WP Rocket Review: Still The Best WordPress Cache Plugin?

WP Rocket Review: Still The Best WordPress Cache Plugin?

WP Rocket Review. Still The Best WordPress Cache Plugin? WP Rocket plugin is one of the best cache plugin for WordPress. Period. It’s installed on 415,000+ sites with a 92% customer approval rating. WP Rocket cache plugin is worth the money to improve your WordPress site’s performance. There’s a 14 day money back guarantee if you’re not happy with WP Rocket. WP Rocket Review + Best Cache Plugin For WordPress + WP Rocket Cache

What’s Cache?

Caching involves storing ready-made, or load ready, version of your website’s content on your server to be display to visitors.  In other words, a cache is a temporary storage area with all your posts, products, pages, videos, and pictures.

It reduces your server needs to communicate with your website content to be display for your visitors.  Caching creates temporary files of your website to put it simply.

For example, caching will pull files stored on your hard disk in a cache subdirectory within your browser’s directory.  When you revisit the recently viewed website, the browser (i.e. Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc) will pull those cache files instead of requesting it from the website’s server.

This will reduce the website’s load times and the server’s load for additional traffic.  The results will significantly reduce your website’s load times. The best cache plugin for WordPress will do this for you.  Can WP Rocket plugin do this for you?  Let’s find out.WP Rocket Review + Best Cache Plugin For WordPress + WP Rocket Cache

Why Cache?

Why would you need to cache?  Well, caching helps your visitors stay on your website and keeps them engaged by serving your content faster to them.  In addition, it keeps your bounce rates down.

How many times have we click away from a website because it took too long to load?  It’s probably in the millions.  Caching makes your website more responsive because it provides instant gratification for your visitors.

It’s the reason why Google, Amazon, and other tech companies invest millions of dollars in their website’s speed.  Fast Company did a great article about it here.  In addition, slow websites get dinged on search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and so forth.  Check out this article here.

In other words, you lose out on free advertisements on Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and so forth via search results.  Furthermore, you’ll lose out on potential sales if your eCommerce store isn’t provide fast results.

People are likely to make more purchases if they get fast results. Hence, the Fast Company’s article about Amazon’s study.

Therefore, caching is one of the elements to optimize your website.  We’ll discuss other options later in this article.  Let’s find out if the WP Rocket plugin is the best cache plugin for WordPress. WP Rocket Review + Best Cache Plugin For WordPress + WP Rocket Cache

WP Rocket Review: Introduction

WP Rocket is the best cache plugin for WordPress.  It’s a feature filled plugin that’s easy to setup for beginners or professionals.  However, that doesn’t mean you don’t have to test the settings.  Every cache plugin will “break” your site.

It’s a matter of testing which settings work best with your WordPress themes and plugins.  You should only be using one WordPress caching plugin.  If you have multiple cache plugins, this will result in issues too.  Let’s see if that plugin should be WP Rocket Plugin.

What can WP Rocket plugin do for your site?  It’ll cache all your website’s posts and pages.  You can enable browser caching and GZIP compression.  Both will tremendously help decrease your server’s load and bandwidth.

In addition, you can defer the loading of JavaScript files and optimize your Google Fonts.  Furthermore, you can defer loading of your images (i.e., lazy load) until the visitor reaches the images on your page.  You can load your CSS and JS files together, so it’ll increase page load times. WP Rocket Review + Best Cache Plugin For WordPress + WP Rocket Cache

Features

WP Rocket has a long list of features.  But does it make it the best cache plugin for WordPress?  The WP Rocket plugin provides support for Content Delivery Network (i.e., CDN).  With a CDN, you’re able to distribute your website across multiple servers around the world to help deliver your website faster.

WP Rocket starts working instantly after upload and activation.  Your visitors should see faster loading times even if you haven’t gone through the settings.

The “child proof” plugin has basic settings like image lazy loading.  In other words, images aren’t loaded until your visitor reaches it.  In addition, with the WP Rocket plugin, you can preload your pages. Plus, you set expirations on your cache.

I’ve set it to expire every 24 hours because I’m always adding new content with a daily new article. However, you can set the expiration to a schedule that fits your content updates.

Furthermore, with minification and concatenation, you’ll be able to fully optimize your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.  It sounds daunting like rocket science, but WP Rocket makes it easy with a simple click of an option.

The WP Rocket plugin allows you to cache files for mobile visitors.  It’s a great feature since everyone is doing more searches on their phones.  Is it the best cache plugin for WordPress yet?  Hmmm..

Here’s a list with a few highlighted features: WP Rocket Review + Best Cache Plugin For WordPress + WP Rocket Cache

• Page Caching
• Cache Preloading
• GZIP Compression
• Browser Caching
• Database Optimization
• Google Fonts Optimization
• Minification
• Defer Javascripts
• Remove Query String From Static Sources
• and more!  See full list here.

Settings

WP Rocket plugin’s settings are very similar to W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache.  W3 Total Cache would be the go-to for WordPress power users and WP Super Cache would be the entry cache plugin for beginners.  They both work really well.  However, WP Super Cache seems to give a lot of people issues even though its made by the WordPress team.  It does work well for some who don’t have much content; however, you’ll run into issue if your WordPress theme is a little more complex.

