July 27, 2019

WP-Rocket Review: Make your WordPress website faster!

What is WordPress performance optimization?

Performance optimization for WordPress takes your website and makes it faster. WP-Rocket breaks down the various performance optimizations into several categories:

Cache

Storage of a pre-loaded copy of the website - starts when the plugin becomes active

File Optimization

Reduces file size and quantity

Media

Reduce the time it takes to load images, video and emoji

Preload

Start fetching non-cached aspects of the website

Advanced Rules

Create rules for pages that shouldn't get cached

CDN (Content Delivery Network)

Serve website files from other servers located within a region, country or international

Heartbeat

Reduce load on server resources

Add-ons

Other integrations and ways to speed up website

Image Optimization

Make image file sizes as small as possible without quality loss

Each of those categories has options for enabling/disabling certain aspects of performance. WP-Rocket also takes care of some aspects that are not included in the above list. Because of the complicated nature of website performance there are many settings. Before WP-Rocket we used several plugins to do the same task of speeding up WordPress.

Why does WordPress need performance optimization?

In a perfect world WordPress would take care of your website performance for you. That is not the case, you will need to find a plugin to do this for you.

Websites that take more than 2 seconds to load are more likely to lose visitors. Performance optimization is especially important for ecommerce websites. Slow load times means lost revenue. Your website message will never reach an audience that doesn’t stick around.

FREE TIP

One thing you can do today, for free, to make your website faster.

There is one very important aspect of websites that tends to make a big difference on load times. Image size! Do you notice that even with a performance optimization plugin your website loads slow? In today’s world it is becoming easier to take larger and better pictures with all kinds of devices. Without even thinking we load those beautiful images onto our websites.

Often we see WordPress websites with very large image sizes. Let’s say you add a 15 MB image to your homepage. Someone loading that homepage on their cell phone might average 3-4 seconds of wait time for the image. Then you add the size of the website and any other images and they could be waiting 10-30 seconds. Reduce your image sizes before uploading to your website or add a plugin that does the work for you. If you had us build your website we already reduced the image sizes as much as possible without loss of quality.

Testing WP-Rocket

We wouldn’t recommend something without first having tested and used it ourselves. In fact we’ve been so impressed by WP-Rocket that we use it ourselves. To help you understand how impressive it is we’ve done a test to prove how well it works. We created two blank installs of WordPress with our favorite free theme (Page Builder Framework) and free page builders (Elementor). One install has WP-Rocket and one does not.

Using the Pingdom Website Speed Test and the same location (North America – USA – Washington D.C) we did the website speed test for each install. We are testing first time access which is important to note. After someone has visited a website their browser will cache the site so the load time can decrease the next time they visit. However, first impressions are important and if that person doesn’t stick around they won’t care about the site being stored in their browser cache.

WordPress with WP-Rocket

WordPress without WP-Rocket

You’ll notice that the load time decreases with WP-Rocket activated and configured by more than 50%. Remember that we are loading a bare bones website and with a fully developed website that load time increases.

Configuring WP-Rocket

Coming soon! We are creating a video on configuring WP-Rocket and adding it here.

David Beaulieu

I was inspired to start my own computer repair business when I was 13 years old in 1998. My father had bought a pallet of used computers and I experimented on them to make "super computers". The excitement of getting my first client and being able to help others with my knowledge and expertise was uplifting! Since that first inspiration, business and technology has been a passion of mine.

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