Do you know that Google considers the speed of a website as one of the major ranking factors on search results?
If your site is slower than your competitors, then Google may penalize it by moving it below your competitor's site position in search results.
And this holds true not only for desktop searches but also for mobile searches.
Take a look at what Google has to say regarding website speed on mobile devices.
"When real users have a slow experience on mobile, they're much less likely to find what they are looking for or purchase from you in the future.
For many sites, this equates to a huge missed opportunity, especially when more than half of the visits are abandoned if a mobile page takes over 3 seconds to load."
This is especially significant as nowadays more than 50% of site visitors are coming from mobile devices. And this also holds true for desktop users too.
As per Kissmetrics study, 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less and 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Every one-second delay in your web page load time results in:
- 11% fewer page views
- 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
- 7% loss in conversions
Your slow website could have a huge impact on your ability to engage visitors and make sales.
Thus, speed is critical to the success of your site because people don’t like waiting around for web pages to load.
So, if you are frustrated with your slow loading website and finding ways to load it under 3 seconds, this review can give you peace of mind.
Today in this article - WP Rocket review, you will learn why it is the fastest way to speed up your website.
I will also teach you how to activate and setup WP Rocket properly on your website to get the fastest results.
Note: This article contains affiliate links which means we make a small commission at no cost to you if you end up signing up to WP Rocket. However, this certainly didn’t stop me from sharing the good and the bad. See our Privacy Policy and Disclaimer for more info.
What Is WP Rocket?
WP Rocket is a premium WordPress plugin that helps to speed up your website significantly.
WP Rocket has many features bundled together in a single package to make your site faster.
Yes, till now to access these features we have to depend on different plugins. But with WP Rocket, you can optimize your WordPress website quickly with just one plugin instead of using so many different plugins.
After trying so many plugins finally I decided to go with WP Rocket. Yes, I am using this plugin on all my blogs to optimize it for speed.
Let's check the comparison of my blog speed before and after installing the WP Rocket plugin.
Before WP Rocket I was using Litespeed Cache plugin on this blog. This is my blog speed test result on GTMetrix.
Pingdom speed test result.
I checked my mobile page speed with ThinkWithGoogle also. Let's see the result.
The above results show that I seriously need to optimize my website for faster loading.
How A Slow Website Can Affect You?
Whether you are a blogger making income from ads, or an affiliate marketer or an online business, it is important to know that speed of your website can have a significant impact on conversion and sales.
As I have mentioned earlier in the article, a one-second delay in website speed can result in 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction and 7% loss in conversions.
This is huge.
According to Google, just improving your load time by 0.1s can boost conversion rates by 8%.
Google may even penalize slower loading sites and move them down the SERPs that will result in Less traffic, Fewer conversions and Fewer sales.
How To Set Up WP Rocket?
Go to WP Rocket and purchase the plugin. WP Rocket comes with three plans - Single, Plus and Infinite.
WP Rocket Pricing
Single plan: $49 for single website.
Plus plan: $99 for 3 websites.
Infinite plan: $249 for unlimited websites.
On each plans you get one year of support and updates.
WP Rocket also offers a 14-days 100% no-risk money-back guarantee.
So if you’re not satisfied with your website speed, simply contact WP Rocket within 14-days to get a refund.
After you complete your purchase, you will be asked to download the WP Rocket plugin.
Download the plugin in a zip file and log in to your WordPress Dashboard.
If you are already using any cache plugin in your blog, first deactivate the plugin and delete it. See WP Rocket documentation for more details.
Now head over to Plugins >> Add New >> Upload Plugin. Select the WP Rocket plugin zip file and select Install Now.
After successful installation, activate the plugin.
Go to Settings >> WP Rocket. You will be taken to the WP Rocket Dashboard where you can manage all the settings to speed up your site.
That's it, WP Rocket is now successfully installed and activated on the site.
Let's check the blog's speed with default settings of WP Rocket.
GTMetrix speed test result
Fully loaded time of this blog went down from 4.2 to 1.7 seconds.
Pingdom speed test result
Here also, the loading time went down from 3.39 to 1.79 seconds.
Please remember these results are obtained only with the default settings of WP Rocket.
If you enable some additional options in the WP Rocket Dashboard, you could obtain even greater results.
It will take only few minutes to install and activate the plugin and you are good to go. Your site will load blazing fast giving you SEO benefits as well.
WP Rocket Features
Cache
Caching makes your website fast. It is the process of storing frequently-accessed data temporarily in a cache.
Every time a user visits a web page on your site they request information from your web host which include files such HTML and PHP files, scripts, images and fonts.
Let's see what happens when someone visits your site:
- A user visits your site and their browser contact your web server for information.
- Your web server compiles this data into an HTML page and serves it to the visitor.
This process takes time which means your site visitors have to wait longer for your web pages to load.
Here comes the role of caching.
