WP Rocket Review

I do a lot of performance tuning work for my clients.  Speeding up a slow loading site is one of my favourite type of job. Here is my WP Rocket review.

In the past I would use the W3 Total Cache plugin, but I’ve moved over to WP Rocket, this post explains why I think this is the best cache plugin out there.

Why Load Speed Is Important

There are two key reasons why you need to have a fast loading site

1. Site visitors; if your site loads slowly, visitors will become frustrated and click away, there will be no add to cart
2. Google; part of the ranking algorithm is site load speed, if you don’t load quickly, Google will reduce your rank.

Is Your Site Running Slowly?

Jump on over to GTMetrix and put your sites domain name into the tool and analyse.  If you score is not As and Bs  you have a problem.

https://gtmetrix.com

What Is A Cache Plugin

At it’s most basic a cache plugin loads up your website pages and makes a static version of them.

When a site visitor comes to your site, the cache plugin serves up this pre-built page rather than serving up a page generated for each visitor.

Serving up a static version of a website page is much faster than running scripts, accessing the backend database and serving up the page.

WP Rocket ( and the other cache plugins) do this but they also offer more services than just caching.

Why I’m Converting To WP Rocket

After using this plugin on a couple of client projects, I’ve also installed it on my own sites.  It’s really good.  Here are the reasons I’ve stumped up the cache cash to use WP Rocket.

I used to recommend W3 Total cache, but WP Rocket is better.

It Does All The things The Other Plugins Do And Then Some

Just to get this out of the way, WP Rocket does page caching, minify of CSS and Javascript, browser caching and CDN support.

These are the standard features of all cache plugins, but WP Rocket has some extras and they are why I’m swapping.

Super Simple To Setup

Unlike other plugins (I’m looking at you W3 Total Cache), it’s really simple to setup.

You step through a series of pages and click on check boxes to enable features in the plugin.  There are big warning boxes if you click on something that could break your site.

You don’t need to know which expired cache heading you need to select, just click on a button.

Separate Desktop & Mobile Cache

This is huge.  It’s a problem I see a lot with the other cache plugins and I often have to disable caching on mobile devices.

Here’s the issue.  Site visitor A visits your contact page on desktop and a cache is created.  The cache is of the css and setup for a desktop visitor.  Visitor B visits your contact page on their phone, the site says there is a cache of that page and serves that up to speed up the process BUT is serves up the desktop code to a mobile.

The page looks terrible, it does not render for a phone and visitor B leaves your site confused and unable to contact you about a possible project.

Does The Job Of Five Plugins

WP Rocket replaces five other plugins that I usually use to speed up sites,  Fewer plugins means fewer resources used which is good performace tuning

1. W3 Total Cache – cache plugin
2. Autooptimize – Javascript and CSS optimisation
3. WP Optimize – database optimization plugn
4. Resmush IT – image optimisation
5. Jetpack – it replaces the jetpack lazyload image optimisation and CDN
6. Heatbeat Control – the plugin

One Plugin to rule them all and in the performance bind them – JRR Tolkien

Fixes Nagging Issues With Common Remote Scripts

One of the really annoying things I see when optimising sites is that common scripts we add to our site are not optimised.  This includes Google analytics and the Facebook pixel.

WP Rocket realised this was a problem and it has a feature to optimise and serve these scripts locally.

Built In Image Optimisation

WP Rocket integrated with the Imagify service.  This is the material for another blog post, but in short, you can oslleslly compress your images inside the

Heartbeat Control

Another plugin can be discarded with WP Rocket.  It has in built Heatbeat API control.

The WordPress Heartbeat API is a great feature that provides real-time communication between the server and the browser when you are logged into your WordPress admin panel. It uses the file /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php to run AJAX calls from the browser. By default, AJAX requests are sent every 15 seconds on post edit pages, and every 60 seconds on the dashboard.

Controlling the heartbeat API limits how often admin-ajax is run.  The admin-ajax can take a lot of time to load.

Super Charge WP Engine

If you use WP Engine for you hosting, many cache plugins are disabled.  They have built in caching out of the box.

WP Rocket is compatible with their server level caching and adds even more speed to a WordPress site hosted by wpengine.

JQuery Not Optimized

I often disable javascript optimisation on sites that use Jquery for things like home page sliders, if jquery is loaded in the footer or optimized it breaks jquery and the slider will not work correctly.

WP Rocket allows us to optimise JS but ignore jquery with the click of a button – genius.

My Results

Here are my scores from GTMetrix, I’m really happy with the results, the B score from YSlow is due to me not having a CDN in place, I’m currently getting that in place so it will be much faster soon..

 

Wrap Up – WP Rocket Review

If you want a really good cache plugin for your site then I recommend WP Rocket.

If you need help speeding up your WordPress site I have a fixed price performance tuning package.  Get a quote to see how much it would cost to speed up your WordPress site.

Photo Credit: Greenwich Photography Flickr via Compfight cc

Doing the seo dance WP Rocket review.