WP Rocket Review 2024: Is It Really Worth Paying?

Thinking of using WP Rocket to speed up your site? In our hands-on WP Rocket review, we’ll help you decide if it’s a good fit for you.

In general, WP Rocket does an excellent job of making it simple to perform almost all important speed optimizations. This includes several features designed specifically for Google’s Core Web Vitals, such as the ability to remove unused CSS on a page-by-page basis.

So, is it really worth paying for WP Rocket? That is what our WP Rocket review will help you decide. Here, we’ll look at the WP Rocket interface and how it helps you speed up your website.

What Is WordPress Caching, And How do WordPress Cache Plugins Work?

A cache is a collection of stored data that may be accessed when needed. In computers, data is stored on a hard disk. When it is requested, a computer needs to run several processes before the information can be presented.

Cache solves this problem by processing frequently requested data and putting it in a temporary storage area or memory. This enables computers to access the file easily.

WordPress is, after all, a dynamic content management system. This implies that WordPress fetches data from the database when a user visits your website and does several additional tasks before sending the web page to the user’s browser.

When many visitors visit your website simultaneously, it loads more slowly.

Caching helps you to avoid a lot of processes on your WordPress site. Your cache plugin generates a duplicate of the page after the initial load. It then delivers that cached version to every subsequent user, rather than going through the entire page generation process every time.

Why Do You Need WordPress Caching Plugins?

Caching is helpful since it cuts the load on your WordPress hosting servers and speeds up your website. You’ll need to set up proper caching to increase your WordPress site’s loading speed and performance.

A fast website boosts the user experience and encourages more page visits. This will also help you increase user engagement and the amount of time they spend on your website.

A fast website can help you gain even more organic search traffic to your site. Google offers fast websites a significant SEO benefit, which allows you to rank higher in search results.

How to Enable Cache on WordPress Website?

You have two options when it comes to caching on a WordPress website. First, select a web host that includes this feature as part of their hosting plans. Second, you need to install a caching plugin. Based on your web host, you may be able to use your preferred caching plugin alongside their in-house caching technology for maximum site speed.

Does WP Rocket Really Improve WordPress Website Performance?

Definitely, when we compared WP Rocket to WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache — based on the test data — WP Rocket offered the best performance optimization results.

Before and After Test Results WP Rocket

So, if money is no object, getting WP Rocket is definitely the best option. For everyone else, this WP Rocket review will help you decide whether buying this premium caching plugin is a valuable decision or whether you should save your money and search elsewhere.

To help you make that decision, let’s start by looking at the pros and cons of WP Rocket. Then, we’ll show you how to use WP Rocket to optimize your WordPress website.

Pros and Cons of Using WP Rocket

This WP Rocket review is incomplete if we don’t cover its pros and cons.

Pros of Using WP Rocket

Friendly and easy-to-use interface.
Excellent customer support and extensive beginner-friendly documentation.
Has an automatic speed optimization feature.
It is simpler to configure than plugins like W3 Total Cache.
Including gzip compression.
It has a static cache for both mobile & desktop.
Deferred loading of JS files.
WordPress database optimization.
CDN Integration.
Cloudflare Support.
XML sitemaps preloading.
Lazy image loading.
Compatible with the most popular WordPress themes and plugins.

Cons of Using WP Rocket

It’s a premium plugin and doesn’t offer a free trial & free version.
Image optimization and WebP conversion are not included in the core plugin. Instead, you will need to use Imagify, a separate plugin for this process.
CDN is an addon costing $7.99/mo.

How to Optimize Your WordPress Website with WP Rocket

Below are some of the best WP Rocket features that you can use to optimize your WordPress website for speed and performance.

Cache Setting

As a WordPress Caching plugin, this feature definitely sits on the top.

This tab contains some of your website’s most basic cache options.

Here, you can choose whether to show the cached version of your website to logged-in WordPress users. The default setting disables logged-in WordPress users. By allowing this, you can browse your uncached version as the administrator.

Further, you can decide if you want to cache your website for mobile users. There is an option to provide a mobile-first cached version of a website. If your primary users access your website via mobile devices, this feature can help you provide a unique user experience.

Lastly, you can set the Cache Lifespan. This is the time when your visitor will see the cached version of your site before it is cleared. If your page’s content is highly dynamic, you need to select cache every 5 or 10 minutes.