Caching plugin such as WP Rocket creates a static version of your web page that it delivers to your visitors.
When the same visitor returns to your site to view it again, they will see a cached version.
This helps in minimizes the amount of data that is transmitted between the visitor’s browser and the web server, which translates into faster loading times.
WP Rocket helps to achieve exactly what is mentioned above.
In the WP Rocket Dashboard, you can find the caching option here.
File Optimization
Under this option, you can minify and reduce the size of HTML files, CSS files and Javascript files.
What is minification and how does it help in speeding up your site?
Minification is the process of minimizing code and markup in your web pages and script files such as code comments and formatting, unnecessary characters from JavaScript source code, unused code, using shorter variable and function names, and so on.
It's one of the main methods used to reduce load times as minifying code can reduce the file size by 30-40%.
Minify HTML
Activate this option to remove whitespaces and comments from your HTML source code. It will help to reduce the overall page size.
Optimize Google Fonts
Google font can have a major impact on the loading speed of your site.
If you are using Google fonts on your site, a visitor's browser will first try to download all the relevant font files to its cache before loading the page causing a delay in load time.
The option Optimize Google Fonts is enabled by default in WP Rocket to optimize your page load time.
CSS Files
Enabling Minify CSS files option removes whitespaces and comments from your CSS code.
There may be more than one CSS file that may be slowing down your site. You can also enable the option - Combine CSS files to combined all these CSS files into one to reduce the page load time.
There is another option - Optimize CSS delivery, use this to render-blocking CSS on your site for faster load time.
Please Note
Activating the Minify CSS Files can throw errors on your site. WP Rocket recommends that if this option cause any error on your site then you have to simply deactivate the option and your site will return to normal.
The same hold true for other options as well such as Minify HTML.
WP Rocket recommends that you should not enable all the options or settings at WP Rocket Dashboard at once.
Enabling option one at a time will help you identify the main cause of problem.
After enabling any option make sure to check that your site is loading well.
Minify Javascript Files
Similar to Minify CSS files, Minify Javascript files also removes white spaces and comments to reduce the file size.
Here too, you may get a warning message that enabling this option may break your site.
However, if after enabling this option causes errors on your site, just deactivate this option.
Defer Javascript Loading
Defer JS Loading stands for deferring JavaScript loading.
When someone opens your site, browsers render and download JavaScript from the server before loading any other site content.
This can interrupt web page load times and can negatively impact your site speed.
Fortunately, with WP Rocket, you can defer this so the browser can load your site content first, without waiting for the scripts to finish downloading.
By enabling the option - Defer Javascript Loading, the HTML document can load before the Javascript files
Thus, enable this option right now to make your site faster than ever before.
Please Note
Test all the options to see which one works perfectly for you. And after enabling any option always make sure to check that your site is functioning normally.
If any option breaks your site just deactivate the option and your site will be back to normal.
It's just a word of caution and doesn't happen normally but you should always exercise caution in case something goes wrong.
Media
Under this option, you can defer loading images or videos on your site.
Why defer the loading of images in a site?
Images are one of the reasons a web page loads slowly. So, to speed up your loading speed WP Rocket has an option - Lazy Load to defer loading of all the images on a web page.
Lazy Load
After enabling this option in WP Rocket Dashboard, your images in your web pages will load asynchronously.
Loading of images on your site will be delayed but your users will not be able to notice it.
As your users scrolls down the page where image is added, they will not find anything unusual. That is why this is feature is so important to speed up your site.
To enable lazy load, go to Media and select the option - Enable for images.
You can also Enable iframes and videos as well.
Preload
This is option is enabled by default when you install and activate the WP Rocket plugin.
As soon as the plugin is activated, it generates a cached version of your site.
Thus, your site will be preloaded immediately after activating the plugin, to ensure your site is loading fast right away.
Under Activate Preloading there are some other options as well.
You can also enable the option - Activate sitemap-based cache preloading.
As soon as you enable this option, it will automatically detect your sitemap.
As I am using Rank Math SEO plugin on this site, it will automatically detect the sitemap generated by it.
You can manually submit the sitemap also (see the above image).
Wrapping Up
WP Rocket is the most powerful caching plugin developed by WordPress experts.
Instead of loading different plugins to perform functions such as lazy load images, minify CSS, HTML & JavaScript files, preloading sites, defer JavaScript, Gzip compression and many others you just need one single plugin - WP Rocket.
No need to add any manual code or hire any developer to do any customization to make your site faster.
When you install and activate the plugin, you can see that almost 80% of the features of WP Rocket are already enabled by default.
And if you want to enable additional features, you can do that with just a click of your mouse. It is so user-friendly.
Moreover, WP Rocket has an awesome 4.9 rating on the consumer review site Trustpilot.com, that host feedback from real customers. See the results below.
Get WP Rocket plugin now and move up in rankings generating more traffic and sales.