However, WP Rocket’s biggest asset is it’s easy to setup unlike W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache.  W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache have multiple tabs to configure.  It’s not as easy as WP Rocket plugin.  WP Rocket has a minimal control panel, which helps eliminate any daunting settings.  In addition, each setting comes with an explanation to help you understand what it will effect and do.  For power users, you can always check out their online documentation to get WP Rocket’s full capabilities here.

Anyway, WP Rocket keeps it simple with their settings.  It’s the reason why I consider it to be the best cache plugin for WordPress.  They get you results while keeping it easy to use.  I pretty much went through and checked all the boxes then went to GTmetrix to check my page load times, Page Speed Scores, YSlow Score, and Requests.  My Before and After results in the next section. WP Rocket Review + Best Cache Plugin For WordPress + WP Rocket Cache

Before

Before WP Rocket, I was using WP Super Cache.  I had the preload settings on for posts, pages, and taxonomies.  In addition, I had enabled CDN, page compression, caching, cache rebuild, clear all cache when something is published, extra homepage checks, and list new cache pages.  My website is hosted on SiteGround GoGeek servers with 50 active plugins, an online store (i.e., WooCommerce), an affiliate program (i.e., AffiliateWP), 45 posts with 1280 px images, CSS coding, JavaScripts running, sliders, and multiple animation settings.  I don’t have a CDN setup on my website except WP Super Cache’s setting.  In summary, I have a lot of things running on my website.

It’s highly likely my website’s setup is completely different than yours.  There are a lot of factors to configuring your WP Rocket settings, so my results may not be standard for other websites.  However, my testing confirms one thing with everything I’m running on my website, which is WP Rocket gets results even for VPS hosted sites.  If it can get results for me, there’s a high probability it’ll get results for you.

With my WP Super Cache settings, per GTMetrix, my website was taking a full four (4) seconds to fully load for my visitors with 64 requests, 62% PageSpeed Score, and 61% YSlow Score.  It’s unacceptable.  Let’s see if WP Rocket lives up to the best cache plugin for WordPress hype. WP Rocket Review + Best Cache Plugin For WordPress + WP Rocket Cache

After

It took me about half an hour to get my settings correct after setting up the WP Rocket plugin.  I finally perfected my WP Rocket settings and I got fantastic results.  My load time was reduce by more than half the time with fewer requests, a higher PageSpeed Score, and a higher YSlow Score on GTMetrix.   My Fully Loaded Time was 1.7 seconds with 41 requests, 66% PageSpeed Score, and 69% YSlow Score.  That’s a drastic improvement where I can label WP Rocket as the best cache plugin for WordPress. WP Rocket Review + Best Cache Plugin For WordPress + WP Rocket Cache

Other Options

There are other ways to improve your site’s performance if you don’t want the best cache plugin for WordPress.  You can simply compress and optimize all your images, remove unused and redundant plugins, implement a CDN like Cloudflare, or upgrade to a premium hosting service like WP Engine.  If you don’t want to pay for premium hosting, you can check out SiteGround’s shared hosting plans here.  WP Rocket Review + Best Cache Plugin For WordPress + WP Rocket Cache

I have referred a few clients to SiteGround.  All my clients have seen tremendous improvements in load times compared to GoDaddy’s or Blue Host’s Shared Hosting.  For hosting comparisons, you can read about them here.

However, the hosting options require a large initial investment and multi-year hosting commitments.  WP Rocket plugin is the most economical option.  The plugin starts at US$ 39 for one site, which comes out to be about US$ 3.25 per month.  It’s really the best route you can take in terms of budget friendly options.  It’s the only smart option if you’re monetizing your website via affiliate links, advertisements, sponsorship, or selling products with an eCommerce cart. WP Rocket Review + Best Cache Plugin For WordPress + WP Rocket Cache

WP Rocket Review: Pros vs Cons

Pros

• Instant results
• Easy to use
• Simple dashboard
• Mobile settings
• 14 day money back guarantee
• 415,000+ installs
• Budget friendly

Cons

• It costs money
• Results may vary
• No speed improvement guarantees
• Annual subscription for plugin updates

WP Rocket Review: Conclusion

WP Rocket is definitely the best cache plugin for WordPress.  It’s simple to use and it provides great results.  It gotten me fantastic results within 30 minutes after setup.  My Google Page Score and YSlow Score increased; in addition, my page loading times dropped by more than half with less requests being made.  With 415,000+ installations, there’s really no denying that WP Rocket is the best cache plugin for WordPress.  In addition, their subscription plans don’t put a significant hole into your bank account with plans starting at US$ 3.25 per month.

Lastly, it’s the most economically option compared to upgrading your hosting, which could take a few days to do.  Plus, you can optimize and compress your photos, but that could take weeks depending on how many pictures you have on your website.  With a few clicks, you can get instant results; WP Rocket is definitely the most efficient and budget friendly option to get better page loading times for your website.  They offer a 14-day money back guarantee if you’re not happy with it. WP Rocket Review + Best Cache Plugin For WordPress + WP Rocket Cache

Want to give it a test run?