WP-ROCKET REVIEW – IS IT BETTER THAN SUPER CACHE OR W3 TOTAL CACHE?
WP-Rocket is a popular plugin to improve WordPress performance?
However, it is a paid plugin which costs around $49 and the site is well done (Visit here)
The question is ?
- Is it better than WP Super cache or W3 Total cache?
- Is WP-Rocket pricing justified?
We will find answers to all these questions in this detailed review of WP ROCKET.
Before that, we all know that a fast loading website not only provides better user experience, but it also helps to improve the ranking.
For WordPress, there are many plugins you can use to make your blog load faster and one of the most common types of plugins is the caching plugin. This cache plugin creates a cache of the static file of your blog posts and pages, and when a user accesses the post, serves it directly from the cache folder.
This saves a ton of resources in terms of running all PHP requests and accessing your database to regenerate and display content. Also, serving content from the cache will make the message load much faster than without the cache.
I won't get into more technical aspects of WordPress caching but what you should know is:
Having a cache plugin on your WordPress blog is essential. It helps you make WordPress load much faster and reduces the load on the server. Below is an infographic image that will help you understand how typically WordPress will process a page request:
Now there are different caching plugins (free and paid) and choosing the right one is important because it will save you the headache of configuration, it will make your WordPress blog highly optimized for speed and performance.
Unlike the good old days, WordPress is now a big commercial market and all plugin developers are in a race to convert their free plugins into a product.
For example, one of the most popular cache plugins W3Total cache has started offering Pro/support functionality which unlocks many advanced features.
Another paid cache plugin called WP-Rocket entered the market and it was probably the first WordPress caching plugin in the market to be released as a premium plugin.
When it comes to WordPress caching plugins, there are plenty of free options such as:
Survival of a paid plugin becomes difficult when there is a huge amount of similar free stuff on the market. It becomes really difficult for a paid plugin to create its niche in the market. I have always been an avid user of W3Total cache and WP Super cache plugin.
Over the past few months, I heard great reviews about the WP-Rocket plugin and decided to try it out myself to see if it worked. I contacted the WP-Rocket team to request a trial license so that I could do a neck and neck battle between the cache of W3 Total and the WP-Rocket plugin, and whether this premium cache plugin is really worth your money or not?
Preparation for W3 Total Cache Vs. WP-Rocket plugin:
Astokes is already very optimized and the loading time is even less than a second. I don't see the point of doing this test on Astokes. For this, I chose one of my blogs which is poorly optimized and takes a bit of time to load. One of our blogs in the network is quite outdated in terms of theme, optimization and we were using the W3 total cache plugin.
To start the comparison between these two plugins, I first tested the loading time on GTMetrix and tools.pingdom.com and here is the result with W3 Total Cache plugin:
As you can see from the results above:
The page size was over 1.31MB and the overall performance is not very good. This is exactly why I needed to test WP-Rocket otherwise it won't be a decent comparison.
After testing the site loading time, I uninstalled W3 Total cache completely.
- Deleting cache
- Disabled all cache options.
- Plugin deactivated and uninstalled
- Delete W3 Total configuration files via FTP
- Deleted entries from .htaccess file
- Also used Advanced database cleaner to remove orphan tables created by W3 total cache
remove W3tc options from Db
The idea was to remove all cache-related files from W3 Total and test site performance with the WP-Rocket cache plugin.
WP-Rocket Plugin Setup:
After using WordPress cache plugins like W3 Total cache and WP super cache for years, I thought setting up WP-Rocket plugin will take some time, but I was surprised, as WP-Rocket is probably the cache plugin Easiest WordPress to setup for anyone. If you are someone who has no technical skills, you can set up the plugin in seconds. You access the settings dashboard via settings > WP Rocket
The only options I enabled from the screen above are Lazyload for image loading, mobile caching and I increased the cache lifetime to 96 hours. As soon as you activate the WP-Rocket plugin, it takes care of most optimization and caching options.
Here are the Pingdom and GTmetrix results after enabling basic settings. Just to make sure the pages are cached, I opened the site in another browser and crawled through 10-12 pages to ensure the pages were cached.
So far the result was satisfactory and I decided to activate the file optimization feature to see how it improves my loading time. I just enabled the three options for file optimization:
And this time the performance report was even better than the last time and I could see a huge difference in loading time and total number of requests. Here is the final loading time of the site:
after minifying the pingdom file
Improved file minification performance
Note: I haven't touched the advanced settings yet which provide features like "prefetch DNS requests" "CDN" and a few others. One thing that I find very interesting after comparing the two plugins is that WP-Rocket fixed most of the performance issues that a caching plugin is supposed to take care of.
Conclusion on Wp Rocket
When I started doing this test, I didn't expect to see such a difference because the W3 Total cache plugin comes with great features, but the test results proved me that was completely wrong.
In my tests, I find the performance of WP-Rocket to be better than W3 Total cache and what I liked the most about WP-Rocket is that it is easy to configure. In fact, it's better than WP super cache and AutOptimize plugin.
WP-Rocket plugin personal license costs only $49 and you can install it in 3-4 minutes.
You will also benefit from the support of their team and above all, the loading time of your WordPress blog will be faster.
In the latest version of WP Rocket, they added features to optimize your database. It's a smart move because a bloated database can slow down your WordPress blog.
Finally, you can always get a refund within 30 days if you are not satisfied with the plugin.
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Finally, I would like to know which cache plugin you use on your blog?
At the same time, I suggest you get a single site license of WP-Rocket plugin and try it on your blog and notice the difference.
Test your site load time with tools.pingdom.com with the current configuration, then follow my procedure and notice the difference with WP-Rocket.
If you don't like it, you still have 30 days to claim your refund.
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