Table of contents
WP Rocket, all the benefits
It is increasingly easier to slow down your WordPress site by filling it with contents, media and plugins that turn out to be necessary to increase visitor dwell time on the site but this cannot negatively impact the site’s response times or user experience. Especially if you do not have control over the hosting.
This means that the site needs a caching and optimization plugin, like WP Rocket, that allows you to cachere the site and optimize and/or compress a series of resources that are more or less impactful on the site achieving an improvement in connection and user experience.
The problem is that, if done wrong, it can produce unexpected behaviors and graphical glitches, if not actual errors on the site, which ruin both the navigability of the site and its functionalities and, consequently, the user experience of the site. For this reason, the choice of a good caching and optimization tool proves particularly important for an internet site.
Currently one of the best plugins for the cache is, precisely, WP Rocket, a premium plugin that is constantly updated and optimized for new requirements and caching systems, and which is highly supported by the most widespread hosting cache systems. It also has an eye for site administrators and web developers thanks to some internal tools and interfaces for managing and controlling optimization operations.
What needs to be done to optimize the site
The optimization of a site is usually a continuous battle (developing new content, adding new plugins, updating plugins, updating the theme…) that leads the sites (victims in this case of events) to drop in search engine results or become particularly slow in navigation or get deformed by the combination of updates and optimizations/compressions. Regarding site optimizations, there are usually three fronts to keep for maintaining or increasing one’s position in search engines:
- Multimedia resources optimized: the media (videos, photos, audio) should be planned with size and weight consistent with the site’s needs and subsequently optimized accordingly
- Server quick response: minimize data processing and server response times to maintain high engagement
- It must maintain a consistent graphical appearance: even if a cache is used or media are optimized, nothing of the graphics and content should变形/lose/alter
These three fronts need to be maintained both on the Desktop side and the Mobile side, which complicates the work and implies a minimum of technical skills unless you have a good plugin that manages a series of cases in a simplified way. And WP Rocket simplifies this work a lot once you activate the plugin and configure it correctly.
Optimize multimedia resources
One of the “heaviest” parts of the site are the multimedia contents (audio, video and photos) that need to be displayed on the pages of the site and usually represent 70% of the web page size, so it is necessary to optimize the sizes of the images (and media) and convert them into more modern and web-oriented media formats. This means using tools to obtain more performant and correctly targeted media for the situation.
For example, an e-commerce and a photographer’s website have different requirements regarding media quality and therefore should be optimized consistently with the requests.
To do this, it is possible to configure in WP Rocket the compression and conversion of media into more optimized formats for use on the web and allows a series of complex optimizations for js and css (which can become quite heavy easily) leaving however the possibility to the user to optimize all settings to obtain the best result for the site’s needs. Additionally, it supports gzip compression which allows for improved website performance especially in the case of mobile devices or if the user has connectivity issues.
Quick server responses
One of the factors to optimize to improve a site’s metrics are the server response times. Of course, this depends largely on the size of the site files but that problem we have already addressed in the previous part through compression.
In this case, to speed things up even more, we will use cache systems (in this case caching plugins) where the most requested data and pages are saved, consequently reducing page processing time and response time, thereby improving user experience.
WP Rocket comes with a highly efficient and practically invisible to the user caching system that can be managed autonomously. This proprietary WP Rocket caching system can be configured in standard mode (optimal for most existing sites), very custom mode (sometimes with overly technical settings that only complicate or scare the user), or completely disabled and an alternative caching system can be configured or it is possible to leave the site without caching (which we, as hosting, strongly discourage).
Obviously it is also possible to have a cache system limited only to part of the pages so as to avoid that the parts of the site that are constantly updated trigger a cache check for the entire site (a heavy and useless operation if a correct page and content caching policy is applied).
Another system to reduce loading time and improve seo and search engine results is the database optimization. Even though this is not done directly by WP Rocket, the plugin takes care of optimizing the site’s queries, thus achieving improvements concerning the speed of the WordPress site.
It must maintain a consistent graphical appearance
The optimizations you make on your site, such as media compression, can cause graphic errors or inconsistencies that are unwanted or completely break the site.
Therefore, one must always be careful about the effects of optimizations on the site both in terms of structure and features as well as contents.
For this reason, WP Rocket allows configuring cache and media optimization to include, exclude, or limit parts of the resources or handle them differently to avoid graphical glitches or other issues and has settings and commands for debugging the cache and other functions that may distort or compromise the graphics.
So does WP Rocket solve everything?
Almost. WP Rocket is a tool that serves to improve an already suboptimal situation but it still helps to know what is being done and what is being touched.
The plugin itself has excellent support and updates that are released continuously whenever there are actual needs, thus always keeping up with the technologies of WordPress sites.
Another strength point are the initial settings of the plugin that can solve site issues, but some problems also depend on the theme used and other plugins present on the site, so it is necessary to know what is being done to get the best results.
A good technician is able to improve default settings by changing some of them in order to get a more tailored setup for the specific site. For this reason, we always recommend relying on people with experience who give you specific metrics regarding the optimizations already done or to be done. This way, the impact of WP Rocket on the site is measurable and one can think about improving the most problematic parts or changing settings that, instead of improving, lower the site’s performance.
