If you are running a website, surely you and I want a website with fast loading speed.
Websites with fast loading speed bring too many benefits. In the current context, a website with a high dot speed has almost no hope of success no matter how good the content is.
No one is patient enough to wait for your website to finish loading. Google is also not persistent enough to index slow websites.
In my previous post, I shared some tips on speeding up WordPress .
When it comes to speeding up a WordPress website, using a caching plugin is always the most popular technique.
W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache has long been a popular cache creation plugin. This is partly because they are free plugins.
Surely those plugins help improve your site speed compared to if you don’t use any plugins. But if you want to improve the speed even more, you probably need to be interested in a paid plugin.
And in today’s article, I introduce a paid plugin called WP Rocket.
Read more : 19 tips to speed up WordPress
Contents
Brief Introduction to WP-Rocket
WP-Rocket is a paid plugin and also the best caching plugin available today. Compared to W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache and a few other plugins, it packs more features. But unlike W3 Total Chace, you don’t have to struggle with complicated configurations to speed up your website effectively.
WP-Rocket is extremely user-friendly. Even you just need to install and activate the plugin to speed up your website already. Of course, you can learn more about the plugin’s configuration for further optimization. This article of mine will help you understand the setup options in WP Rocket.
Another advantage of WP-Rocket in speeding up WordPress:
If you don’t use WP-Rocket you have to install more plugins to speed up WordPres. Whereas WP-Rocket has integrated those functions in a single plugin.
For more full features of WP-Rocket you can check out WP-Rocket features page .
Speed test after using WP Rocket
Before going into the WP Rocket configuration guide, I want to give you some test results after trying this plugin. These results may differ on your website. Simply website speed depends on many different factors
No wonder the plugin costs up to 199$ to install for many websites.
Here I check on a website that has installed demo data a theme from MyThemeShop. I use GTMetrix and Pingdoms to test speed. The results before and after installing the WP Rocket plugin are shown below. As you can see the plugin has improved speed, pagesize and many other things clearly:
Results on GTMetrix without WP Rocket
Results on GT Metrix after using WP Rocket
Results on Pingdom before using the plugin
Results on Pingdom after using the plugin
To make sure the WP Rocket plugin is working, open the source view of any page and scroll down. If you see a line like below, WP Rocket is working OK: (” This website is like a Rocket… “)
How to Install and Configure WP Rocket
Before installing the plugin, make sure you have removed other cache plugins. In other words, a website you should only use a plugin to create cache.
Like other paid plugins, you install WP Rocket by uploading a zip file using WordPress’ plugin upload screen.
As soon as the plugin is activated, page caching is up and running.
To configure the plguin, go to Settings -> WP Rocket
Basic Options
First, click on the Basic Options tab . Here you will see the basic options as below
Lazy Load : Ensures images, iframes, and videos are loaded only when they are visible. Currently, many themes have built-in delayed image loading function. If your theme already has such functionality, don’t check the Images option.
Files Optimization : This option reduces the size of HTML, Google Fonts, CSS and Javascript files by removing spaces, comments and unnecessary characters, and combining your scripts and css to form fewer files.
However, this function can break the interface or make the website work improperly. This is relatively common for other plugins with similar functionality. So you need to double check your website after choosing this option. If the website has a problem, you can uncheck this option or try to fix it according to the instructions of WP Rocket.
Mobile Cache : If the website has a large amount of mobile traffic (see through Google Analytics) you should choose this option to further improve the speed on mobile.
Feeds Cache : Cache option for WordPress RSS Feeds.
Logged in Users Cache : This option caches files for logged in users. The option makes sense if your website has a lot of people logged in, such as a community site or a multi-author site.
SSL Cache : This option caches the site using SSL. Going into 2017, the wave of websites switching to SSL is increasing. If your website has not yet switched to SSL, please refer to our SSL installation guide . You have many options from free SSL like Let’s Encrypt to cheap SSL from Commodo. If your website has SSL enabled, this option will be selected by default.
