WP Rocket Speed Review – Is it fast enough ?

Do you want to know the WP Rocket performance ? Are we getting better speed results using the above cache optimization plugin?

In the WP Rocket review conducted using some perfomance tests, I’ll show you how to achieve this goal – it cleared GTMetrix, Pingdom, PageSpeed Insights tests with positive results.

In the WP Rocket vs SG Optimizer, we saw that it cannot fully optimize JS and needs custom development.

The page load was around 750ms with a B Grade in Pingdom performance test result. If your site is loading below 1-2 seconds, you are doing a good job at speed optimization.

Using GTMetrix, I obtained A grade in both PageSpeed and YSlow score. The fully loaded time was around 2.5 secs with a page size of around 600 KB. I know two results should be enough to prove that WP Rocket is performing well for your site.

The blog I tested the site had 330 posts. In the WP Rocket vs Autoptimize, we can check its speed performance.

WP Rocket Review – PageSpeed Insights Results

I want to make sure that I can reciprocate the same test results using PageSpeed Insights tool of Google. The mobile and desktop score were around 35 and 90 respectively.

[wps_note size=”17″ background=”#fae588″ color=”#333333″ radius=”3″]If you check WP Rocket documentation, it is clear that we should not put much emphasis on score results alone.[/wps_note]

To make things clear you should test your blog or website page manually on your computer or mobile. You can easily count numbers to mimic seconds, which should give a fair idea of the page loading speed.

[wps_note size=”17″ background=”#dda8a8″ color=”#333333″ radius=”3″]Another good indication is the “Speed Index” metric by the same tool. In the mobile results it was giving around 9 seconds and desktop was giving only around 2 seconds.[/wps_note]

The LiteSpeed Cache vs WP Rocket comparison mentions the best results of both.

WP Rocket Review Settings

1. Mobile Cache – Both options enabled
2. User Cache – Enabled
3. Cache Lifespan – 10 hours
4. Minify HTML, CSS, JavaScript files – Enabled
5. Combine Google Fonts files – Enabled
6. Remove query strings from static resources – Enabled
7. Combine CSS, JavaScript files – Enabled
8. Optimize CSS delivery – Enabled
9. Load JavaScript deferred (with safe mode for jQuery) – Enabled
10. Enable LazyLoad for images, iframes, videos – Yes
11. Disable Emoji – Yes
12. Disable WordPress embeds – Yes
13. Activate Preloading – Yes
14. Heartbeat Control – Enabled
15. Add-Ons – Cloudflare enabled

The complete WP Rocket plugin review will give details of pagespeed peformance and settings.

[wps_note size=”17″ background=”#d5c5e2″ color=”#333333″ radius=”3″]For some reason, Database optimization did not work as intended on my site. Also Google Adsense ads took some time to load. This happens after the content is displayed and could be due to deferring of JavaScript.[/wps_note]

[wp-review id=”5202″]

Plugins Active

[wps_note size=”17″ background=”#ddd2ba” color=”#333333″ radius=”3″]In addition, Cloudflare Free version was also installed.[/wps_note]

[wps_note size=”17″ background=”#afd693″ color=”#333333″ radius=”3″]Active Plugins: Accelerated Mobile Pages, Ad Inserter, Akismet Anti-Spam, Classic Editor, Lightweight Subscribe To Comments, Contextual Related Posts, Cookie Notice, Easy Table of Contents, EWWW Image Optimizer, Inline Related Posts, kk Star Ratings, Link Juice Keeper, Redirection, Schema Creator by Raven, TablePress, Ultimate Category Excluder, Wordfence Security, Yoast SEO, WP Review Pro, WP Rocket, WP Shortcode Pro by MyThemeShop[/wps_note]

Case Study of WP Rocket Speed

For checking the performance of WP Rocket, I tested 3 pages with 10+ images of almost the same size. These were randomly chosen from the above tech site which has 330+ posts. The site had a traffic of 2000+ page views per day.

In a future post, I’m going to show how this plugin’s speed boost has an impact on daily traffic with practical proof.

WP Rocket Performance Testing using Pingdom Tool

As you can see from the above, all the 3 pages scored a B grade. The three posts had different page size and requests.  But the load time is almost around 750 ms. This is a tremendous proof of WP Rocket plugin speed performance, even though the page size range was between 840 KB to 2.7 MB.

I ran the same test 2 to 3 times, to make sure that the page was cached enough. Sometimes, the caching is not enabled (if preloading doesn’t kick-in) and will show wrong results. The above results are a good indication of the power of WP Rocket in page loading and grade score.

WP Rocket Speed Test Using GT Metrix

In all the 3 pages, the score grade was A, except for 1 page’s YSlow. The page size in these test results shows that it is around 570 KB. The number of requests were around 37. The fully loaded time was 2.4 secs approximately. This is not bad enough.

WP Rocket Google Page Speed Results

All the above results show a good desktop score, but a low mobile score.

We already mentioned that mobile results are not yet optimized using WP Rocket, if AMP technology is used.

Also Read

• Rocket.net Review – Best Plans and Pricing – Common Features
• Rocket.net Review – Experience it yourself with $1

But if you are using responsive mobile without AMP, you should see a good Google page speed score without AMP.

It is already mentioned on WP Rocket tutorials, that this point should not be given much importance. The page loading time is an important metric that should be considered as an important parameter.

[wps_note size=”17″ background=”#fae588″ color=”#333333″ radius=”3″]Note: Also, the test results varied, when testing the same page several times. This should be considered as inefficiency of Google PageSpeed testing tool. Since we cannot rely on this tool, we have taken into consideration of the other speed checking tools. [/wps_note]

My Final Few Thoughts …

As a conclusion from the above 3 tests, we can consider WP Rocket to be a good cache plugin. It also does HTML, CSS and JS file minification to the maximum extent possible. Though the PageSpeed Insights tool shows low score for mobile results, it cannot be considered significant. This is due to the conflicting results obtained by the tool.

On the other hand, Pingdom and GTMetrix show positive results of WP Rocket speed  and efficiency. If you have more desktop traffic, then you can definitely go ahead with this speed optimization plugin. You can use the default settings which are enabled by default on activating the plugin.

For best results, you can always switch on and off, different options available. Finally, WP Rocket is a robust plugin useful for all kinds of hosting.