How to Setup WP Rocket in 2022 | ®

In this post we are going to take out the scalpel to dissect, analyze and configure one of the most useful plugins (surely straight to the top 3) for WordPress: WP Rocket 2022 🚀🚀🚀. The novelties for 2022 are required by the

“Wait a minute Doc, are you telling me you’ve built a time machine… With a DeLorean!?”

(Back to the FutureRobert Zemeckis, 1985)

What type of plugin is WP Rocket?

It is possibly the most powerful WPO plugin on the market for the WordPress content management system (CMS) within the standardized plugins and with technical support. Therefore, it is a great ally for any SEO team or freelancer who wants to keep their website fast and accessible for users and for the main search engines (Google in the lead).

WP Rocket updates. What is WP Rocket like in 2022?

Briefly comment that WP Rocket is updated practically every month, so it is completely safe against possible attacks on its code. Its continuous changes of interface and functionalities will make this post ready for an update in a short time… As it is a highly optimized plugin, it is difficult for you to have problems with a Theme when updating it, however, if you have the payment plan, the technical service will take care of solving any problem of incompatibilities or code failures.

WP Rocket is a paid plugin

The Rocket plugin is not a free plugin. Those of us who use WordPress regularly are very used to free plugins and their comfort, and the fact of paying for this type of accessory can keep us from buying it. However, in this case its price is justified. If there is a plugin to pay for, it is this one; mainly due to its results, its easy handling and its technical service.

WP Rocket, WPO and SEO?

Before starting fully with the analysis of the plugin, we are going to give a brushstroke of what WPO is, for those who are not familiar with the term, and to underline its importance today as a determining SEO factor to position in the results of the search engines, preferably the giant Google….

WPO stands for Web Performance Optimization. That is, within SEO it is the area that is responsible for optimizing the elements that influence the loading speed within a website to make the site faster for users and for search engines. There are several factors that need to be optimized (or taken into account) and that influence the load: code, server, browser, cache, images, device.

The importance of the WPO for SEO is increasing. Google has emphasized it on numerous occasions and you only have to browse the sub blog or webmaster tools to realize the emphasis it places on this topic, so there is consensus in the SEO world that it is a determining factor to position in Google. In addition, with the shift in access to the online world that mobile devices have brought, it is even more necessary to optimize the sites so that they are as fast as possible.

With Wp Rocket you will be able to optimize practically all the elements related to WPO, except for the server, so it will not be necessary to install a specialized plugin per element, giving very satisfactory results in both Page Speed ​​and GTMetrix.

How to set up WP Rocket in 2022?

Before and after

Let’s go to the mess with the configuration of WP Rocket. As if it were an advertisement to lose weight. First remember to pass your most important web pages through the speed measurement tools and take a “photo” of the before and after; This way you will see and have objective data of the results that are achieved after the configuration of the plugin! Very valuable if you work in an agency to present results to the client, who usually gets lost in these technical issues and does not know what you have been dealing with. You can , GTMetrix or WebpageSpeed.

WP Rocket setup step by step

Once the plugin is purchased and installed in WordPress, you must locate it either in your installed plugins panel or through the WordPress side panel in the Settings module.

wp rocket desktop

WP Rocket in 2020 improved the interface giving it a facelift to make it more friendly and intuitive for the user, also improving the explanations and help section next to each field for the uninitiated or SEO padawans or simply to know “If I touch this…👀 What does it do? ?»

From the desktop we will see a quick summary of the optimization carried out by the plugin, a breakdown of the characteristics of your account profile and quick access buttons to perform the most common actions of the plugin:

• Share data with Rocket: you can activate it if you want your data to help improve the plugin
• clear cache
• preload cache
• Purge the contents of OPcache
• Regenerate CSS critical path

In this section you will also have at your disposal the typical FAQs, a help manual and all the information in case you need to contact the technical service.

Optimize cache with WP Rocket

Optimizing the cache of your website well is one of the differentiating points in WPO. In this section WP Rocket is very good. The plugin shows the “Mobile cache” section and has two fields that I recommend you leave marked:

• Enable cache for mobile devices ✔
• Separately save files for mobile devices ✔

Then you can optimize the ««, very useful if your website log in to users, that is, for users registered on your website. Only check the box “Enable caching for users connected to WordPress” if it is the case.

