Do you want to properly configure and install WP Rocket WordPress plugin in your site?

Increasing the speed of your website has become essential for SEO purposes. By ensuring that your load times are as short as possible, you’ll be able to provide search engines with quicker information regarding what your site contains – thus instilling greater trust and in turn rank higher. Here’s why it’s so vital.

When it comes to developing a website, you want it to load as fast as possible. According to statistics, if your page takes more than 3 seconds for people on the Internet to load, down about half of them will abandon the page and move on.

This is why search engines keep emphasizing speed when wanting to make sure that the correct sites are being ranked high in their searches – in other words, making sure that sites with good loading times are getting seen first by high numbers of users so that they get traffic as quickly as possible.

The higher the page speed, the better your search ranking. Faster websites are perceived to be more trustworthy, because of the perceived higher value and will rank higher than other sites in Google’s algorithm. The difference between page load speeds is significant as well, with only 1/10 of a second delay causing visitors to leave a website.

Faster websites prove to have better conversions, higher search engine rankings, and more content reach. Another issue with slow loading time is that visitors instantly abandon pages that don’t load within seconds of opening!

Increasing website speed may seem complicated at first glance, but it is possible if you use the right optimization tools. WP Rocket is one such tool. This WordPress plugin will make your speed optimization journey easier and more effective.

What does caching have to do with speeding up your website?

Let’s talk about speeding up your website with the help of WordPress Rocket. It is important to take care and measure the health of commonly used applications, including those which serve and promote our brand. Why WP Rocket? For starters it’s one wicked-fast caching plugin that ensures your site loads at lightning speed while taking advantage of server clusters to ensure optimal allocation of shared resources and enhanced power management tools designed to squeeze as much speed from your server as possible.

WP Rocket keeps dynamic data in a temporary storage so it can be retrieved instantly on demand. This caching principle makes it possible for a website to run faster and more efficiently.

Without further ado, let’s get started with configuring WP Rocket to speed up your website.

Since WP Rocket is a premium WordPress plugin, the first step is to purchase a WP Rocket License.

After the download is complete,  go to Plugins  →  Add New to install WP Rocket  .

WP Rocket automatically configures most of its features when enabled. After installing and activating WP Rocket, these features will launch automatically:

• Page and browser caching
• Web fonts Cross-Origin support
• GZIP compression

To make setup easy, each of the steps below matches the tabs you’ll find to the left of the add-on panel. Follow these steps one by one to properly configure WP Rocket plugin.

Cache

The first tab you will see after the Dashboard is Cache. This tab doesn’t require much configuration though.

One thing you should definitely do is  to  enable separate cache files for Mobile  under  Mobile  Cache .

If your website has a registration feature or any user-specific content,   you should also enable the Enable cache option for logged in WordPress users  under  User Cache .

File optimization

File optimization allows combining and optimizing HTML, CSS and JavaScript files without affecting their functionality.

Note that the options under the File Optimization section are the most advanced, so be careful when changing any of the settings unless you are a professional developer.

Often times, when users configure File Optimization manually, something goes wrong when the layout, links or forms are broken. WP Rocket’s documentation  will help you fix issues with the File Optimization section.

Sometimes the plugin warns you not to change the settings as it will somehow affect the front end of your site. If you see it, this could mess  things up! error, you can manually exclude the files causing the problem.  Check out WP Rocket’s tutorial video on finding the right JavaScript to exclude  .

Media

The Media tab allows you to manage late loading, Emoji and WordPress embeds.
Late loading is a content optimization method that significantly increases the page’s load time. The main idea is to show the content on the page (for example, images and videos) only when they are visible to visitors when they scroll down. This optimization technique makes your website run much faster and more efficiently.

We recommend enabling all available features. Also,  consider checking the Replace YouTube iframe with preview image box to further speed up your load times  .

Preloading

Usually cached plugins wait for a website visitor to navigate to each page. The preload feature is very important for caching pages because unlike other plugins WP Rocket automatically creates the cache first to serve the cached pages later.

Enable the  sitemap-based cache preloading  feature. Now select your sitemap.

Scroll down to find Prefetch DNS Requests . If you are using any third party content, this is where you can add its URL. For example, you can link Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook and add Google fonts.

Advanced Rules

Certain cookies, user agents, pages, etc. You  can disable caching under the Advanced Rules tab.

Most of the time  you leave Progress Rules as they are, as the plugin automatically detects plugins that should be excluded from caching  . If you want to exclude something specific (e.g. your cart page), you can certainly do so under Advanced Rules .

Database

Scrolling down  you will find the  Database tab. This is where you can clean your WordPress database of anything unnecessary.

Be sure to make a backup copy of your website before checking any boxes! Avoid unnecessary post revisions, spam comments, transients, etc. You can delete it. You also have the option to set up an automatic cleanup schedule for your plugin to run on its own.

CDN

CDN instead allows you to rewrite URLs on your website to serve content from your CDN. If you are not using CDN, you can skip the configuration of this section.

For example, you can modify it so that instead of loading images from your media library, WP Rocket loads images from a CDN version.

Heart beat

The Heartbeat section aims to improve the dashboard functionality. The editor simplifies many useful features such as autosave and user session management.

You can enable the Control Heartbeat feature to save some resources of your server.

If you don’t want to disable the Heartbeat API specifically,  it is better to reduce or disable other  Heartbeat activity  settings  .

Additions

WP Rocket provides specific plugins for Sucuri, Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics, and Cloudflare.

If you’re using Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel,  WP Rocket ‘s plugins allow you to host these tracking scripts locally instead of installing them from Google or Facebook.

These servers will also see useful features for Sucuri or Cloudflare, such as by clearing the cache cache when open  WP Rocket .

If you want to enable any of these features, simply open the required plugin.

We  hope this article helped you learn how to properly install and configure the WP Rocket plugin in WordPress  !