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Nowadays, site speed is more important than ever. It is very important for the users of the website and also has a major impact on the SEO rankings for desktop and also mobile (especially with the mobile-first feature of Google). At the end of the day, the websites that load slowly will have much lower page visits and it is very essential.
People want things to happen quickly. Nobody will wait 10 seconds for your website to fully load. They will rather click X and never return to it.
Not only the people but the search engines don’t like slow websites again. The site speed has an impact on the overall score that it receives from the search engines like Google. Thus if your website is slow – Google will not like it and it will rather not show on the first page results. Never.
After this quick introduction to the topic, let’s move on to the substance of this article.
WP Rocket Latest Update – 3.8.1
Nearly next to the end of 2020, WP Rocket released a new version of its tool. Version 3.8.1 – this is the latest mirror version that no more has the option to remove the jQuery migrate.
The reason for that is most of the WordPress plugins and themes need to use jQuery to work correctly.
Also, the option can break your website when updating to WordPress 5.6 version.
If you still have jQuery, we sincerely recommend you not to remove it by checking the option just because there is a danger of breaking your website!
Wp Rocket Review
As you probably already understood from the first few paragraphs of this article – everyone who wants to be successful with their website must make sure that it loads very quickly. And here comes the Wp Rocket Plugin.
Wp rocket is a WordPress caching and optimization plugin.
It is one of the most popular options available for the WordPress community.
Wp Rocket Caching options
Caching is probably the best and the easiest method to improve the speed of your WordPress site and there are many caching plugins out there. So why would you choose exactly Wp Rocket?
WP rocket tries to get ahead of the other caching plugins in two different ways.
The first one is that it offers a very beginner-friendly user interface
Secondly – that it includes tons of smaller and different built-in performance optimizations that usually do not appear in most of the other caching plugins.
Let us go through its biggest tweaks and make a quick review of them.
Wp Rocket Tools
Minification – the Wp Rocket plugin offers a function that is called minification. This function allows you to shrink the size of your website by removing excess content like spaces or whitespaces. Thus it improves the speed of the code but doesn’t affect its functionality in any way.
Combine files – this option allows Wp Rocket to combine multiple files in one. For example, multiple CSS files that are used for the design of the website can be combined in 1 file and thus it loads even faster.
Removes strings from queries – this feature of Wp Rocket removes additional strings that might be used in your website such as “?Ver1.8” and many similar to this one. This will not have an impact on the user experience but it will still boost your page speed results.
Fixes render-blocking for CSS and JavaScript – this option does what it says – it helps you to remove the well known “render-blocking” warning that you get by page speed analysis.
Lazy Load – The lazy load is another great feature of the Wp Rocket Plugin. Its main role is to speed up your website by only loading what is needed by the viewport of the user. Let’s take this explanation to a more simple one – if your user opens your website on its phone for example. It will only load the things in the footer when the user scrolls down and reach it. Not before. This is a very cool feature and it speeds up the website and improves its performance.
Wp Rocket Has An Easy CDN Integration
The Wp Rocket plugin has easy integration with CDN. It helps you to easily connect with CDNs like Cloudflare for example and thus you can speed up your website even more.
The Database Optimizer
The database optimizer is another amazing feature of the Wp Rocket plugin. This feature lets you clean your database directly from the Wp Rocket menu and you don’t have to install any additional plugins to do so.
It is quick and easy!
Optimize Your Site With WP Rocket
After we discussed what WP rocket does, let’s go and see how to speed up your website!
The first thing that you might notice is that WP Rocket starts to work once it is installed and activated. This means that you don’t really have to do much else to get its benefits.
Without configuring any of its settings you already have your website page caching, browser caching and GZIP compression enabled.
And they will give your website a serious boost.
You can start with the “Clear Cache” option that clears the cache of the website and your users would be able to see all of the changes that were already made.
In the cache tab, you can configure the functionalities of your site’s caching.
