Speed Up Your WordPress Website – Optimizing Your Website with WP Rocket If you’re looking to improve the performance of your website, WP Rocket is a great tool to consider. With WP Rocket, you can easily optimize your website and enhance its speed. In this guide, we will walk you through the process of optimizing your website using WP Rocket.
In this blog, we are going to optimize my website to improve its speed. By following the steps in this blog, you will also be able to optimize your own WordPress website. Let’s get started.
Speed Up Your WordPress Website
Step 1: Analyze the Website – The first thing we need to do is analyze the website we want to optimize. Let’s enter the website URL and see what happens. It’s taking a lot of time to load, which is a problem for a website like this. We need to optimize its speed.
Step 2: Use Third-Party Tools – To measure the speed and optimize the website, we need to use third-party tools. We will use Google Page Speed Insights, GTmetrix, and Pingdom Tools. Let’s open these tools in separate tabs and enter the website URL to analyze its speed.
Step 3: Review the Results – After analyzing the website with the tools, we can see that the speed scores are very low. This is not good for user experience and can negatively affect conversions. We need to improve these scores.
Step 4: Log into WordPress – Now, let’s log into the WordPress website that we want to optimize. It’s important to ensure that you are logging in using a secure method to protect your website from hacking.
Step 5: Update Plugins – Once logged in, we can see that there are pending updates for the website. It’s crucial to keep all plugins and themes updated to prevent vulnerabilities. Let’s update all the plugins and review the list of activated plugins.
Step 6: Install a Caching Plugin – The first thing we need to do to optimize the website’s speed is to install a good caching plugin. After trying various plugins, I recommend WP Rocket as the best caching plugin. It’s fully compatible with page builders like Divi and has a simple setup process.
Step 7: Install WP Rocket – After purchasing WP Rocket, log in to your WP Rocket account and download the plugin. Then, go back to your website’s WordPress dashboard and install the plugin by uploading the downloaded file.
Once installed, you can start configuring WP Rocket to optimize the website’s caching and improve its speed.
Configuring WP Rocket
Let’s configure WP Rocket right now. Here we are: “Congratulations, it’s now activated and already working for you, your website should be loading faster now”. We’ll be testing that out in just a second, first, we’re going to optimize and walk through all these settings one by one, so your website is completely optimized. If we’re breaking our website along the way, no problem I’m going to show you how you can fix it straight away.
The first thing we do is we’re going to click on this cross icon. Then on your dashboard, you can see your license, you can also get a Rocket CDN, which speeds up your website if your target audience is way broader than just your country. Then we go over here, we have the Rocket analysis if you want to share your anonymous data it would help them develop an even better plugin so why not just share it? This is everything to see on your dashboard. Let’s walk through all the settings.
WP Rocket Cache Setting
The basic cache options. The first thing I’m going to do is turn off the sidebar over there, so we have more cleaner interface, I like this. Then we’re going to of course enable caching for mobile devices. Then they’re going to ask: “Do you want separate cache files for mobile devices.” Well on most modern themes like this one, it’s a Divi theme. It’s responsive and should work without a separate cache. So you only need to enable this one if you have a dedicated mobile theme or plugin. If you’re using Elementor or you’re using Divi or you’re using Astra, you should not enable this. Just leave it off, it’s fine. Then we scroll down.
User cache is great when you have a lot of people logging into your WordPress website. In our case, we have a webshop, and people will be logging in sometimes when they come back. To enable this. If you don’t have people logging into your WordPress website, disable this. On this website, I’m going to enable this one. Then we go to the “Cache Lifespan”. Now 10 hours is great by default, so don’t change it unless you see some issues that you’re seeing regularly.
Then there’s something wrong with your WordPress installation and bounce, it’s a very technical story, but you can change this to for example 9 hours. If you notice that your server is a bit lagging and it’s getting a little bit too much for the old server because you’re maybe on a shared server I don’t know, you can change it even to 11 or 12 or 13 hours. But basically, 10 hours should do the trick. Press ‘Save Changes’.
WP Rocket File Optimization
I’m going to tell you what all these settings are and how they affect your page speed. You want to minimize the CSS files. CSS files are written with a lot of comments inside, spaces, and all kinds of things inside of your CSS files that a developer put in there so they can change things, and read things, what’s going on here.
Especially when you have a team. But a browser doesn’t need that information to put your website in the right order. So we’re going to minify it, to remove all those things and reduce the file size. And that’s what we want. We want to reduce it so we get more speed.
Now you get a warning ‘This could break things’ of course, but we do want to activate it, to see if things work better with this. So press on ‘Activate it’. And here you can exclude certain CSS files. I’ve never come across a website where I have to exclude some URLs and I have optimized a lot of websites, so that’s okay just keep it like this. And then we also going to optimize CSS delivery.
WP Rocket CDN Consideration
If your website receives a lot of visitors from different parts of the world, you may want to consider using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Rocket CDN. Rocket CDN stores your website files on different servers around the world, allowing visitors to download the files from the nearest server to their location. This can significantly improve load speeds and user experience. However, if your visitors are primarily from your own country, you can skip this step.
Controlling Heartbeat
By reducing the frequency of WordPress auto-saves, you can reduce the load on your server. WP Rocket allows you to control the heartbeat interval, saving you server resources. By hitting once every 2 minutes instead of every minute, you can reduce the load by 50%. This can greatly improve the performance of your website.
WebP Compatibility
If you have a plugin that converts your images to WebP format, you can enable WebP compatibility in WP Rocket. This feature optimizes your images and reduces their size, improving the overall performance of your website. However, if you’re not using a WebP plugin, you can leave this feature disabled.
Cloudflare Integration
If you use Cloudflare to route your website, you can enable Cloudflare integration in WP Rocket. This allows you to modify the options and optimize the performance of WP Rocket with Cloudflare. If you’re not using Cloudflare, you can skip this step.
Image Optimization
If your website has large images that load slowly, you can use the Imagify plugin to compress and optimize your images. Imagify is a powerful tool that can significantly improve the loading speed of your website. It offers a free monthly quota of 25 MB for optimization, or you can purchase credits for automatic optimization.
Tools and Conclusion
WP Rocket offers various tools, such as exporting and importing settings, reinstalling previous versions, and updating inclusion and exclusion lists. These tools can be useful for managing and optimizing your website. Once you have completed these steps, you have successfully optimized your website using WP Rocket.
Now, let’s see if WP Rocket has improved the performance of your website. Run another performance test using GTmetrix, Pingdom, and PageSpeed Insights. Compare the results with your previous tests to see the improvements.
Remember, WP Rocket can greatly enhance the performance of your website, but there may still be room for further optimization. Stay proactive in monitoring your website’s performance and explore additional strategies to achieve even better results.