Emojis : Option to replace Emojis with WordPress Simileys. Selecting this option reduces the number of outbound HTTP requests. This is the option you should choose.
Clear Cache Lifespan : By default the cache is kept for 24 hours. After 24 hours the cache will be refreshed.
Advanced Options
This section is an advanced option. True to its name, you should only touch it if you know what you’re doing.
Static Resources : This option helps you again improve the score for Remove query strings form static resource in GTMetrix test results.
Prefetch DNS Requests : Every time a user visits your site, it loads additional external scripts such as Google Fonts. Of course loading those scripts also slows down your site.
You can reduce this time by using DNS Prefetching technique. To use you copy and paste the URL you want to get before for example / /fonts.g oogleapis.com . Be sure to only include URLs that all of your sites have access to. This URL you get from a speed test tool like GTMetrix or Pingdom when you get this error.
Empty the cache of the following pages when updating post : When you create new content or when a comment is submitted, WP Rocket will automatically update the cache of the Hompage page, category or tag associated with that post. Alternatively, if you want other pages to be refreshed, simply enter the URL.
Never cache the following page : This option allows you to enter a URL you do not want to cache. Unlike other caching plugins, WP has automatically not cached the shopping cart and checkout pages if you run an e-commerce site.
Don’t cache pages that use the following cookies : Allows you to not cache pages based on the cookie name entered.
Cache pages that use the following query strings : Enter a query string (as key=value) to cache all pages that use a specific parameter in the URL.
Don’t show cached pages to the following user-agents : Allows you to exclude bots such as Googlebot from using the cached page.
Reducing the number of minified files in one file on : Combines all CSS or JS files into one file. It is also explained here that you should not do so.
CSS files to exclude from minification : Enter the CSS you do not want to optimize. You need this option if you find a CSS file that causes an error if minification is performed.
Javascript files to exclude from minification : Import JS files you don’t want to optimize. This setting is similar to the CSS case above.
JS Files to be moved to the footer : WP-Rocket places all optimized JS files in the header of the site. This function allows you to enter JS the original URL (not the post-optimized URL of the page footer). Overall this function is very easy to break your website. So if you try it, you need to check your site carefully.
JS files with deffered loading : Enter the Javascript files you want to load asynchronously. Like above, you enter the original URL.
Database
This option helps you to clean up the database. You should back up your database before cleaning it up.
So with the function here you no longer have to install additional database optimization plugin.
Preload
By default, the plugin will automatically preload the content and create a cache when you publish a new article. You can also manually pre-load usage content from the admin bar
CDN
If you are using a CDN (content delivery network) to store your files, you can easily integrate with the plugin with options like the options below:
CloudFlare : If you are using CloudFlare as your CDN, ticking this option makes it convenient for you to use CloudFlare with the plugin.
The next options are for the case you use some other paid CDN like MaxCDN or KeyCDN.
Using domain sharding
In this CDN you can also use domain sharding to handle Parallelize downloads across hostnames & Serve static content from a cookieless domain error. Details you can see in the article on speeding up WordPress
Varnish
If your server supports Varnish Cache, then you should enable cache clearing in Varnish. So every time WP Rocket clears cache it automatically clears Varnish’s cache.
Stable Host
Stable Host is one of the hosting services that use Varnish Cache. If you are using hosting here, please note this configuration.
Tools
Here you can use a few other utility tools such as proactively clearing the cache for the entire website, exporting and importing WP Rocket configurations for use between websites without having to reconfigure.
Epilogue
WP Rocket is the best caching plugin available today. As a paid plugin, it has many advantages over him compared to other free caching plugins.
It integrates a lot of functions to help speed up your website. With this plugin you no longer have to install a bunch of other plugins to improve your website speed.
If your website is still slow after using many other caching plugins, you should try this plugin.
Have you ever used WP Rocket or not? Please share your opinion about this plugin in the comment section below?
