WP Rocket Review: The Caching Plugin

Do you have a slow website? Probably you are not using an effective caching plugin to serve your content faster. WP Rocket is a well-known name among the WordPress caching plugins. It allows users to easily optimize their website and serve content from the cache without having to disturb the server every time a user makes requests. Apart from just a caching plugin, the WP Rocket has way more things to do with your website. Just activating it on your site will itself improve the load time slightly.

If you are interested in knowing better about this handy WordPress plugin and wish to know its complete feature set, you can continue reading this comprehensive WP Rocket review.

What is Caching?

For those who don’t know, caching is the process of temporarily storing the data to serve them faster to the users without having to serve it from the server each time. The advanced caching methods will increase the page load speed considerably by making caches of almost all files on a website. Also, advanced techniques like minification, and combining multiple files into a single one will reduce the server load thus improving the page load speed.

Many of the popular web hosting services such as Siteground and WP Engine has their caching engines which automatically serve the data faster. If not, the users can always depend on the plugins like WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, etc.

What is WP Rocket?

WP Rocket is a caching plugin for WordPress websites. With its advanced functions like File Optimization, Minification, Lazy load, etc. it can considerably increase the load speed of a website. It was developed by WP Media and has been serving thousands of websites all around the globe. Unlike many other popular caching plugins, it is not free. You will have to spend some money to purchase it for a single site or multi-site. But from our experience, it worth the money.

WP Rocket Interface

WP Rocket has a very simple interface where each one of the functions has its descriptions. So, you don’t have to complete reading their documentation to start using the plugin. Another great feature is that they well organized the functions and given reference links next to each complicated options. They also provided their recommendations to enable certain functions so that you don’t have to do any extra research.

Upon the activation itself, the plugin will start working. Later on, you can enable the additional features required to make your website faster. But the only thing to make sure is that after enabling each one of the functions, make sure that your website is working fine and no visual errors are showing up.

When compared to the advanced caching plugins like W3 Total Cache, the WP Rocket has a very simple interface that does everything you need.

WP Rocket Features

Now, it is time to have a look at the features of the WP Rocket plugin. Before we starting, one thing we have to say is that WP Rocket is the only plugin that helped us to achieve a 100/100 page speed score on Google Pagespeed Insights (which is almost impossible with a single plugin.) While all other caching plugins need additional tools to help you achieve this, the WP Rocket can do it its own. So, without wasting your time, let’s have a look at the WP Rocket features.

The Basic Caching Functions

Nevertheless to mention that the WP Rocket will automatically start caching your web pages upon activation itself. With the basic website caching, it stores the cached data on the server and serves them instead of making the request every time. You can experience the speed changes upon the plugin activation itself. It does all the basic things on the activation.

Minification and Concatenation

The minification feature of the WP Rocket minifies the code of your website by removing unwanted lines and spaces from your codes. The concatenation, on the other hand, combines the CSS and Javascript files to make them low in count thus increasing the page load speed. To activate these functionalities, all you have to do is navigating to the Static files tab and activating the minify files and combine file options. The plugin will automatically generate new cache files that are minified and concatenated.

Prefetch DNS Requests

Prefetching your DSN requests has a great impact on your server load. Usually, the server has to request the DNS every time a user makes requests. But once you prefetch those DNS requests, it is no longer needed to wait for the DND request.

Optimize Databases

If you have been running your website for long and have been publishing a lot of content with lots of plugins, chances are that your database has a lot of trash in it. These unnecessary data will affect the load time of your website. So, the WP Rocket is equipped with a database optimization tool that can optimize your database upon a click of a button.

CDN Support

If you are using a CDN, you can configure that in WP Rocket too. Just navigate to the CDN tab of the plugin, and insert the necessary information. The plugin will then start serving your content from the CDN for increased load time.

Lazy Load

If you have a website with a lot of images and videos in it, lazy loading them will reduce the page load time. While most of the popular caching plugins missed this feature, the WP Rocket has this built-in. So, you will no longer need to find an extra plugin to lazy load your images, videos, or iframes.

A Lot of Help

Probably, one of the best things about the WP Rocket is its excellent support and help files. It has the solution for almost any problems you face regarding the plugin or the overall website caching system. You just have to visit their document section and search for the solution. If you can’t find them, just initiate a ticket to their active support team.

Pagespeed test using WP Rocket

We tested the plugin by testing the speed of one of our website before and after the WP Rocket optimization. We enabled all of the recommended features such as minification, lazy load, remove query strings, CDN, etc. for the testing. And the results were like this.

Before

After

We were satisfied with the results, and as you can see, we were able to achieve an incredible first load speed of 0.6s using the WP Rocket.

Pros

• Easy configuration
• Lazy load feature
• A lot of help files
• Active support

Cons

• Not free

Verdict

After using the WP Rocket for several years, we are delighted with their service. It is an all-in-one suite to improve the page speed of your website. The pricing starts from $39 which is not a big price when compared to a page speed optimization service from an expert. So, if you are impressed with its features, give a try to it. You will not regret it.