Speed Up Your Site with WP Rocket
There have been many articles written on WordPress caching plugins. They explain what caching is, why you need caching and which plugin does the best job at speeding up your site. Most of these articles are very interesting to a geek like me and if you’d like to read the technical stuff, see the links at the bottom of this article. The purpose of this article is to explain why I use WP Rocket for my caching solution.
There are a three factors to consider when selecting a caching plugin:
- Easy to use – Unless I am maintaining the site for my customer, they need a caching plugin that is easy to setup and use. I prefer this myself as I don’t have time to be messing about with advanced settings to get every ounce of speed out of my site. If that’s important to you, then consider W3 Total Cache.
- Performance – Many others have done comparison tests on the top caching plugins. WP Rocket comes out on top nearly every time.
- Cost – If you must use free, then consider WP Super Cache, which comes in the top three in performance in most tests. While WP Rocket costs $49 per year (at the time of this publication), it is 50% ($24.50 thereafter) for one site. They have a 5 site and unlimited package as well.
The top features of WP Rocket
- Quick setup
- Page caching
- Cache preloading
- Sitemap preloading
- GZIP compression
- Browser caching
- Database optimization
- Google font loading optimization
- Lazy loading of images
- Minification and concatenation of HTML, CSS and JavaScript files
- Deferred JavaScript loading
- WordPress Multisite compatible
- CDN support
- eCommerce friendly
According to GTmetrix, WP Rocket cut the loading time by 0.98 seconds, improving the speed by 34.12%. In our Pingdom tests, it cut the loading time by 1.27 seconds on average, with a speed improvement of 35.21%. These results make it the fastest plugin in our test of the best WordPress caching tools. – Joe Fylan (see article link below)
WordPress Caching Plugins Compared
- 6 Best WordPress Caching Plugins Compared by Colin Newcomer
- The Top 3 WordPress Caching Plugins Compared and Choosing the Best One for Your Site by WPMUDEV
- WordPress Caching Plugins – The What, How and Why by Sorin
- The 9 Best WordPress Caching Plugins Tested and Compared by Joe Fylan
- Benchmarking the Fastest WordPress Cache Plugins by Charles