EDITS.WS

Author: Valentina Orlandi

  • 3.15: Introducing LazyLoading CSS Background Images to Boost Performance

    What’s the main goal you have in mind when optimizing your website for speed? You may think about delivering an exceptional experience to your visitors. Or you may want to improve your Core Web Vitals grades and PageSpeed Insights score, as they are related to optimizing your website visibility on Google.

    Either way, we bet you’ll enjoy our new major release. Say hello to WP Rocket 3.15!

    We’re proud and excited to introduce this new major version with a brand-new feature: LazyLoading CSS background images. This new option helps you address two PageSpeed Insights audits and improve some key performance metrics – therefore, your PageSpeed Insights score, too. The feature is also a game-changer option on the market. You’ll discover why in the next section.🚀

    WP Rocket 3.15 also comes with removing the Combine CSS feature – you’ll understand the reason behind our decision in the article.

    Say hello to our new release, watch our video, or keep reading to learn everything about this new WP Rocket milestone!

    Why Does Image Lazy Loading Help Improve Performance?

    Lazy loading is a powerful performance optimization technique that allows the browser to load only the files visible before scrolling (above the fold). They’re the files essential to display the page to the user quickly. 

    Thanks to lazy loading, the files not included in the highest part of the viewport (below the fold) are loaded asynchronously. They’re not needed when the page loads at first, and they are shown only when the user scrolls down the page. As a result, the page is displayed quicker because the browser doesn’t have to wait until all resources –including the non-critical ones– are loaded.

    Lazy loading should be applied to all images except the ones above the fold – as explained, these are immediately visible to the users and must be loaded as soon as possible. Among the images to lazy load, there may also be the images defined in the CSS files and inline CSS code, such as the background images.

    You can see how lazy loading helps the page load faster and improves the overall loading time, right?

    Now that we explained why lazy loading is essential to boosting performance let’s discover the new WP Rocket feature.

    3.15: What Lazy Loading for CSS Background Images Entails

    The most important news about Lazy loading for CSS background images is that it directly impacts two important PageSpeed Insights audits: Avoid enormous network payloads and Keep request count low and transfer sizes small. Both audits are related to how heavy your pages and their elements are when loading a page.

    And that’s why the lazy loading CSS background images feature comes in handy – especially because it’s the first option on the market to allow this type of optimization automatically upon the feature’s activation, without any effort from your side.

    Depending on how your page is built, the new feature can also help you improve three performance metrics: Largest Contentful Paint (Core Web Vitals), First Contentful Paint, and Speed Index. 

    All these metrics are included in Google’s Performance report, affecting the overall PageSpeed Insights score. By improving them, you’ll likely improve the Core Web Vitals assessment and the overall performance grade.

    The Impact of the New Feature on Performance

    We ran some performance tests to measure the impact of the brand-new feature on the PageSpeed performance report.

    We included 22 background images in the website test to measure the effect of enabling the new feature.

    List of the background images included in the test website before the test - Chrome Network tab
    List of the background images included in the test website before the test – Chrome Network tab

    Before enabling the LazyLoad for CSS Background Images feature, we ran the PageSpeed report. 

    The result showed room for improvement for the two audits mentioned above: Avoid enormous network payloads and Keep request count low and transfer sizes small. 

    In particular, the tool highlighted the total size of the resources (6,229 KB) and the number of resources found (23 requests) in red.

    Diagnostics section before enabling the LazyLoad CSS Background Images
    Diagnostics section before enabling the LazyLoad CSS Background Images

    The overall grade and the five Lighthouse metrics were pretty good:

    Performance report before enabling the LazyLoad CSS Background Images
    Performance report before enabling the LazyLoad CSS Background Images

    Let’s see what happened after enabling LazyLoading for the CSS background images.

    Take a look at the list of images included in the Chrome Network Tab. As you can see, the number of images went from 22 to only 7 – these are the ones that needed to be loaded on this specific viewport.

    You see 5 images in the screenshot, while the Network Tab list shows 7 because we use a 300px threshold for LazyLoading. It means that all images included in such threshold will be loaded. In this specific case, there were 2 additional images visible in the 300px of the viewport.