Finally, without counting the advanced rules that go deeper into how to optimize certain points of the cache, we have the “Cache useful life” which comes to say what time is established for those files that are cached from which they will be deleted and the page will be served without caching. Here you will have to take into account the type of site you have and every time you update the pages and files of your website, the activity in an e-commerce with constant uploads of products will not be the same as a service website where, except that have a very active blog, content updating is more limited. The plugin allows you to set the time you consider appropriate for the cache (look at the global cache, not for specific files or pages) of your site, establishing 10 hours as the standard time.

Finally, don’t forget to click on Save changes! 💡

Optimize files with WP Rocket

We come to another of WP Rocket’s most powerful hot spots. Hot because here you will have to be somewhat careful since when optimizing the html, css and javascript incompatibilities may arise with the theme, other plugins or web code. And powerful because if you manage to optimize it you will get your site much faster than the one you had. Make a back-up of the web before you get into this and you’ll avoid cold sweats 😓!

The first thing is the basic options. Our advice is to activate them all:

• Minify the HTML ✔
• Combine Google Fonts files ✔
• Suppress query strings from static resources ✔

The next section is specific to “CSS Files”. Here we advise you to check both, but check if any element of the web is altered. Both css minification and the combination of css and css delivery, save a lot of loading speed. There are tools like this that can help you see what part of the code WP Rocket has optimized:

• Minify CSS files ✔
• Combine CSS files ✔
• Optimize CSS delivery ✔

The section to exclude CSS files can be very useful when incompatibilities with some parts arise when minifying or combining your css. You can exclude certain css that break your website and optimize the others. Just copy the .css path into the box that shows up and it will ignore that element.

Getting into talking about the css critical path is another matter, but it is one more element to optimize when building the CSSDOM. He left it in case someone wants to delve into this topic, which concerns developers more than SEO.

The last field in this module is “JavaScript Files. As before, we advise you to activate the minification and merge options and then check the web if any important elements loaded by JavaScript have been altered. In the same way as with css, certain JavaScript resources can be excluded to solve some problems. We also advise enabling JavaScript lazy loading and Safe Mode.

• Minify JavaScript files ✔
• Merge the JavaScript files ✔
• Load JavaScript files lazily ✔
• Safe mode for jQuery ✔

Finally, don’t forget to click on Save changes! 💡

Optimize media with WP Rocket

Media optimization refers to images in all their formats (jpg, png, webp,…) and other files such as pdfs, videos, iframes, emojis, etc. We have to say that here WP Rocket does not seem to us to be the most powerful plugin or with which the best results are achieved (see ), but it can be used perfectly if you do not want to install another plugin for this. The option that we advise you to check is the lazy loading of images, which will load the files as the user scrolls or browses the web, so it will not be necessary to load all the images from the start. We activate:

• Enable for images ✔
• Enable for iframes and videos ✔
• Replace the Youtube iframe with an image in preview (activate this only if your website has many videos)
• Disable emoji ✔
• Disable WordPress feature for embedded content ✘

Finally, don’t forget to click on Save changes! 💡

Optimize preload with WP Rocket

Cache preloading is a way to automate the cache to make it more effective. We recommend that you leave it active and that you activate it through the sitemap (Sitemap.xml) if you have it automated. The plugin integrates perfectly with Yoast SEO so it becomes a perfect ally when it comes to updating new content. You can also do this manually or specify the sitemaps you want the preload to call. The same is true for preloading DNS requests. For example, requests made outside your website (Google Maps, Google Fonts, Facebook, Instagram, etc.)

• Activate preload ✔
• Activate the cache preload feature via the sitemap ✔
• Yoast SEO XML Sitemap ✔ (only if you have previously installed Yoast SEO)

Finally, don’t forget to click on Save changes! 💡

WP Rocket Advanced Rules

We are not going to dwell too much on this module. Just say that it is used to restrict or specify elements that want to be excluded or integrated into the cache.

Don’t forget to click Save Changes! 💡

Optimize the Database with Wp Rocket

Ok, at this block and before any consideration the message “Back up your database before running cleanup! Once the database optimization is done,…