will use the previously downloaded file and then you must click on “Install Now.”

After you have installed the WP Rocket, you will have to click the “Activate Plugin” option. WP Rocket will be activated, and the page caching will start working automatically.

Now is the time to configure it. Go to the WP Rocket Settings option that appears on the left panel of WordPress. You will notice that several options will be displayed. You have to select “WP Rocket.” The WP Rocket DashBoard will appear in which you can configure different options according to your needs.

The options that you can configure are the following:

• Cache
• File optimization
• Media
• Preload
• Advanced rules
• CDN
• Database
• Heartbeat
• Add-ons.
• Image optimisation.

WP Rocket benefits

Easy to set up and use

One of its greatest benefits is its ease of use. Many people, especially beginners, stop using certain caching services precisely because they are difficult to use. WP Rocket provides an intuitive, practical and easy-to-use control panel.

Thanks to that, users can easily enter each option’s configuration to customize them according to their needs.

Caching

We have already seen that WP Rocket starts working as soon as it is installed, optimizing a website’s performance. Unlike other services of this type, WP Rocket allows the configuration of caching to take advantage of all the benefits it offers according to the user’s needs.

File optimisation

WP Rocket allows you to improve loading speed by significantly reducing website files. Like the previous point, the advantage of this WordPress caching service is that you can configure the optimization options to achieve the desired results.

Thanks to that, it is possible to combine HTML, CSS and JavaScript code as well as Google Fonts files.

Media optimisation

We have already discussed this advantage before. The user can activate Lazy Loading to optimize all the multimedia content of the website. That includes images, videos and iframes.

Excellent technical support

It is one of the most important benefits that any user looks for in service of this type. WP Rocket offers excellent customer service through specialised agents with all the necessary technical knowledge to answer any question. They respond quickly and in a very friendly way.

In addition, WP Rocket also provides high-quality documentation so that anyone can search for information through guides, tutorials or frequently asked questions.

WP Rocket results

We ran a test pagespeed score on one of our WordPress sites before and after installing WP Rocket cache plugin. The performance improvement was quite unbelievable with just the standard settings. The WP Rocket caching plugin is pretty remarkable. Please see the image below.

WP Rocket pricing plans

WP Rocket is one of the caching services that offers affordable prices for most people and businesses.

It offers three plans, and each one is priced differently depending on the number of websites users can use. In fact, it is the only difference. It is for this reason that WP Rocket is one of the most used services since each plan provides the same functionalities. There are no limits except for the number of websites.

• Single Plan: $49 | €44 | £40 (1 year of support and updates for 1 website) *.
• Plus Plan: $99 | €88 | £80 (1 year of support and updates for 3 websites) *.
• Infinite Plan: $249 | €222 | £203 (1 year of support and updates for unlimited websites) *.

* Prices are taken from the date of post and conversions are approximate

Each plan has the following features:

While WP Rocket is not a free caching plugin, nor does not offer a free plan, it does present a 100% no-risk money-back guarantee, which is only valid if requested within 14 days of purchasing the service.

Pros and cons vs other caching plugins

WP Rocket review: Summary

We have seen that WP Rocket is not only easy to use but can also dramatically improve WordPress website speed. WP Rocket is definitely worth a try and with a 14-day refund policy, you have no downside and nothing to lose by trying it on your WordPress site.

Try WP Rocket now for 14 days or get your money back.