    List of the background images included in the test website after the test - Chrome Network tab
    List of the background images included in the test website after the test – Chrome Network tab

    We ran the PageSpeed report once again, and here’s what we got.

    The Diagnostics section showed a big improvement. The number of requests went from 24 to 7, and their size from 6,229 KB to only 930 KB. No red warning anymore!

    Diagnostics section after enabling the LazyLoad CSS Background Images
    Diagnostics section after enabling the LazyLoad CSS Background Images

    In fact, the Avoids enormous network payloads audit went under the Passed ones:

    Avoids enormous network payloads - Passed audit
    Avoids enormous network payloads – Passed audit

    While the overall score and grades were already good, we can still see an improvement. The Largest Contentful Paint (Core Web Vitals) decreased from 2.3 s to 1.3 s. The speed Index went from 1.1 s to 0.8 s, and the First Contentful Paint went from 1.0 s to 0.8 s. 

    Performance report after enabling the LazyLoad CSS Background Images
    Performance report after enabling the LazyLoad CSS Background Images

    💡It’s important to remember that the improvements you can get with such a feature depend on how the page is structured and how many background images below the fold are used.
    First Contentful Paint, Speed Index, and Largest Contentful Paint are all potential target metrics for improvement, as well as the PageSpeed audits and the overall performance score.
    Our test has been run on a prototype to show the improvements such a feature can make, even when the starting point is already good. Imagine what can happen when the room for improvement is bigger.

    Let’s now discover the LazyLoading CSS background images in detail!

    How the New-Brand Feature Works

    The LazyLoading CSS background images feature is in the Media tab > LazyLoad section. 

    The option to LazyLoad CSS background images is the second on the list. You only need to tick the box to enable it. As explained above, there’s no extra work for you to do: you activate the option, and the plugin does the job for you.

    LazyLoading CSS background images feature - WP Rocket 3.15
    LazyLoading CSS background images feature – WP Rocket 3.15

    As mentioned in the previous section, images above the fold should not be lazy-loaded because they must be displayed as soon as possible. It also applies to background images.

    If you wish, you can use the Excluded images or iframes box to exclude them. While we’re at it, we’d like to let you know that our next version will take care of that for you, but shhh!

    âš  We recommend not enabling this feature with CSS Combination from the other optimization plugins or themes. We don’t process combined files from other plugins. Consequently, any backgrounds located there won’t be included in the lazy loading process.

    This brings us to the next change of WP Rocket 3.15: removing the CSS Combination option.

    Goodbye to the Combine CSS Feature

    The Combine CSS feature was designed for websites using HTTP/1 protocol to solve one of its limitations: the ability to send multiple requests over a single connection. Over time, HTTP/1 usage decreased and is now an outdated protocol. On the other hand, HTTP/2 is now the main used protocol, and HTTP/3 is getting more popular for delivering static assets.

    For these reasons, Combine CSS becomes unnecessary. There are no performance benefits from using the Combine CSS feature with HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 protocols. What’s more, there’s even less reason to do any CSS optimization if you use the Remove Unused CSS feature, which is also compatible with the new feature.

    On top of that, as mentioned above, when enabling the new feature to LazyLoad CSS background images, the Combine CSS feature should not be activated. 

    That’s why Combine CSS will be automatically removed from the File Optimization tab for new users and customers updating to WP Rocket 3.14. 

    The Combine CSS files feature is to be removed
    The Combine CSS files feature is to be removed

    Wrapping up

    WP Rocket 3.15 comes with a new powerful feature to improve key performance metrics –including a Core Web Vitals one–, address crucial performance audits, and boost the PageSpeed Insights score. 

    LazyLoading CSS background images is another step towards easy and effective web performance optimization to make your website faster without any effort. You only need to tick a box to let the new feature do its optimization job – and you won’t find any other caching plugins on the market doing the same optimization automatically!

