If you own a website of any kind, rather for business or just a personal blog, you probably have heard about WordPress. One of every three websites you visit is run by WordPress. There are also plugins for you to improve your website. WP Rocket is one of them. It helps you to get a faster website to put it simply. Before we go any further let’s talk about WordPress and its plugins for a little.
What Is WordPress and Its Plugins?
WordPress is an open-source content management system that
helps you create and build your website. It is the most popular way for a
series of reasons. First of all, it is easy to use so everyone can benefit from
it. Another good side that it’s very
flexible. By flexible we mean that you can arrange and adjust almost everything
without needing to know about programming. Talking about WordPress, maybe you
have come across WordPress.org and WordPress.com. There is a small but
distinctive difference between these two. WordPress.org is the free, self-hosted
way of building any kind of webpage. WordPress.com is a paid service with less
flexibility to offer. To sum up, you can use WordPress for your business
websites, online stores, blogs, and almost any other kind you can think about.
Come to talk about its plugins, WordPress is not enough after you set your website up. There are many plugins available to improve your website. For example, let’s talk about WP Rocket.
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a WordPress caching plugin available to improve
your website’s load time. It helps your
visitors load the site in the fastest way possible which decreases the chance
of them leaving the site while just waiting for it to load. It’s really helpful
and works efficiently. But how does it exactly work? Fundamentally this plugin
deletes caches on a regular basis so the load time doesn’t lag. Browser
caching, page caching, mobile cache files, and preloading the cache and all
that makes the website load slower regardless of how fast your internet is. Not
only a slow loading WordPress site is a reason for potential visitors to leave
but also search engines like Google doesn’t like slow websites. The faster
websites have a priority in search rankings, which means when your site is
faster, you´ll appear before the slower ones.
How to Install and Configure
WP Rocket?
After figuring out what is WP Rocket good for, let’s see how it is installed and a basic
configuration.
The automatic installation is pretty easy:
- First off you need to buy WP Rocket from the
WordPress website and download the zip file.
- Go to your WordPress admin page.
- Click on Plugin and Upload Plugin
- Select the WP Rocket zip file and click Install
Now.
- It should be activated after.
Note: You can find some coupon codes for a discount online.
Installing is not a problem but configuring some WP Rocket
settings can be confusing. Here is a basic set up to get the maximum
efficiency. Right after you activate the plugin it will start cleaning your
cache. But there are some settings you can adjust.
Setting up and configuring:
- Click on WP Rocket on your WordPress dashboard.
- You can use the recommended Basic Options.
- Enable the Lazyload of images and videos
especially if you have a lot of pictures etc. on your site.
- You can also enable Mobile Cache to make the
plug delete cache for mobile devices.
- If you have a site where users can log in,
enable Logged in User Cache.
- You need to enable the SSL Cache button if you
have an SSL certificate of your site. (https://)
- If you are not a very experienced WordPress user
it is better to leave the Files Optimization section disabled. This section
lets you combine Google Fonts if you enable it to make sure to check the site
for further errors.
- It also allows you to remove query strings from
static resources.
- Minify CSS/JS files
- Combine CSS/JS Files
- Optimize CSS Delivery for these options you need
to know which files might cause problems and exclude them. It is better to left
all of them disabled if you are a beginner.
- Last but not least, you can adjust your cache
lifespan which tells you to clean the cache files every 24 hours or more/less.
If you make this setting too short the cache will be deleted too frequently.
This might cause visitors to miss your latest content. It Is recommended to set
it as 24 hours.
After you completed the setup, you can use a speed test to
see how much difference the plugin has made to your website’s load time. You
can use Google PageSpeed Insights, Google Test My Site, and Yahoo’s YSlow to
see it for yourself.
WP Rocket vs W3 Total Cache
Since WP Rocket is not free, the first thing that comes to
mind is to search for free alternatives. The most popular free alternative to
WP Rockets is W3 Total Cache. Here is a quick review of them.
We covered the basis of WP Rocket and one thing that catches
attention is how easy it is to use the settings. W3 Total Cache is recommended
from various sources but it’s not as easy to
use as Rocket. So, unless you know your do´s and don’ts it may be a little bit
hard for a beginner. But on the other hand, with a very detailed setting
section Total Cache offers almost every aspect of the plugin open for
customization.
Another difference to talk about is WP Rocket offers
Database Optimization while W3 Total Cache doesn’t. Your WordPress database is usually filled with everything you used for
your website from themes to posts and all kinds of content. With WP Rocket you
can clean your database and optimize it with a variety of settings.
Unfortunately, if you have W3 Total Cache you might need another plugin just to
do this job.
Yet again a minor but distinctive difference between the two
is that WP Rocket has Google Fonts Optimization and W3 Total Cache doesn’t,
which helps your Webfont not get in the way of your website loading.
An important feature is that they both have the Content
Delivery Network. They both support multiple CDNs while other plugins mainly
use only one.
To sum up, in the fundamentals these to plugins do almost
the same job, the biggest difference is the usability in them. The decision is
yours to make after all.
How to Uninstall WP Rocket?
There may be a possibility of you wanting to change your
caching plugin at some point. There are two ways to uninstall your WP Rocket.
Uninstalling Automatically
- You can simply uninstall it from WordPress admin
like any other plugin. WP Rocket will clean all of its data automatically.
Uninstalling Manually
- You can also delete it manually from the plugins
folder.
- Go to the folder, /wp-content/plugins/.
- Delete the /wp-content/cache/
and /wp-content/wp-rocket-config/ folders
- Delete the /wp-content/advanced-cache.php
file
- Edit the htaccess file, remove everything in
between #BEGIN WP ROCKET and
#END WP ROCKET
- Remove the line define(‘WP_CACHE’, true)
- Delete the wp_rocket_settings
entry and the transients and cronjob in the WordPress options table
of your database.
Conclusion
In this article, we explained the ups and downs of WordPress Rocket and some other alternatives. Hopefully, we answered all of your questions on the topics of what it is, what does it do, how does it work, and how to set it up.
If you liked this article, please check out our latest articles about SEO. You may be interested in 10 best WordPress plugins for your site.