Tag Archives: Settings

[ad_1] Considering using WP Rocket to speed up your WordPress site? When it comes to WordPress performance plugins, WP Rocket is one of the best-known options. And that’s for a good reason – it’s a really great tool for speeding up your site.  We ran a test for this review and we found that it cut our site’s fully loaded times by 44-61%, which is pretty impressive and important when you consider that page load times affect everything from SEO to bounce rates, conversion rates, user experience, and more. But is it the right plugin for your site and your unique situation? Well, that’s one of the questions that we’re going to answer in our WP Rocket review. Here’s everything that we’re going to cover: Let’s get started! WP Rocket Review: What Does It Do? We don’t want to spend too long here because you can find all of this on the WP Rocket site, but the quick version is that WP Rocket is a full-service WordPress performance plugin.  It aims to offer pretty much everything you need to create a quick-loading WordPress site in one simple package. The “core” feature is page caching. But WP Rocket is a lot more than just another page caching plugin. It also handles: Browser caching. Gzip compression. Code optimization (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) – you get a lot of different options here including minification, combination, and more. Media optimization – speed up your images and videos. Database cleaning. CDN integration. Various minor performance tweaks – e.g. adjusting the Heartbeat API and disabling embeds. It’s also highly configurable and you’ll get lots of advanced options to control exactly how your caching functions, including a flexible cache preload option. WP Rocket also includes some unique features that you won’t find in other WordPress performance plugins, which I think is one area where it differentiates itself. One of the most interesting features is its new Remove Unused CSS option, which lets you scan your site and remove unnecessary CSS on a page-by-page basis. In my testing, I’ve regularly seen reductions of ~80-250 KB in page size (depending on your theme/plugins) just from this feature alone. It also includes other features to automatically inline critical CSS and delay loading JavaScript.  Overall, the WP Rocket team is always pushing things forward with new and unique features to speed up your site, which is one of the best things about the plugin. WP Rocket Review: Testing the Performance Now, let’s run some performance tests to see just how much WP Rocket can speed up a WordPress site. After all, this is the most meaningful question in our WP Rocket review. To assess this, I set up a realistic WordPress site powered by the Astra theme and one of its Elementor demo sites. This is a full website, just like the website you might be installing WP Rocket on. My website is hosted on a droplet from DigitalOcean, which is pretty speedy hosting just by itself. If you’re hosting on cheap shared hosting, you’ll probably see even better improvements than this test. To collect the data, I’ll use WebPageTest to run tests in two scenarios: Desktop – Chrome browser with a throttled FIOS connection speed (a decent but not fast connection). Mobile – a simulated Moto G4 device with a throttled 4G connection to simulate someone browsing while not connected to WIFI. I’ll configure WebPageTest to run nine separate tests and take the median value. Then, I’ll test before WP Rocket and after installing/configuring WP Rocket using the recommended settings from our tutorial below. Desktop Test LCP Fully Loaded Size HTTP Requests NO WP Rocket 1.252 s 1.443 s 907 KB 52 🚀 With WP Rocket 0.652 s 0.568 s 657 KB 18 ⬇️ Decrease ⬇️ 48%  ⬇️ 61% ⬇️ 250 KB ⬇️ 34 LCP = Largest Contentful Paint, one of Google’s new Core Web Vitals metrics Mobile Test LCP Fully Loaded Size HTTP Requests NO WP Rocket 3.907 s 5.327 s 861 KB 49 🚀 With WP Rocket 0.890 s 3.010 s 610 KB 15 ⬇️ Decrease ⬇️ 77% ⬇️ 44% ⬇️ 251 KB ⬇️ 34 WP Rocket Review: Performance Conclusions The numbers pretty much speak for themselves in the example above: Desktop LCP decreased by 48%. Desktop fully loaded time decreased by 61%. Mobile LCP decreased by 77%. Mobile fully loaded time decreased by 44%. Beyond the huge improvement to page load times, you can see a big reduction in the size of the page, a lot of which comes from the new remove unused CSS and delay JavaScript loading features. Most other WordPress performance plugins won’t be able to achieve such a big reduction in page size because they don’t have these features. Basically, WP Rocket can make your site load a lot faster. So now, let’s talk about the other stuff, like how you can configure WP Rocket for optimal results and whether WP Rocket offers good value from a pricing perspective. Best WP Rocket Settings: How to Configure WP Rocket Now that I’ve shown you the performance data from our WP Rocket review, let’s take a deeper look at the features and go over the optimal WP Rocket settings to achieve the benefits from above. This section will accomplish two things: You’ll learn how WP Rocket works and all the different features it offers. If you do decide to purchase WP Rocket, you can follow this tutorial to configure it on your site. WP Rocket Automatically Activates Core Features First off, as soon as you activate WP Rocket, it will automatically activate some core features. These include: Page caching Browser caching GZIP compression Cross-origin support for web fonts Auto-detection to work with popular plugins (like WooCommerce) However, to get the most from WP Rocket, you’ll want to further configure its settings, which you can access by going to Settings → WP Rocket. Let’s go through each tab in the WP Rocket settings… Cache The Cache tab gives you more control over how page caching

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