    It’s also time to let go of the Combine CSS Files feature. Web performance evolved alongside the HTTP protocol, and there was no need to keep it anymore. WP Rocket includes only the features essential to improve your website speed – simplicity and easiness are always at the heart of our product.

    Update WP Rocket to the new version right away, and let us know what you think in the comments!

    The post 3.15: Introducing LazyLoading CSS Background Images to Boost Performance appeared first on WP Rocket.

  • The 10 Web Performance Misconceptions

    At WP Rocket, our mission is to educate users about the importance of web performance while making it as simple and accessible as possible. It’s quite a challenge: web performance is not an easy topic, and optimizing a website to improve performance is even less easy to explain and understand. What’s more, finding reliable information is difficult – the topic is complex and sometimes subjective. 

    This article highlights some misleading concepts about what matters when identifying the key performance optimization actions to speed up a website. Keep reading, and you’ll find a list of the most common misconceptions we encountered. We’ll explain why they are incorrect and share how we tackle web performance challenges with our plugin.

    What Are the Most Common Web Performance Misconceptions?

    Let’s discover the misconceptions we consider more relevant regarding web performance optimization. 

    1. Delay JavaScript

    Optimizing JavaScript files is one of the most challenging web performance optimizations. It’s also one of the most impactful to improve performance and key metrics such as Core Web Vitals. In other words, you can’t avoid optimizing JavaScript if you want a fast website. One effective way to go is to delay the JS files that don’t need to be executed immediately. As a result, the page will load faster, and the browser will execute JavaScript only when needed by the user interaction. 

    The misconception is that all JS files should be delayed. The truth is that this will often hurt the user experience and might even break the site’s functionality. Critical JS should never be delayed, such as those related to the above-the-fold resources (e.g., menu) and the tracking scripts (e.g., Google Analytics). These resources must be available early in the page load to ensure a smooth user experience.

    It’s now easy to understand why knowing which JS files should be excluded from being delayed and how to do it is crucial.

    For instance, WP Rocket allows you to manage the Delay JS execution feature easily. The option makes it easy to delay JS – a key optimization task. On top, WP Rocket allows you to exclude JavaScript files both manually and thanks to the one-click exclusion released with our latest major version, WP Rocket 3.13.

    Delay JS execution - File optimization tab, WP Rocket
    Delay JS execution – File optimization tab, WP Rocket

    We asked Adam Silverstein, Developer Relations Engineer at Google, their take on always delaying JavaScript and its impact on performance. He confirms our view and adds: “Generally, for server-rendered sites like WordPress sites usually are, most JavaScript can be deferred unless it is required early on in the page cycle for some reason. An example is analytics scripts where you want to capture data as soon as possible: here, the async attribute is more appropriate. One potential risk with deferring scripts is that if other scripts or inline scripts depend on the deferred script (and are not deferred as well), the dependency can break”. 

    So, it’s time to look at the misconception about deferring JavaScript.

    2. Defer JavaScript

    Here, the misconception is that all JS can be deferred. 

    The truth is, deferring JavaScript is crucial as long as it respects dependencies. In other words, deferring JS without considering dependencies is not recommended.

    For example, an inline script using the jQuery library will need jquery.js to run before it can be executed without crashing. If jquery.js is deferred, the inline script won’t find jQuery declared and will prompt a console error jQuery is not defined, preventing the code from running, breaking the related feature, and potentially breaking the layout and the overall functioning of the page as well. 

    Adam Silverstein mentions a new WordPress script API proposal near to be released. It will help the deferring strategy by defining loading tactics and preventing dependency issues. 

    Adam explains: “In the proposed approach for core, we are handling the deferring cases automatically with the core approach to script strategy – including checking the dependent scripts are also deferrable and handling delayed execution of inline scripts that depend on a deferred script”.

    When it comes to JavaScript deferring, WP Rocket has a lot of automated exclusions to prevent conflicts. For instance, when Avada is enabled, WP Rocket automatically excludes the jQuery library and Google Maps external script.

    The new Script API will allow our plugin to extend the exclusions library further. As a result, it will be less and less likely that your website will break when deferring JavaScript. 

