[themedy_alertbox icon=”money” colour=”red” custom_colour=””]Themedy customers can receive a 20% discount to WP Rocket in the support forums![/themedy_alertbox]
A few months ago we switched our WordPress caching plugin to WP Rocket, and haven’t looked back since.
What is a Caching Plugin?
Simply put, these plugins use various techniques to attempt to speed up your sites load time and reduce the amount of resources needed on your server to run your site.
One of the methods they use is something called “page caching”. Without page caching every time someone visits your WordPress site your page is loaded by reading and loading various files on your server (HTML, JavaScript, images etc) and making database calls (page content, widgets etc). Without page caching this process is repeated on every page, for every visitor, each time they load a page of your site.
If you have many visitors visiting various pages on your website at the same time, your hosting account may start to strain and eventually buckle. That’s because you have been allocated a certain amount of resources (power) to run your site. Trying to push out all this information at once could start to use all those resources. At that point your server will start to load the pages for new visitors slower, while it’s trying to catch up on all the people that loaded your page first.
So how does page caching work?
Page caching loads the pages of your site first and stores a copy of that page in a format that your server can load much faster and more efficiently. That copy is a “cached” version – and one of the main benefits of a cached page is your database calls will be reduced or eliminated all together. Since database calls can be taxing on your server, you will be able to handle many more simultaneous site visitors through the use of page caching alone.
Does everyone need a cache plugin?
Not necessarily, if you are on a low traffic site and with a relatively decent hosting provider your gains might not be that noticeable (however even then there can be some good gains in loading time). However, if your hosting is on the cheaper side or you receive a lot of daily traffic a caching plugin will bring you considerable gains in site load time.
Enter WP Rocket
There are a lot of various options for caching in the WordPress space, some free, free with paid addons & straight paid plugins. I’ve experimented with most of them over the years but currently I’m in love with WP Rocket.
Why? One word… simplicity. WP Rocket is extremely straight forward to get running with noticeable benefits from just hitting “activate” on your plugins screen. Many of the other plugins I’ve used have taken multiple steps to get up and running the way I’ve wanted them to.
Don’t be mistaken by it’s simple setup – if you want to take it further you can dig into the simple options page for even more speed inducing tweaks.
Some Great Features of WP Rocket:
- One click activation of it’s most important features like page caching.
- Built in automatic support for WooCommerce, Easy Digital Download, Jigoshop, iThemes Exchange & WP-Shop. (you don’t want cart pages cached for example – this is handled for you)
- A great minification tool to minimize your CSS, HTML and JavaScript * (a note on this below) files so they load faster.
- Lazy loading images options which displays images on a page only when they are visible to the user.
- Cache Preloading: Normally a page is first cached when someone loads it for the first time. If you use their preloader option the plugin will attempt to cache every page of your site instantly for maximum benefit.
- Auto-updates option: They just introduced a feature that allows their plugin to auto update when there is a new feature (optional). There is even an option to roll back to a previous version easily if you are having problems.
- Many more advanced features for developers like: Prefetch DNS requests, never cache certain pages option, CSS / JS excludes from minification process etc.
Final Thoughts
While there are various top notch caching solutions for WordPress, some even free – WP Rocket is a robust solution that has one of the easiest setups I’ve used. If you are like me and attach a great value to simplicity and time saving then the cost of WP Rocket is well worth the investment.
Have you used WP Rocket before or another solution, let us know all about it in the comments below!
[themedy_alertbox icon=”bolt” colour=”green” custom_colour=””]We’ve talked to the guys at WP Rocket to get you a special Themedy coupon code! Themedy customers can receive a 20% discount to WP Rocket by using the coupon code in our support forums![/themedy_alertbox]
* I’ve never had the JavaScript minification tool of any caching plugin work out of the box and WP Rocket is no exception. However, WP Rocket has consistently shown the least amount of problems with only a few tweaks usually needed. The average user should be careful about enabling this option (or skip it all together), as it tends to break the features of some other plugins.
We receive no financial compensation if you purchase WP Rocket, we recommend it only because we like it and think you will too.
WP Rocket
Starts at $39
Pros
- One click activation
- Support for the most popular WordPress ecommerce solutions
- Great minification tool
- Lazy load images
- Auto-updates
Cons
- Minification doesn't always work, especially on JavaScript files (common problem in caching plugins in general)
I just bought and set the plugin up 1hr before thuis post. It is indeed suite awesome, but they have a set-up fee of 180 dollar if you want them to do it…
Suite strange since it is so simple.
I disable js always in caching plugins
Whole industries exist because some people would rather pay someone else to do something then do it themselves – no matter how simple 😉
Glad you found the plugin useful too!
That’s right, Mark! Whole industries exist — like WordPress theme design!
Mark,
I recently switched some of my clients to WP Rocket and I must say it is one of the most enjoyable experiences I have ever had using a caching plugin. Most of my clients are in the hospitality and tourism industry and they have tons of images to show off, sliders too (oy vey). The lazy loading of images right out of the box is a boon.
I use W3 Total Cache on most of my sites, but I started switching a few to WP Rocket. Those that remain, have really custom settings that I have grown to like and I don’t want to fix what’s not broke. Saying that, I don’t miss the multiple, very long configuration pages.
My biggest reasons to use WP Rocket caching is the ease of setup and configuration, lazy loading of images, support of many plugins and shopping carts, as well as, the support (huge in my opinion).
This plugin is worth every penny.
I’d love to see you do a comparison of WP Rocket to Quick Cache Pro which I’ve found to be quite delightful as well.
Kim
I’m using the plugin right now, and it’s brought my page-speed grade up to A all around.
Still use W3 Total Cache and soon will move to rocket plugin too. Thanks dude.
I just made the move today with a handful sites, I am very happy with the result. It takes less than 10 sec to setup, and it really rocks on every site until now. I did not know about this super easy cache solution before, thank’s Themedy, great tip!
I save time and get the best solution, just how I like it.