However, if the content of your website remains unchanged for a long time, you might choose to keep the cache file permanently.

The longer the Cache Lifespan, the faster your website will be.

File Optimization

The File Optimization tab contains several options for optimizing your site’s CSS and JavaScript code. This is also where you’ll find WP Rocket’s most unique features, such as the ability to remove unused CSS and delay JavaScript execution.

The following options are available for your website’s CSS code:

Minify CSS files.
Combine CSS files – I don’t suggest using this if your host uses HTTP/2.
Optimize CSS delivery – You may either use the remove unused CSS feature or opt to load CSS asynchronously.

You have the following options for JavaScript:

Minify JavaScript files.
Combine JavaScript files – Similar to CSS, I don’t suggest using this option if your host uses HTTP/2. You also can’t use it if you use the “delay JavaScript execution” feature.
Load JavaScript deferred – It can help with the render-blocking warning displayed by tools like PageSpeed Insights.
Delay JavaScript execution – The new feature we mentioned above. If you have crucial scripts that you must load immediately, you can specify them here to avoid problems.

Media Optimization

The Media tab allows you to speed up your site’s images, videos, and other media files by using lazy loading.

With lazy loading, your site will delay loading certain below-the-fold content until a visitor begins scrolling down the page. You can enable lazy loading individually for images, iframes, and videos.

If you embed many YouTube videos, you’ll like the ability to replace the YouTube embed with a static preview image. This can significantly reduce page load times because WordPress will not load the actual YouTube embed until a user clicks on the preview image.

You can also add missing image dimensions, which helps prevent layout shifts and improve the Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) metric in Google’s Core Web Vitals.

Cache Preloading

With preloading, WP Rocket enables you to “preload” pages into the cache before a visitor visits. This is useful for ensuring that all of your site’s users experience speedy, cached pages.

However, you can keep everything in its default settings. I don’t advise changing anything unless you’re sure what you’re doing.

Advanced Rules

The Advanced Rules tab allows you advanced control over caching behavior.

You can disable caching for specific URLs, cookies, and user agents. You may also set URLs to always purge when you edit a post/page and cache query strings.

Here, one thing you might want to do is to prevent your contact form page from being cached. Because caching can sometimes cause issues with forms, I normally exclude my form page just in case.

Aside from that, these options are largely for advanced users, and most individuals won’t need to change anything.

Database Optimization

Your website’s database serves as its foundation. This is where the important files, data, and settings are stored. However, it might get too busy at times and harm the performance of your website.

WP Rocket Database optimization feature might help you get rid of such garbage. WP Rocket, for example, may remove trashed content or spammy comments on your blog entries. This type of cleanup ensures that your website works properly without slowing down.

And one feature that I particularly like about WP Rocket’s Database section is the ability to schedule your database cleanup to run automatically.

Note: Before cleaning your database, we advise creating a backup – anything should happen, but it’s always better to be safe than sorry.

You can use UpdraftPlus to create a complete backup of your WordPress site. For more, see your list of best WordPress backup plugins.

CDN Compatibility

The CDN tab helps establish a content delivery network to enhance global load times. This is completely optional, and using a CDN will cost you extra money. WP Rocket only helps you configure your website to use a CDN; the plugin does not have its own CDN.

You have two choices here:

You can use WP Rocket’s CDN service, RocketCDN. It costs $7.99 per month for unlimited bandwidth.
You can use third-party CDN services such as KeyCDN, Bunny CDN, StackPath, and others. If you use one of these services, enter your CDN URL in the CDN CNAMES box.

Additionally, you can prevent specific files from being served by the CDN; most websites won’t require you to do this, though.

Heartbeat API

The Heartbeat tab allows you to stop or limit the WordPress Heartbeat API, which can save server resources.

The Heartbeat API is responsible for features like autosaves.

We recommend leaving these settings defaults to Reduce activity. If you’d prefer, you may also turn off the Heartbeat API in specific areas.

WP Rocket Pricing

WP Rocket, as previously said, is a premium WordPress caching plugin with three pricing options:

Single: It costs you $59/year for a single site usage.
Plus: It costs you $119/year for up to three site usage.
Infinite: It costs you $299/year for unlimited site usage.

Each plan comes with one year of support and updates. WP Rocket also has a 14-day refund policy in case you’re not satisfied with the plugin.

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Are There Any WP Rocket Free Alternatives?