    3. Reduce Used CSS

    In addition to JavaScript optimization, reducing used CSS is one of the most effective ways to boost your website performance. There are two ways to manage such optimization:

    • Inlining CSS files, which means integrating CSS on the same page using a `style` tag.
    • Use separate external files.

    The misconception is that delivering the used CSS in separate files is always the best way to address such optimization.

    The truth is that inlining CSS is perfectly fine and has two important advantages from a performance and user experience standpoint:

    • It’s a faster process because the browser will only make a tiny request to check the freshness of the page. If the page has not changed, which is generally the case, the browser will serve a cached copy of the page. For this reason, inline Used CSS will improve performance: the browser won’t load and parse a CSS file but will directly process the inline CSS on the page.
    • Inlining all the page’s CSS prevents issues such as FOUC (Flash of unstyled content) and doesn’t impact user experience, as using the Critical Path CSS in addition to a separate file could do. To prevent other metrics from worsening, having the Critical Path CSS should be required when the Used CSS is delivered using a file.

    That’s why WP Rocket inlines CSS and allows anyone to take advantage of an advanced feature such as removing unused CSS with just a click:

    Remove unused CSS - WP Rocket
    Remove unused CSS – WP Rocket

    Once again, Adam Silverstein from Google shares our point of view. We asked him what’s the most effective way to deliver the used CSS. He says: “My expectation is that for smaller CSS sizes, at least, inlining will be faster by reducing the need to load the additional CSS file. The “penalty” for that may vary depending on conditions – for example, the device and network the user is using”. 

    4. Host Fonts Locally

    If you run a WordPress website, you may already know that hosting fonts locally can be another good choice for improving performance. Plus, hosting local fonts is essential to comply with the GDPR rules. 

    Regarding Google fonts, it’s important to control from where the files will be sent so they do not depend on Google Fonts CDN – especially if it doesn’t perform well for a large part of the audience. 

    A common misconception is that hosting them will automatically improve your website’s loading time. 

    The truth is that Google fonts will be faster only if displayed in the same zone where the visitor is. 

    If the website uses a CDN, Google fonts will be faster only if the CDN coverage is better than the Google Fonts’ – which strongly depends on the visitor’s location. 

    We ran tests to validate this assumption and found that hosted fonts were the least performant for distant visitors regarding Time to First Byte, a key metric to boost your website speed.

    This performance data is important because it will directly influence the LCP element if it’s a text using Google fonts.

    Hosted fonts test results
    Hosted fonts test results
    Google fonts CDN test results
    Google fonts CDN test results
    Cloudflare test results
    Cloudflare test results – Fonts

    The other misconception about hosting fonts locally is that WP Rocket cannot preload Google fonts. This is false: our plugin can preload Google fonts automatically when enabled by the Remove Unused CSS option. 

    5. Fetchpriority Resource Hint

    The fetch priority hint is an attribute that tells the browser the priority of resources to discover and download so that the page can load as fast as possible. Currently, its usage is still limited to a bit less than 70% of users worldwide.

    The misconception is that you should always use the fetchpriority resource hint. The truth is that resources hint may sound like a must-do, but it’s not as straightforward as it seems.

    While fetchpriority hint makes critical resources available in time, it can deteriorate performance if the resources are fetched without the right priority. This is a very complex performance optimization task – and it’s tough to implement it without testing or analyzing pages. 

    At the same time, the impact of this task on performance is limited to what can be automatically prioritized or deprioritized. 

    We listed a few examples to explain how fetchpriority depends on several factors.

    • Logo and LCP image: this is easy – these elements are obvious candidates with a high fetch priority.
    • Sliders: it starts getting tricky.

      A slider’s images above or near the fold will have a subjective fetching priority depending on whether they cause an issue.

      If the slider is near the fold but deemed critical to the user experience, its first image should be highly prioritized.

      If a slider is delayed, it is unnecessary to prioritize fetching its images, even if it’s above the fold.

    • CSS, JS, and third-party resources: only their respective developers can assess if they should be prioritized or deprioritized. And even with their input, and when mixing several plugins and resources, the fetching priority would be case-based. 

