WP Rocket Pro is one of the best caching plugins for WordPress, one of the most popular premium products.
But is it effective? Is it worth the price you pay? And what difference will it make to your site?
This plugin has been consistently ranked as the easiest and fastest way to improve your site’s loading speed. And our full WP Rocket review will explain why.
Why Should You Have Wp Rocket Pro Plugin So Crucial On Your Website?
Page load speed is the real issue of a website’s success. It’s an essential part of the user experience; people will quickly tune out if visiting the site is not fast.
When creating an online presence, speed is sacrificed for aesthetics and appeal.
People don’t always realize that as long as your website doesn’t look like it’s from the 2000s, the fonts and sizes are clean and readable, and the colors and layout are appropriate, your audience will be satisfied.
Remember that visitors come to your site to satisfy their needs, whether they need information or demand your products and services.
It’s worth noting that the basic WordPress system is high-speed and ready to use.
However, with tons of plugins and complex themes at our disposal, it’s tempting to create a beautiful website with complex features while putting aside one of the essential things: performance – which comes only second to content in terms of importance.
Complex themes and plugins require multiple CSS and JavaScript files, which usually add several dozen more files, dramatically increasing the size of your page and the number of HTTP requests needed – all of which make your pages slower to load.
Not to mention that some themes and plugins are poorly written, which can significantly affect your site’s performance.
Fortunately, there are caching plugins that allow WordPress sites to load much faster. There are a number of them on the market, some of which are very popular.
Some paid and free plugins, and others offer both paid and free versions of their plugin. Some of the most popular ones include W3 Total Cache (the most popular free caching plugin for WordPress), WP Super Cache, Hyper Cache, and WP Fastest Cache.
So Why Choose WordPress Rocket?
A caching plugin is essential for a WordPress site. Even the free plugins offer noticeable improvements in your site’s loading speed.
According to this research, it’s one of the essential elements to maximize your website’s potential, as 47% of your visitors expect your site to load in about 2 seconds.
It also indicates that you can lose up to 79% of your customers if your site takes too long to load.
Speed also affects your search engine ranking. Google was transparent when it said it wanted to build a better, faster web. If you ignore your site’s loading speed, the repercussions can be severe, and your final revenue can be significantly affected.
WP Rocket Review
WP Rocket is a WordPress load speed optimization plugin that implements several advanced mechanisms to boost your website’s loading speed, such as :
- Different levels of advanced caching.
- Minification.
- Concatenation using an easy-to-use interface.
It is one of the top-rated caching plugins, with a price starting at $49. But is it worth it?
WP Rocket is relatively new on the WordPress caching scene compared to the best caching plugins. But even though it was a newcomer in a very competitive niche, it attracted significant attention and quickly rose to the top.
Many say that WP Rocket blows away all other caching plugins in terms of performance and ease of use.
Currently, one of the best caching plugins for WordPress is WP Rocket.
So what is the real difference?
Unlike most other solutions, this plugin is straightforward to configure and incredibly effective in increasing WP speed!
Why Should You Use WP Rocket As Your WordPress Caching Plugin?
This plugin does all of this automatically without you having to do anything yourself.
Few other plugins can enable such a wide range of advanced features quickly. You’ll find many incredibly complex or difficult options requiring in-depth knowledge of what you’re using.
You may also need to install several plugins that will conflict to enable all the above features.
WP Rocket is the opposite, it’s straightforward to set up, yet it’s more effective than most other plugins combined.
Let’s see it in action!
Because of the many features available, are other caching plugins also accessible? We will check the comparison with some of the most popular ones on the market.
What Are The WP Rocket Features? What Does It Do?
Among other things, it offers 14 features know:
Pages Caching
Creates a temporary copy to load from disk, which is faster than hitting the WordPress database every time. Cache preloading does not wait for visitors to create the cache copy, making the user interface faster.
Browser Caching lets you set your server settings so that static files such as images, CSS, and JS can be reused and not downloaded every time.
Sitemap preloading examines all pages to ensure that all-important pages are always cached.
Remove Unused CSS And Eliminate Render Blocking Resources
Deferring JS loading waits for Javascript until the end of the loading period so the user can see the site load quickly. To learn more, click here.
Removing query strings from static resources is a technique that ensures that files are cached and measured correctly. Minification and concatenation can remove unnecessary content to minimize requests.
Wp Rocket With Cloudflare
- Cloudflare compatible: can integrate with Cloudflare to quickly activate this service.
- CDN: integrates seamlessly with content delivery networks such as StackPath/MaxCDN, etc.
- DNS Prefetching: to avoid the latency associated with using third-party services, send a DNS query when the page starts loading.
