Download WP Rocket v3.4.1.2 Plugin for WordPress RELEASED ON 30.10.19

CHANGELOG:

Enhancement: Cloudflare validation API done only when CF inputs are changed
Bugfix: Prevent Cloudflare API calls on every page slowing down websites
Bugfix: Update the domain validation on Cloudflare to work with website on subdomains

WP Rocket – Caching Plugin for WordPress v3.4.1.2 premium to improve WordPress performance?

Is it better than WP Super cache or W3 Total cache?
Is WP-Rocket pricing justified?

We will find answers to all these questions in this detailed WP rocket review.

Before that, we all know that a fast loading website not only gives great user experience, it also helps in better ranking.

For WordPress, there are many plugins which you can use to make your blog load faster and one of the most common type of plugin is cache plugin. This cache plugin creates a cache of the static file of your blog posts, and when a user accesses the post it serves it directly from the cache folder.

This saves a ton of resources in terms of running all PHP queries and accessing your database to regenerate and server the same post. Moreover, serving a post from cache will make the post load way faster than without the cache.

I would not get into more technical aspects of WordPress caching and what you should know here is:

Having a cache plugin on your WordPress blog is essential. It helps you to make WordPress load way faster and reduces the load on server. Below infographic will help you understand how typically WordPress handle a page request

Now there are various cache plugins out there (Free and paid) and picking the right one is important, as it will save you from the headache of configuration, it will make your WordPress blog highly optimized for speed and performance.

Unlike old days, now WordPress is a big commercial market and all plugin developers are in a race to convert their free plugins into a product.

For example, one of the most popular cache plugin W3Total cache started offering Pro features/support which unlocks many advanced features and another paid cache plugin call WP-Rocket entered into the market and this was probably first WordPress cache plugin in the market to be released as a premium plugin.

When it comes to WordPress cache plugins, there are many free options out there such as:

W3 Total cache
WP Super cache
WP Fastest cache
Auto optimize

Survival of a paid plugin becomes difficult when there is a humungous amount of similar free stuff in the market. It becomes really difficult for a paid plugin to create its niche in the market. I have always been an ardent user of W3Total cache and WP Super cache plugin.

From past few months, I have been hearing good reviews about WP-Rocket plugin and I decided to give it a try myself and see how effective it is. I contacted the WP-Rocket team to ask for a review license so that I could do a neck-to-neck battle between W3 Total cache and WP-Rocket plugin, and find out if this premium cache plugin is really worth your money or not?

Preparing for W3 Total Cache Vs. WP-Rocket plugin:

alfredtpalmer.com is already highly optimized and the loading time is even less than a sec. I don’t see much point of doing this test on alfredtpalmer.com. For this, I picked one of my blog which is poorly optimised and takes a little time to load. One of our blog in the network is “seomuda.net” which is quite outdated in terms of theme, optimization and we were using W3 total cache plugin.

To start the comparison between these two plugins, I first tested the loading time of alfredtpalmer.com on GTMetrix and tools.pingdom.com and here is the result with W3 Total Cache plugin:

As you can see from the above results:

Page size was more than 1.31+ MB and overall performance is not that great. This is exactly why I needed to test WP-Rocket else it won’t be a decent comparison.

After testing the load time of the site, I uninstalled W3 Total cache completely. ( Guide to uninstall W3 Total cache plugin)

Deleted cache
Disabled all cache option.
Disabled and uninstalled plugin
Remove W3 Total config files via FTP
Removed entries from .htaccess file
Also used Advanced database cleaner to delete orphan tables created by W3 total cache

The idea was to remove all files related to W3 Total cache and test the site performance with WP-Rocket cache plugin.

Configuring the WP-Rocket plugin:

After using WordPress cache plugins like W3 Total cache and WP super cache for years, I thought to configure WP-Rocket plugin will take time but I was taken aback, as WP-Rocket is probably the most simplest WordPress cache plugin for anyone to configure. If you are someone without any tech-skills you can configure the plugin within seconds of time. You will be accessing the configuration dashboard via settings> WP Rocket

The only options which I enabled from the above screen was enabled Lazy loading images, mobile caching and increased the clear cache lifespan to 96 hours. As soon as you activate the WP-Rocket plugin it takes care of most of the optimization and caching options.

Here are the Pingdom and GTmetrix result after enabling the basic settings. Just to make sure pages are cached, I opened the site in another browser and browsed 10-12 pages to ensure caching of the pages.

So far the result was satisfactory and I decided to enable the files optimization feature to see how it improves my loading time. I just enabled all the three options for files optimization:

And this time the performance report was even better than the last time and I could see a considerable amount of difference in terms of loading time and total number of requests. Here is final loading time of the site:

Note: I have not yet touched the advanced settings which offers few features such as “prefetch DNS requests” “CDN” and few others. One thing which I find very interesting after comparing both the plugin is, WP-Rocket fixed most of the performance grade issues which a cache plugin is supposed to take care of.

Here is a test result by WP-Seer team, where they compared WP-Rocket with WP Super cache and here is the result difference in loading time:

Conclusion: WP Rocket review

When I started doing this test, I was not hoping to see such a huge difference as the W3 Total cache plugin is loaded with excellent features, but the results of the test proved me completely wrong.

In my testing I find WP-Rocket performance to be better than W3 Total cache and what I liked most about WP-Rocket is it’s easy to configure. In fact, it’s better than WP super cache and Auto-Optimize plugin.

You will also be getting support from their team and most important the loading time of your WordPress blog will be faster.

In the latest version of WP Rocket, they have added features to optimize your database. This is a smart move as a bloated database can slow down your WordPress blog.

Do test your site loading time with tools.pingdom.com with the current configuration and later follow my procedure and notice the difference with WP-Rocket.

Get WP Rocket – Caching Plugin for WordPress v3.4.1.2

Preparing for W3 Total Cache Vs. WP-Rocket plugin:

Conclusion: WP Rocket review

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