    You can see what we mean when saying resources hints are not as easy as you may suppose.

    That’s why WP Rocket doesn’t include such a feature yet, although fetchpriority can positively impact your website speed if used correctly. Rest assured, our plugin helps achieve optimal performance thanks to other powerful and advanced features.

    We also asked Google’s team what’s their take on using a high fetchpriority for all images above the fold and a low one for all images below the fold. 

    Adam Silverstein explains: “In general, the goal should be to add fetchpriority=high only to critical images because adding it to multiple images will generally undo the benefits. Typically you want the LCP image set with this attribute, but think carefully before using it on many other resources. This page is the best resource for understanding loading priority. In general, all images start with a low priority.  Images within the viewport start at “low” priority and then at layout time, as the browser realizes they are in the viewport, are boosted to “high”. By tagging it in markup using fetchpriority=”high”, they can start at “high” immediately and load much faster. If you tag too many images as a high priority, they will compete for the same resources. One possible exception would be trying to tag the LCP image for both desktop and mobile breakpoints (which could be a different image). The WebPageTest ‘experiments’ feature is a great way to test this”.

    Speaking of fetchpriority, it’s interesting to highlight that the Core Performance Team proposed to add the fetchpriority=”high” attribute to LCP images in WordPress core to enhance LCP performance. 

    Spoiler alert: we’ve been working on an automatic way to add the fetch priority on the LCP element, making it as easy as possible for our users to benefit from the option. You may see what we’re talking about in one of our next releases.

    6. Lazy Load Background Images

    Lazy loading is another important web performance optimization technique. It allows the browser to load images only when needed so that not all images are loaded simultaneously, and the page can be rendered and displayed quickly.

    That’s why lazy loading background images can spare requests for unnecessary images below the fold, thus improving performance. 

    The misconception is that background images added on internal CSS (`style` tag) and CSS files can be lazyloaded. The truth is that WordPress, lazyload libraries, and native lazyload don’t allow this optimization – which needs to be accurate, and it’s not as simple as it may seem.

    At WP Rocket, we’ve been working on a specific feature to make this optimization easy and automated while being precise.

    7. LCP Images vs. Above-the-fold Images 

    Speaking of lazy loading and the fetch priority attribute, another misconception is that everything above the fold should be set to a high value (fetchpriority=high).

    Adam Silverstein explains: “Fetchpriority optimizations should ideally be applied only to the LCP image. At the same time, all the above-the-fold images should avoid lazy loading”.

    And he adds an example: “Let’s say there are six above-the-fold images and one LCP image. Then, the best approach would be to omit the lazy loading from all the images and apply fetchpriority to the LCP image”.

    8. Exclude Above-The-Fold Images from Lazy Loading

    If you’re familiar with web performance optimization best practices, it’s likely you know that excluding above-the-fold images from lazy loading is a good way to speed up your website performance.

    This is partially a misconception, as it mainly depends on how the current tools handle it. 

    While excluding above-the fold-images can boost your website speed, it might result in skipping additional images from the lazy load if it’s not implemented for the images currently included above the fold. As a result, the page will load slower instead of the other way around. 

    Moreover, the number of images to exclude will usually differ from one viewport to another, making performance optimization more difficult to manage.

    Such optimization requires auditing to find accurate images to skip from lazy load. 

    The current solutions are not automated and are based on a ‘guess’ rather than getting the actual images to be excluded. That’s why we’ve been developing the easiest possible solution to allow anyone to tackle this performance optimization.

    We ran some tests and got interesting results. When implemented correctly, and excluding the exact number of above-the fold-images from lazy loading, it can improve metrics such as First Contentful Paint, Largest Contentful Paint, and Speed Index. Plus, it can address PageSpeed Insights audits such as Avoid enormous network payloads and Keep request count low and transfer sizes small.

    In the meantime, WP Rocket allows you to address it with a helper plugin.

    9. YouTube Iframe Preview Image

    You may be right if you think enabling the YouTube iframe preview image will boost your website speed. This solution avoids loading YouTube scripts and starts loading the video only if the user clicks the play button.

