Everyone loves a fast-loading website, talk about visitors, webmasters, or web crawlers, everyone. Even Google loves fast-loading websites that load within just a few ms or seconds and thus ranks those than other slow websites with the same content.
So, the loading time of a website is really very necessary when talking in terms of SEO. Plus it helps in decreasing the bounce rate since a visitor has the tendency to go off your site if it takes a hell of a lot of time to open up.
Talking about WordPress there are several plugins that boast that they would optimize the loading of your website. Some of these that are relatively well-known are WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, Hyper Cache, etc. The server of a website does play an important role but not as important as some people may show you. I had my website on A2 shared hosting and it loaded under 1 Sec.
So how do I get my website to load in under 1 second? Earlier it was WP Super Cache and now it is WP Rocket. Wondering why I changed from WP Super Cache to WP-Rocket. There are a lot of reasons for that, as mentioned in the following paragraphs.
Read: WP Super Cache settings for deepest-level optimization!
Table of Contents
About WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a WordPress caching plugin developed and marketed by three geeks out there, namely: Jean Baptiste, Jonathan Buttigieg, and Julio Potier. Head over to WP Rocket’s website from here: wp-rocket.me. WP Rocket as the name suggests helps your website to load as fast as a rocket (:P) by using several of the well-known caching techniques as well as preloading of content and lazy loading of images etc.
Features of WP Rocket
- Pretty easy to configure: The admin panel of WP Rocket is quite easy to understand and even a novice user can easily optimize his/her website with little or no knowledge about how caching works.
- Caching of pages: Caching of web pages is ‘ON’ by default in WP Rocket but then what is the difference between WP Rocket and other caching plugins since all of them have caching. The good thing about WP Rocket is that it uses a different caching technique than what is used by other plugins and thus puts little or no load on your server in the caching process.
- Preloading of Cache: Cache is preloaded so that when a visitor or a bot visits your website it is served with the preloaded cached page, thus improving page load time as well as providing for better indexing by bots and web crawlers and thus benefits SEO.
- Image Lazy Loading: Almost none of the caching plugins provides this feature, but WP Rocket does. So you have a two-in-one plugin here which includes caching as well as Image Lazy loading. The image lazy loading feature in WP Rocket works pretty well than most of the dedicated lazy loading plugins.
- Compression of files: WP Rocket also provides compression of files. Minification of HTML, CSS, and JS files can readily decrease the load time of a website and this has been pretty well understood by the developers and included in the plugin.
- CDN Integration: If you are using MAX CDN or for that matter any CDN then you can easily integrate it to work with WP Rocket (excluding Cloudflare free version).
- Developer Friendly: I haven’t used this feature though, but it has been mentioned on wp-rocket’s website that the code is clean and contains many hooks that can be easily understood by the developers which can enable them for advanced custom development.
Below are the screenshots of the Admin/options panel of WP Rocket:
These were all about the advantages of WP Rocket. I have been using it for the past few years and haven’t faced any problems so I won’t be able to mention any disadvantages about it.
Last but not least, in fact, an important factor, is the price of the plugin. A single site license costs 39$ and includes 1 year of support and updates. For a detailed pricing list refer to their website at: wp-rocket.me
Want us to optimize your website? Contact us and we will do the desired for you 🙂WP Rocket is an all-in-one plugin when it comes to speeding up a WordPress website. Do let us know your views on it through your comments. Appreciation and suggestions are also welcome.
NOTE: This article was originally published by me on my previous Blog Iocreed dot com and has been reproduced here word by word with few changes.
The article highlights the strengths and weaknesses of each plugin, making it easier for users to choose the right plugin based on their needs.