You can enable caching for mobile visitors. This is a great option because it will serve them the newest version of your website and thus they will have an optimized user experience.
Enable caching for logged-in users is another option that you can use. This option gives you an opportunity to enable caching for your logged users only, but if you don’t have a logging-in functionality of your website we would suggest that you skip this option.
File Optimization is the next tab that enables you to use minification along with some other settings. These settings let you shrink your websites’ HTML, JS, and CSS without changing any of its functionalities.
In the Database tab, you can manually exclude some CSS or JS to prevent issues. However, this functionality is a bit advanced and we do not recommend using it if you are not familiar with such options because you might cause some issues on your website.
In the Media Tab of the Wp Rocket plugin, you have various options to optimize your images, videos, and other media files that are used in your website. If you use youtube videos on your website, the plugin will suggest you the option to replace the video with a static image that will show the video on click, and thus it will improve the speed of your website really significantly.
You can also use the disable emojis and disable Wp Embeds options.
The Preload Tab
The Preload tab is another great feature that enables you to use cache preloading. With almost every of the WordPress caching plugins – a single page is only being loaded into cache after it is being visited by a user – this means that the first visitor after the cache is purged doesn’t get the purged version.
If your website is getting infrequent traffic this could reduce its performance.
The preload function lets your content “preload” into the cache even if it was not visited yet.
The way Wp Rocket does this is by using two different approaches.
The first one is the Sitemap – where you have to enter a URL address and then Wp Rocket preloads the content of this URL.
And the second one is the Bot – when an actual bot crawls the website and create a cache.
The difference between sitemap and bot preloading is that the sitemap way of preloading costs less resource but it is only run when the lifespan of the cache is expiring, while the bot will preload the certain page when it gets published or edited.
The Advanced Rules Tab is a tab that gives you control over everything.
You can choose which content is going to be cached, who will see the cached content, and when certain content should be purged.
You can use various options for example:
You can specify which pages to be included and which pages to be excluded from being cached.
You can exclude certain user agents or cookies if you don’t want them to be served with some of your content.
You can also specify some URLs of your website that you want to be always purged after an update of a post or page.
and you can also force caching for some specific strings. It is all up to you!
The Database Tab
The database tab is where the database caching options are held. You can clean your database from all the junk and it is really easy and doesn’t really require previous knowledge on the topic.
You can clean your database manually or you can schedule a database cleanup and it will be done automatically.
CDN
CDN or content delivery network is another feature that can be enabled via the WP Rocket plugin. The CDN is a geographical group of servers that are located all over the world and when your website is being visited from a certain country, it tries to be loaded from the closest server. This improves the time the website loads and improves user experience.
Another Great Features
WP Rocket has even more fancy and great features!
It allows you to implement tracking pixels to your website so you can track every move of your visitors. Where they click, how much time they spend on each page, and even more!
Last But Not Least – The Price
Wp Rocket is a paid plugin that comes with 3 different license options.
You can either buy it for $49 – which includes a single license for 1 website that will get support and updates for 1 year.
Or you can get the PLUS version of it which costs $99 and grants you 1-year support and is usable for 3 websites, and the last and the most-expensive license plans is the INFINITE plan – it grants you 1 year of unlimited updates and support and the possibility to be used on unlimited websites. The cost for the INFINITE plan is $249.
You will receive a 50% discount on renewals.
Our Final Thoughts About WP Rocket
If you are going to invest time and money in your website or you have some serious ideas to be accomplished with a WordPress site – the Wp Rocket plugin is going to be one of your greatest investments.
Its price is not that big and it is totally worth it.
You get convenience, compatibility, support, and updates and this is for only 49$ a year for your website!
What we like about WP Rocket
We like the fact that this plugin does its job really well. It reduces page load speed by 50% or even more. It is very easy to use and includes many different features that can be applied.
What we don’t like
The only fact that we don’t like is that it is not free like most of the other caching or optimization plugins.
Yet if you are looking for a premium feature – this is probably the best caching and optimization plugin that you can use!