    Nonetheless, at this point of the article, you should be familiar with the concept of: it depends. 

    Implementing the YouTube iframe preview image to optimize performance won’t work for all websites. It might cause trouble if the parent element holding the video styles images in an unusable way. If so, the preview image won’t be displayed correctly and might need some additional CSS to undo the parent’s element conflicting style. 

    The iframe will likely load the same way it does since it will be re-injected once the preview image is clicked.

    We ran some tests and validated the assumption that self-hosting the YouTube preview image does not always give better results. Better performance data applies only to local audiences or if a CDN is being used. 

    Our tests show that YouTube CDN still performs best and has the lowest TTFB, influencing how fast the image is fetched.

    Considering this result is essential because such performance data influences the LCP element if the preview image is part of it.

    Cloudflare test results - CDN
    Cloudflare test results – CDN
    YouTube CDN test results
    YouTube CDN test results
    Self-hosted test results
    Self-hosted test results

    10. Using a CDN

    The last misconception we want to cover is constantly using a CDN to improve performance. While it’s true that a CDN will make your website faster if your audience is worldwide, it’s not correct to say that it will always help your website’s performance.

    It depends on the visitor’s location and the distance between the user and the assets requested.

    Let’s give you a couple of examples to make it clearer.

    • Local audience: You run a local business in France, and your website is already hosted on a local server. Using a CDN that doesn’t have a PoP (Points of Presence) in France or close to it will worsen the user’s experience, as the page and its assets will be shipped from a distant data center, let’s say, New York. On the other hand, the distance will be shorter if you just use the origin server.
    • Region or worldwide audience: You run a regional business across Europe. Picking a CDN with a strong Europe presence will give better results vs. picking a CDN that has only one or two PoPs in Europe. 

    In short, when picking a CDN, you must ensure their PoPs coverage matches the audience’s locations.

    Wrapping up

    Web performance optimization is not easy at all – and this article proves it once again. Hopefully, it has shed some light on some misconceptions about key topics such as optimizing JavaScript and CSS and lazy loading. 

    At WP Rocket, we strive to make our performance plugin the easiest while offering the most advanced features to boost your website performance. We know what we’re talking about and will always try to explain it as simply as possible. In the meantime, try WP Rocket and see how easy and powerful it is!

    The post The 10 Web Performance Misconceptions appeared first on WP Rocket.

  • WP Rocket Is Turning 10: It’s Been a Long Journey So Far

    Some milestones show how far you’ve gone, and WP Rocket’s 10th birthday is one of them. That’s right: our plugin is already turning 10! It’s an important anniversary, and we want to celebrate this special occasion by reflecting on what we achieved during this long –yet quick– time. How has web performance evolved since 2013? And how has WP Rocket faced the most crucial challenges over time to making websites faster while keeping it as easy as possible for everyone?

    Keep reading: you’ll get answers to these questions and learn more about our company and its story.

    How WP Rocket Evolved Alongside Web Performance Needs

    Web performance and WP Rocket evolved together in these 10 years. Things changed, and we adapted accordingly. Ready to go over the most important events?

    The First Years

    When we launched WP Rocket in 2013, the main goal was brave and ambitious: we wanted to offer a different caching plugin. Some caching plugins were already in the market. However, we weren’t concerned about WP Rocket not being the first one. We wanted to set a new standard for performance optimization, not just create a copy of something already available.

    This approach allowed us to introduce some features in the market for the first time – such options now seem obvious, but believe us: 10 years ago, you could not take them for granted.

    First and foremost, we decided to automatically enable the caching option when the plugin was activated. Allowing customers to turn it off has never been an option. The reason was simple: you could uninstall the plugin if you no longer wanted it.

    Here’s a screenshot of a pretty old WP Rocket interface – one of the first ones in English:

    WP Rocket 2.1
    WP Rocket 2.1

    We also applied 80% of web performance best practices by default and adopted a “Decisions, not options” approach to making the plugin as straightforward as possible for everyone – beginner customers included. Rather than giving plenty of difficult options, we decided what were the best features to improve performance. For instance, WP Rocket has always automatically enabled features such as page and browser caching, mobile cache, GZIP compression, and Cache Preloading.

