How WP Rocket Immediately Sped Up My Website

Are you wondering how to speed up your website?

I was wondering the same thing earlier this year before I fortunately discovered the WP Rocket caching plugin. By simply installing and activating WP Rocket, making no additional adjustments, my website loading speed increased significantly.

WP Rocket promises “you’ll see an improvement in loading time just with the default configuration,” and that is exactly what happened for me.

Speed is one of the most important components of a website or blog. The faster your website loads, the better experience your readers will have while using your site. Website speed is also a factor that Google uses in search results rankings.

In this review of WP Rocket, I’ll show you how this WordPress caching plugin sped up World of Freelancers by simply installing it using the automatic install method and then activating it. This WP Rocket review focuses on only one thing: The number of seconds – or milliseconds – it takes for my website to load both with and without this caching plugin. 

You’ll see screenshots of the speed of my website, according to both the Pingdom and GTMetrix website performance tools, both right before installing and activating this plugin as well as after right after.

All the other reviews I see about this caching plugin are rather in-depth and technical. I’m not very techie, so I’m writing a very basic review. If you’re not very techie either, you may appreciate this short and simple WP Rocket review.

WP ROCKET REVIEW
How WP Rocket Immediately Sped Up My Website

I installed WPRocket on August 16, 2020. I ran the Pingdom and GTMetrix speed tests logged out of my website, as I read that being logged out will give you the most accurate results. Pingdom allows you to choose the server location where you want to run the test. I read that you should choose the server location nearest to you, so I chose Washington, D.C. for each Pingdom test. GTMetrix does not allow you to choose the location. It uses Vancouver, Canada for each of their tests.

I’ll now show you the screenshots of my website speed according to Pingdom and GTMetrix both immediately before installing and activating this plugin and immediately after.

My website speed before installing and activating WP Rocket, according to Pingdom was 3.61 seconds.

Two minutes after activating WPRocket, my website loading speed had increased dramatically, according to Pingdom, and now was now loading in only 710 milliseconds.

My blog speed before installing and activating WP Rocket, according to GTMetrix, was 5.5 seconds.

Two minutes after activating WP Rocket, according to GTMetrix, my site speed actually stayed approximately the same. So I continued testing it. Finally, after about 1.5 hours, GTMetrix showed that my site speed had increased quite a bit and was now loading in 3.0 seconds.

I don’t know why it took so long for GTMetrix to show my site was loading more quickly when Pingdom showed an immediate increase in speed. Maybe this was a caching issue on their part.

I wondered why the two tools show such different loading speeds, so I did some research and learned that at that time Pingdom was using an on load method while GTMetrix was using a fully loaded method. So it made sense that the Pingdom results were different than the GTMetrix results.

These speed testing tools give a lot more detail than is shown in these screenshots. A lot. So much detail that I would have to hire someone to interpret the results, and I’m not going to – nor do I need to – do that.

I don’t need to do that because WP Rocket clearly increased the speed of my website by simply installing and activating it, just as they promise.

How does WP Rocket improve your website speed by simply installing and activating? They say: “When you activate WPRocket, we immediately apply the most commonly recommended performance optimizations. That means we take care of them automatically so you don’t have to do anything to make your site faster.”

If you want to speed up your site even more – which I will probably also do at some point – WP Rocket also has lots of documentation that will help you do that. You’ll find these documents in your WordPress dashboard once you install and activate the plugin. You can also use their expert technical support people to help you increase your site speed even more beyond the default settings. Plus they have a private Facebook group of 10,000 WP Rocket users which you can join to ask questions and get even more support.

WP Rocket is a premium plugin. They have no free option. You can get this plugin for only $49 for one year. Website speed is extremely important and WP Rocket was a very easy to way increase my website speed so, in my opinion, this price is completely worth it.

I don’t personally recommend many products here on World of Freelancers, but I do personally recommend WP Rocket. This plugin did exactly what it promised to do -speed up my website by simply installing and activating – and I am really very happy about it. Speed up your own website or blog with WP Rocket right here.

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Cover image by Reimund Bertrams

Sabina Lohr

Sabina Lohr is a lifelong freelancer turned entrepreneur who created World of Freelancers to help others discover how to work for themselves online and live the freelance lifestyle. She’s always really enjoyed the freedom that freelancing brings, including several years on and off of working online while traveling and living abroad.

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