Wp Rocket Image Optimization And Lazy Loading
Wp Rocket lazy loading it’s another technique that ensures that heavy images are only loaded if the user scrolls to the image in question, providing a faster experience.
Other Best Settings For Wp Rocket
- Google Fonts Optimization: optimizes the download of the most popular fonts to make them faster to access.
- Database Optimization: cleans the WP database of unnecessary items that slow it down.
- GZIP compression: compresses content for faster download.
If you check out the articles about speeding up your WordPress installation, you’ll probably see that installing most or all of the above is recommended.
wp rocket pricing
You can choose between three packages, as shown above.
- Simple ($49)
- The Plus plan: $99 for three websites, the third of which is free.
- Unlimited number of websites
You can get a license for three sites for only $99 annually. What if you are a web developer or designer?
And if you have dozens of other WordPress sites, you can get an unlimited license for only $199 per year. This unlimited license allows you to use WP Rocket on all the websites you own and doesn’t already own, like your clients’ sites, without limitation.
They even offer discounts on license renewals up to 50%, so it doesn’t cost much in the long run.
Remember, a fast website does wonders for your business. As a result, the amount of traffic and sales/leads you’ll get by making your site faster and more optimized via WP Rocket is well worth the price.
Even when your license expires, you can still use the plugin, and all of its features will still work, but you won’t have access to support and future updates, which can be ideal if you want to take a break from your website while keeping it lightning fast.
If you ever want to return, purchase a new license, and you’ll have access to support and updates again.
Another of the best things about WP Rocket, besides its actual performance, is its support, which its users often rent. So the price of $49 per year is attractive.
Renewal licenses are currently offered at 50% off, but saving even on your first purchase is possible. I know there are no current offers, but check below for seasonal discounts.
Wp Rocket Free Alternatives: W3 Total Cache Vs. WP Rocket
Here is a table comparing WP Rocket with other popular caching plugins regarding the features offered.
From the list, only W3 Total Cache can stand up against WP Rocket regarding the number of features. Although incredibly complex and tedious, we’ll put them against each other in the next section.
Why pay for a premium plugin when a popular free plugin seems to do the same thing? We’re talking about W3 Total Cache, one of the most popular WordPress caching plugins and one of the oldest and most tested on the market. It has never failed to provide good results to most websites.
Let’s briefly compare WP Rocket and W3 Total Cache and see if WP Rocket is worth the money.
Configuration
It is where WP Rocket wins hands down over W3 Total Cache.
The Plugin WP Rocket is completely working as soon as it is installed.
However, the W3 Total Cache plugin requires some fine-tuning of its configuration before it becomes genuinely usable. At the very least, it can improve your performance, but knowing what setting to configure or what option to enable will make it possible to maximize its performance.
You can make the situation worse because of conflicts between the various technologies.
W3 Total Cache Options
Above is a screenshot of the W3 Total Cache settings. It is just a preview of the number of locations you will need to configure. On top of that, each page contains dozens of options to configure.
And it doesn’t stop there. W3 Total Cache requires you to be able to tinker with your server and other advanced hosting features to use everything it has to offer, as seen below.
W3 Total Cache Requirements
If you are still familiar with these elements, you must ask someone else to do it or look for tutorials online, although this will save time and effort. There is also the risk of making mistakes that could break your site. The list is long, from editing your .htaccess file to installing/activating other PHP modules.
Pricing And Support
W3 Total Cache wins here simply because it’s free. However, its complexity can be a significant obstacle. Some of its advanced features are unlocked by renewing the PRO version, which costs $99 per year for a single site. Moreover, you will still have to pay for premium support whether you use the free or pro version.
On the other hand, WP Rocket starts at $49 per year, and you can get a license for an infinite number of sites (you can use the right for as many sites as you want) for just $199 per year. It includes excellent support – which its users often praise as one of the best on the market.
Performance
W3 Total Cache is outperformed by WP Rocket, and this is proven by multiple tests, which we will cover in the next section.
Results Compared To The Alternatives
Is WP Rocket the best caching plugin? Are all those options we reviewed earlier just a bunch of fluff? AThemes conducted a comprehensive test that pits WP Rocket against other popular plugins, and here are the results:
You have a good understanding of how WP Rocket works and its features. You will have seen that it is a cheap and reliable plugin that can help you optimize your website to rank higher in search results and satisfy your target audience.
I recommend this plugin not because I find it the best solution to optimize my wordpress site cache; on top of that, it is reliable.
You should also know that WP Rocket is listed as one of the best seo wordpress plugins.
To improve the performance of your website, use WP Rocket immediately!