    It goes without saying, Preload cache has been included since the first version. Having a caching plugin and waiting for visitors to generate the cached version didn’t make sense to us.

    Compatibility has also been another important aspect since the first release. In fact, compatibility goes hand in hand with simplicity – one of our three pillars alongside support and stability. 

    That’s why the first WP Rocket version was already compatible with e-commerce and multilingual websites. Our plugin allowed the automatic cart exclusion from the cache and the ability to clear the cache by language or for all languages. 

    Regarding compatibility, we also offered a seamless experience with as many hosting services as possible since day 1. Hosting is key for performance optimization, and we ensured our plugin would work perfectly with most of them.

    After ten years, it’s no coincidence that WP Rocket is the only caching plugin accepted and compatible with 99% of hosts such as Kinsta and WP Engine.

    Since the beginning, everything we did had one goal: make WP Rocket the easiest caching plugin on the market.

    It’s important to highlight that PageSpeed Insights wasn’t an important web performance tool in 2013. At that time, users would use various tools to monitor their web performance and focus on improving their loading time.

    That’s why loading time was also our priority during the first years.

    The Rise of PageSpeed Insights and Mobile Devices

    Over the following years, the PageSpeed Insights performance score started to gain more relevance. The performance grade was something users wanted to optimize. While we have always stated that loading time was the way to measure the real website’s speed, we recognized that we had to consider this metric for our customers. 

    In addition, mobile devices started to become more popular, and mobile performance optimization wasn’t an option anymore. At the same time, making a website faster from a mobile device is not exactly the same as from a desktop – and we had to introduce the most effective features to make web performance optimization successful for all devices.

    Here’s why between 2017 and 2020, we released some major releases that tackled crucial performance optimizations for JS and CSS files and improved the PageSpeed Insights score for desktop and mobile. 

    For example, in 2017, WP Rocket 2.7 released the Critical Path CSS and Defer JS features for the first time. In 2020, WP Rocket 3.7 introduced the Delay JavaScript execution option. 

    While these features have gone through several enhancements since then, they are still the most powerful options to boost your website speed and optimize key metrics – which brings us to the next chapter of the performance evolution.

    Introducing Core Web Vitals 

    In 2021, Google released the latest SEO ranking factor, including Core Web Vitals as performance metrics to assess the page’s user experience.

    The introduction of such important KPIs for speed and SEO performance made us focus on features and enhancements to make it easier to optimize their grades.

    Keeping this goal in mind, we released WP Rocket 3.9, the major version introducing the Remove Unused CSS feature – a game-changer option to optimize CSS and address the related PageSpeed Insights audit. At that time, the feature was in beta, and we knew there was room for improvement in terms of simplicity and easiness of use.

    So, in 2022, we released WP Rocket 3.11 with a new-brand RUCSS feature revamped from three angles: availability, performance, and compatibility to make it simpler and more efficient.

    However, Core Web Vitals have not been the only aspect making the last years more challenging for web performance optimization. Nowadays, pages and resource requests are heavier and must be optimized accordingly. It takes effort and deep expertise unless you can use a powerful, easy tool like ours.

    You can take a look and see that page weight increased by 300% for mobile in the last 10 years:

    HTTP Archive Data, HTTP Requests

    The same goes for JS and CSS bytes – they increased by 400% from mobile, making their optimization more and more necessary:

    HTTP Archive Data, JS Bytes
    HTTP Archive Data, CSS Bytes

    Web performance has changed over the years, and so has WP Rocket. It’s never been “just another caching plugin”, and now it’s a performance plugin that tackles and addresses the most complex and difficult performance issues – way beyond caching.

    How WP Rocket Support Has Always Been a Pillar

    As mentioned above, when we launched WP Rocket, we stuck to three pillars: simplicity, support, and stability. 