Yes, there are various free alternatives to WP Rocket. The best include Hyper Cache, WP Super Cache, and W3 Total Cache. However, when compared to these other caching plugins, WP Rocket is the best.

Look at the screenshot to compare a few features of these caching plugins.

As you can see above, WP Rocket covers all the boxes; however, the other three caching plugins offer limited options.

Other caching plugins require you to install extra plugins to get exclusive features such as database optimization, Google fonts optimization, lazyload images, etc. However, WP Rocket is the only cache plugin that includes all of these fantastic features by default.

WP Rocket Customer Reviews & Testimonials

WP Rocket got a 4.8-star rating on Trustpilot from over 2100 users. More than 94% of users give a 5-star rating to the WP Rocket plugin.

Many professional experts also recommend WP-Rocket to users in their testimonials.

WP Rocket Review Final Thought – Is It Worth The Money?

WP Rocket is an excellent plugin on its own. The test results speak for themselves, and the WP Rocket interface is really well-designed, with enough documentation to help you understand what each configuration does.

Hence, if you ask us, “Is WP Rocket a good plugin for boosting WordPress performance?” the answer is definitely yes.

But, you may discover free plugins that implement many of the same features as WP Rocket (though you’ll need to install many plugins to do this), making your decision a little more difficult.

Further, why should you pay for WP Rocket when you can use free plugins?

We think there are three reasons for these:

WP Rocket vs Free Performance Plugins

There first is simplicity. WP Rocket improves WordPress performance in two ways:

Single plugin – Instead of pairing several plugins, you get all the features in one tool. This simplifies your site and helps you prevent any compatibility issues.
Interface – The WP Rocket interface is well-designed, making it simple to understand what each function does. When compared to W3 Total Cache, the difference is night and day.

The second is support. Because it is a premium plugin, you will have access to high-quality support if you run into any issues.

Lastly, WP Rocket offers some unique features that might improve your site’s performance. For example, the new Delete Unnecessary CSS function is great. It can regularly reduce the size of your website by 100-250KB.

For those three reasons, we believe that paying for WP Rocket makes sense for a lot of people unless you’re on a low budget.

If you can’t afford a premium performance plugin, you can still build a fast-loading site using only free plugins, so you don’t need WP Rocket. But, if you want the best experience, some unique features to make your site even faster, and premium support, we think WP Rocket is worth the money.

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If you are looking for more speed optimization resources, then check out these articles:

Lastly, follow us on Facebook and Twitter to stay updated on the latest WordPress and blogging-related articles.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I Use WP Rocket For Free?

No, WP Rocket is not a free plugin. It costs $59 per year. However, WP Rocket has a 14-day money-back guarantee, so you can technically give it a shot that way. If it doesn’t work for your site, you can always ask for your money back.

What Does WP Rocket Do?

WP Rocket is a WordPress performance plugin. It speeds up your WordPress site and helps you pass the Core Web Vitals.

Which Is Better, WP Rocket vs W3 Total Cache?

W3 Total cache is an excellent option if you’re on a budget. However, if you want advanced features that you won’t find in free caching plugins, WP Rocket is the way to go. It’s the best option that you’ll pass the Core Web Vitals.

Which Is Better Autoptimize vs WP Rocket?

WP Rocket is a powerful performance plugin, whereas Autoptimize only handles file minification and concatenation. The added performance optimization from caching, database cleanup, and other features make WP Rocket better.

Is Nitropack Better Than WP Rocket?

Nitropack is more powerful than WP Rocket at improving your site’s performance. It offers more advanced features and better speed optimization. However, it is much more expensive than WP Rocket.

Which Is Better, WP Rocket vs WP Optimize?

We highly recommend both WP Rocket and WP-Optimize. They both are great caching plugins.

However, WP Rocket gets ahead with its advanced file optimization, CDN support, and better interface.

But that doesn’t mean WP-Optimize is ineffective. It’s better than WP Rocket at image optimization and database cleanup.

Is LiteSpeed Better Than WP Rocket?

Yes, LiteSpeed cache can outperform WP Rocket on some sites if you spend the time (and have the knowledge) to set it up.

But, WP Rocket is easier to use, faster to deploy, and gives extremely high-performance results. As a result, WP Rocket is a better option for most people.

Murtaza Malek

Web Engineer, Evid Learner and Reader, Techentreprenuer, Tech Evangelist.

23 August 2022