Myself like so many other people out there always want faster websites, if a website doesn’t load within 10 seconds max I’m out of there.
WordPress websites are bad for this, especially if they haven’t been set up properly with a caching plugin, or, even worse, no caching plugin at all.
So I need a plugin, but which one?
So by now you’ve probably already looked at the plethora of plugins available on wordpress, all sporting names like “fastest” “super” or “total” all with 4.5+ star reviews and thousands of downloads, how do you know which one is best? Well you could do what I did and try each one individually, running endless tests on google pagespeed insights and playing with all the settings, but there is an easier way.
WP Rocket
Over the years I’ve tried many of the different plugins all with varying degrees of success, WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, WP Fastest Cache and Hummingbird Pro, none of them come close to WP Rocket.
To be clear, I’m not saying any of these other plugins don’t work, they do, there was a slight improvement after using them, however, the difference between those plugins and WP rocket is night and day. It was like the first time I used an SSD instead of a mechanical hard drive in Windows, it makes you never want to go back.
How is it so much faster?
Simply put, it has everything.
Many free plugins you find on WordPress only offer simple browser caching. With basic HTML, CSS and javascript minification. Then, asking you to fork out money on the pro versions to unlock better minification or features like lazy loading for your images. All these features and more are inbuilt into WP Rocket, like GZIP compression, Google Fonts Optimization and database optimisation.
You can get a lot of these features using a combination of the different free plugins, for example, WP Super Cache, Autoptimize and Smush, however having too many plugins active and running on your site slows WordPress down. Therefore, having all three of these may be more of a hindrance than a help.
Ease of use
WP Rocket is also easy to set up and use. As soon as you activate the plugin it starts working to speed up your site. You don’t have to go into the settings and click a bunch of checkboxes just to get it to work, however, the options are there if you do want to dive deep into the settings to get the best out of the plugin.
“I don’t care if my site is slow, I don’t want to spend $49”
Well, I’m not going to force you to spend money on something you don’t want, however, if you want your website to rank highly on Google one big factor is speed.
Google routinely crawls websites checking their speed, mobile-friendliness and, of course, keywords. Bear in mind having a fast website doesn’t immediately mean you’re going to shoot to the top of page 1 on Google but it is one piece of the puzzle, by paying $49 and installing one plugin you can save yourself a lot of time and effort in the long run.
“Are you being paid to write this?”
I think it’s important to mention I have not been sponsored or paid by WP Rocket or anyone for that matter to write this, I am one of those people who will resist spending money if there are good free alternatives. While there are some half-decent free plugins which will do an okay job, WP Rocket does an outstanding job and is well worth the money.
