WP Rocket Review – Can it Speed Up WordPress?
Are you looking for a WP Rocket review? WP Rocket is a popular choice when it comes to speeding up or optimizing your WordPress website performance. When we create a WordPress website, it’s usually fast enough. But gradually it can be slow as we add more stuff to our website.
There could be various reasons why a WordPress website is slow. It might be that your CSS isn’t minified, or you have unused CSS and JavaScript, etc. which are causing the site to slow down. WP Rocket is a plugin that promises to boost the speed of your WordPress website.
Whether it is on mobile or desktop, a WordPress site can be made a lot faster. In order to test this statement, we decided to give WP Rocket a try.
After trying out WP Rocket on one of our production sites, we were surprised with the result. In today’s post, we’re going to present the result after using WP Rocket. So, this will be a WP Rocket review. We’ll be sharing our experience with WP Rocket in this post.
What is WP Rocket?
WP Rocket is a feature-rich performance plugin for WordPress. You can use this to boost the performance and speed of your WordPress site. You can improve your Google PageSpeed score by using this plugin.
WP Rocket is regularly updated with the latest technologies. It doesn’t only increase your website’s load speed; it also increases your website’s overall performance.
Website PageSpeed score before using WP Rocket
Before installing and configuring WP Rocket, we decided to check the Google PageSpeed score of one of our production sites. This is a blog site with thousands of blog posts. It also has ads and lots of widgets. We tested the home page and the single post page speed score as these are the two most important pages of a blog site. (Google PageSpeed Insights checks a website’s load speed for both desktop and mobile devices.)
First, we checked our home page for mobile devices. So, this is the Google PageSpeed score of our website before using the WP Rocket plugin.
As you can see from the screenshot above, we didn’t have a good score. The performance score of our subject site’s home page for mobile devices was 54 out of 100. We had several performance issues.
Next, we checked the performance score for the desktop. This is the home Google PageSpeed Insight results.
Here we have a 97 out of 100 score for desktops. We have a very good PageSpeed score for desktops. But still there is some room for improvement.
After checking the home page score, we tried our single post page. So, for single post page, our Google PageSpeed score for mobile devices was as following:
From the screenshot you can see that the page speed score is 58 out of 100. It’s a bit higher than the home page. But it still requires a lot of work.
After that we looked at the score for the desktop. So, this is the single post page speed score for desktop.
It appears that we had a good PageSpeed score for desktop devices. So, for the single post page, our PageSpeed score was 98 out of 100, which is really good.
To summarize our Google PageSpeed Insights scores for the home page and single post page:
- Home page score for mobile: 54
- Home page score for desktop: 97
- Single post page score for mobile: 58
- Single post page score for desktop: 98
So this was the state of our blog site. As you can see, we had good scores for desktops, but the mobile scores were very low.
👉 Get WP Rocket Plugin NOW! 🚀
🔥 Unlimited License Plan Available ✅
WP Rocket experience
After testing our PageSpeed score, we decided to install WP Rocket on our site. As soon as you install and activate this plugin, it starts working and you can see some result immediately. But we did a little bit of configuration and explored some of the settings of the plugin. To access the plugin, you can go to Settings > WP Rocket from your WordPress dashboard. This will lead you to the WP Rocket Dashboard.
From this section, you can take a look at your license info, and also remove cached files and used CSS cache. You can also find video tutorials in the “Getting Started” section and also read the WP Rocket documentation. There’s also an FAQ section where you can find the answers to some common questions.
There are other tabs within WP Rocket such as the File Optimization, Media, Preload, etc. Some basic options are automatically enabled. We still had to look around each tab to see what features and options are available for the best achievable performance.
In the File Optimization tab, the first option is the CSS files. Here we enabled the “Minify CSS files” option and from “Optimize CSS delivery” we enabled the “Remove unused CSS” button.
The next section is the JavaScript files. Here we enabled the “Minify JavaScript files” option as this removes the white spaces and comments to reduce the file size. Then we enabled “Load JavaScript deferred” which eliminates render blocking JS on our site. We also enabled the “Delay JavaScript Execution” option. This delays executing JavaScript files until the user interacts with actions such as scrolling, clicking, etc.
There’s a lot more options to look at but this will only make this review longer. If you have WP Rocket, you can click on each tab and see what other options and features are available from here.
👉 Learn More: How To Speed Up Your WordPress Site with WP Rocket
Website PageSpeed score after using WP Rocket
After we were done looking at the different settings and features of WP Rocket, we decided to see what our Google PageSpeed score was this time. So, we tested our home page and single post page after configuring WP Rocket on our WordPress site. And here’s our result.
If you remember, our PageSpeed score for the home page on mobile devices was 54. After optimizing our site with WP Rocket, now our score is 99! Which is almost perfect! Next we checked the score for the desktop.
As you can see, after using WP Rocket, our home page speed score for desktop is 100! Next we checked the single post page score. For mobile devices our single page speed score is 99 out of 100. Which is a huge improvement as previously the score was 58 out of 100.
For the desktop view, for a single post page, we already had a good score, but WP Rocket further optimized the pages and increased our score. To summarize our PageSpeed scores after using WP Rocket:
- Home page score for mobile: 99
- Home page score for desktop: 100
- Single post page score for mobile: 99
- Single post page score for desktop: 99
Our experience with WP Rocket was amazing. As you could already see, our site had a good score for desktop, but for mobile devices, we really needed some optimization. WP Rocket helped us out immensely as our site is now superfast and has almost no issues. Both on mobile and desktop, our site’s performance is superb!
👉 Get WP Rocket Plugin NOW! 🚀
🔥 Unlimited License Plan Available ✅
👉 Video: WP Rocket Review
Conclusion
That brings our WP Rocket review to a conclusion. There are many optimization plugins for WordPress- and WP Rocket is considered one of the best among those. As there’s no free version of the plugin, it’s difficult for many people to decide if getting this plugin is the right choice. We also had our doubts but after using WP Rocket, we can safely say that this is an amazing plugin. The performance improvements after using WP Rocket are noticeable.
If you are thinking of getting WP Rocket to optimize your WordPress site, we would definitely recommend it. If you have a faster WordPress site, it will attract more visitors. This will improve the user engagement and make your website more helpful to the visitors.
Disclaimer: This post may contain affiliate links and we may receive a small commission if you purchase something by following them. However, we recommend services/products that we believe good to serve your purpose.