WP Rocket Review

In this WP Rocket review we look at four factors key to the buyer’s decision making process. This includes “Ease of use, Features, Pricing and Support”. So if you just want the quick overview of how WP Rocket performs here it is for you.

WP Rocket was only marked down on “Ease of use” due to the maximum settings not always being suitable for all WordPress websites.

However this is nothing against WP Rocket specifically as all caching plugins share this common trait and its good to have a discussion with your website host to get the best settings in place.

To understand how we came to these numbers read the full review.

Introducing WP Rocket

There is one thing thing that WordPress is known for which is not a good thing compared to some other newer website platforms.

Quite simply its slow…

Now this can be solved almost entirely by using a quality managed WordPress host like Cloudways on their Vultr servers like we use but to really step up your game and get the absolute most performance for your website visitors you will want to use a caching plugin which is what WP Rocket is.

Not only will it easily save your website visitors at least half a second (much more if you are using shared hosting) in wait time it will also improve your Page Speed score which is something Google is using more in determing their rankings of website.

So as you can see this is quite an important review today and I’m excited for you to discover what this WordPress plugin can do.

What is WP Rocket?

As mentioned WP Rocket is a caching plugin which also has additional features designed to improve the overall code of your website and the requests your website sends to your server.

It primarily does this through a technology called caching which basically stores some data of your website in static files on your server or your user’s browser. By doing this it speeds up the process of serving various webpages to your website visitors.

As sophisticated and easy to use WP Rocket makes this technology it’s all pretty standard stuff but there are a few things that standout about WP Rocket.

WP Rocket Standout Features

First WP Rocket is more than just a caching plugin but as they say a “Performance Optimization plugin” and you will quickly see this when running a page speed test on a website like GTMetrix.com where you will see your page speed and Yslow score go up (considerably more than with caching enabled) as soon as you activate WP Rocket. On the topic of activating the plugin, as soon as you do, WP Rocket immediately goes to work for you and loads the best general settings which should work on all websites and server configs with no problems.

However if you are feeling brave you can dig deeper into the maximum settings to get even more performance. However as noted in our app scores above this can cause complications depending on your server configuration so is best done on a staging site first before implementing on a production site.

Other great features of WP Rocket include:

• Lazy loading images
• Hosting Google Analytics script locally
• Deferred loading of javascript
• Minification of HTML code
• File concatenation and minification of CSS and JavaScript files

Apart from this as WP Rocket like to say you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to use their plugin and if you do want to dig deeper they have an excellent library of videos you can access straight from the plugin in your dashboard (so no need to leave your website).

WP Rocket Founders

How to use WP Rocket?

After buying WP Rocket, you can download the plugin file at the link they will email to you. You then upload via the plugin menu of WordPress and after it has been installed, you will see a button called ACTIVATE plug-in. Press it and you are good to go.

As soon as the plugin is activated, the process of page caching starts on its own and it requires no further setup. However if you are ready to dive under the hood there are additional settings that could increase performance further.

For example, when you click on the Settings button, you will see the standard settings but also things like minifying HTML, CSS and Javascript to suit your needs. Typically minifying CSS and HTML is fairly safe so this can be a good place to start and will further improve your page speed score.

Another thing to note: 

WP Rocket has an excellent feature for database optimization which is something you can schedule on a regular basis for example weekly. You will want to do this especially if you have been running your website on WordPress for a few years as database bloat is a very real thing.

When you have an unoptimized database you will notice a slow down of your WordPress experience for both you the admin and also your website visitors. After running a WP Rocket database optimization, you should notice that your WordPress dashboard speeds up the first time you do it. After this having a weekly or monthly schedule for it should suffice.

And finally if you don’t already use an image optimization plugin like ShortPixel make sure to have a look at the options WP Rocket gives you. Large images on a website again are a major reason for a page taking too long to load so its good to see WP Rocket give options to manage it including image and video lazy loading.

For more specific steps on how to use WP Rocket the following video is just for you.

WP Rocket Pricing

Now that you know how good WP Rocket is the natural question is price and how it stacks up to the alternative WordPress caching and performance plugins.

There are three plans to choose from.

There are a few excellent alternatives to WP Rocket – they don’t quite compare in terms of ease of use but each one of the two listed below are star performers in their own right as we will discuss.

Perfmatters

Perfmatters is on this list because it is an excellent and more lightweight alternative to WP Rocket which focuses more on peformance optimization rather than caching. So this plugin could be a fantastic choice if you are using a website host that does server side caching which negates the need of having a local cache plugin.

Apart from this there are a few other standouts about Perfmatters.

• Support is their number one feature – Brian and the team really are the best and easily justify the starting $29 price per year just to access their expertise. Brian used to work at Kinsta so knows what he is talking about when it comes to WordPress performance.
• Script manager to deactivate unnecessary scripts on a per page/section level – an example of this would be the Contact Form 7 plugin that adds scripts to all pages of your website even with no forms on it. Really suggest not using it and rather Fluent Forms.
• Local hosting of Google Analytics
• Ability to adjust Google bounce rate data so you get more accurate reports
• Lazy loading of images and video
• Numerous content distribution options

All in all starting at just $24.95 makes Perfmatters an equal recommendation to WP Rocket and our top choice if you have server side caching.

The pricing will look as follows:

• 1 Site: $24.95
• 3 Sites: $54.95
• Unlimited sites: $124.95

Get started with coupon code “PERFMATTERS” for a further 10% off.

Breeze

Breeze is a free plugin that is designed to work best with their hosting service.

However you can still use it if you are not a Cloudways customer if you like to test peformance gains vs these other plugin options.

We currently use Breeze only because we are on Cloudways servers using their Vultr High Frequency servers which has the double benefit of not only being fast for your website visitors but also your own backend editing experience. This is something that is not spoken about enough but as you are the person using your own website the most it pays to have a host that makes it a pleasure to use your own website.

Get started with Cloudways here.

WP Rocket Pros and Cons

Are there up-sells?

WP Rocket is very upfront with pricing and you know exactly what you get for each of the three pricing plans they present.

You will not be presented some limited time only (have to get it now before it’s gone) upgrade.

Conclusion

If you use WordPress then WP Rocket should be right up there with your top picks to get a quicker website. It’s one of the most hassle free options right now.

The highest recommendation we can make for WP Rocket is that we have used it on our own production websites in the past and seen notable increases in speed and far less server requests after installing.

The biggest advantage offered by WP Rocket is the speed with which it does its work. With features like Lazy load and image optimization as well as database optimization, your page loading time is going to drop dramatically.

Add to this the attractive pricing starting from only $49 per year and you have a winner.

Get started with WP Rocket

Our only suggestion after getting it would be to make sure that you are investing in high quality WordPress hosting to get the most out of it.

We recommend Cloudways Vultr High Frequency servers.

Is there a WP Rocket coupon code?

Occasionally vendors share coupon codes, these will appear below (or blank if none).