    Support has always been one of the greatest assets of our plugin, recognized by our customers since the beginning:

    WP Rocket has always been a premium plugin also because we wanted to provide customers with dedicated, outstanding, and in-house support. 

    Since 2013, our customer support team has grown massively. In the very beginning, we hired one person to take care of our customers – and she’s been with us since then! 

    Nowadays, our team is made up of 18 people across several countries and regions.

    The organization has changed to improve the workflow and ensure tickets are addressed effectively in the shortest time. It’s not only a matter of ensuring a fast response time. Even more importantly, we’ve always wanted to provide Rocketeers with the right answer to solve their issues. In other words, quality has been –and still is– the North Star for customer support.

    George Stathopoulos, our Customer Support Manager, explains: “Our commitment to quality support means that we don’t just meet expectations; we exceed them. Going the extra mile is ingrained in our DNA, ensuring that every interaction reflects the exceptional service we pride ourselves on”.

    Preserving quality no matter how much web performance keeps getting more complex means constantly improving the technical expertise among our teammates. That’s why WP Rocket customer support is trained to keep up with the latest performance challenges. The team is now split into tiers according to the complexity of the tickets we received to manage the workflow more efficiently while preserving the same quality.

    We also offer top-notch and updated technical documentation to let as many customers as possible manage WP Rocket’s settings and potential doubts on their own. This is also a way to educate users on web performance topics, reflecting our company mission.

    George adds: “Support is not just about providing solutions. It’s about building bridges, extending a helping hand, and illuminating paths for others to thrive”.

    Wrapping Up

    This decade has been exciting for WP Rocket – it’s always been about developing the best caching and performance plugin rather than being the first one. We wanted to set a new standard for web performance optimization, and the results say we did it right.

    More than 3 million websites are now in orbit with WP Rocket – our plugin is the third most popular one worldwide and the first premium one.

    These amazing achievements are possible thanks to two aspects that have always made a difference, and they keep making it: powerful and game-changer product updates and knowledgeable and reliable customer support.

    Do you want to share your experience with our plugin during these years? Let us know in the comments!

    The post WP Rocket Is Turning 10: It’s Been a Long Journey So Far appeared first on WP Rocket.

  • 3.14: Cloudflare Plugin & WP Rocket Are Fully Compatible

    If you run a WordPress website and manage several plugins, you know how important compatibilities are to avoid issues. The more a plugin is popular, the more important it is to ensure full compatibility and synchronization. 

    While WP Rocket already ensures compatibility with the Cloudflare plugin, 100% automatic synchronization wasn’t still there. Our new major release focuses on filling this gap, perfectly integrating the two tools and making performance optimization smoother for Cloudflare customers.

    Say hello to WP Rocket 3.14! This new major version addresses only those Rocketeers using Cloudflare, but don’t worry. 3.14 comes only a few weeks after 3.13, and we’ve already been working on the next big release, which will address everyone using our performance plugin.

    Let’s discover what 3.14 is about, and keep reading until the last section – there’s important information about the requirements needed to keep WP Rocket working on your websites!

    What’s the Cloudflare Plugin?

    Cloudflare is a global network ensuring a secure and reliable network, and it offers an Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) plugin to distribute content worldwide. If you have an international audience, you will likely use a CDN such as Cloudflare –and its APO plugin–  to improve performance, regardless of your visitors’ location.

    Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) plugin - WordPress repository
    Automatic Platform Optimization (APO) plugin – WordPress repository

    What Does This Compatibility Mean?

    WP Rocket 3.14 automatically enables cache purge synchronization when the official Cloudflare plugin is activated. You don’t need to do anything: the plugin will handle the synchronization automatically and deliver flawless integration. 

    If the full synchronization is working correctly, you’ll get the following message:

    The message confirming the Cloudflare plugin works with full compatibility
    The message confirming the Cloudflare plugin works with full compatibility

    You may receive a different message in WP Rocket’s dashboard if the synchronization is incomplete. In this case, the following notifications inform you about the actions to enable complete synchronization.

    • If the Separate Cache for Mobile Devices is enabled on WP Rocket and not on Cloudflare, you’ll get the following non-dismissable warning message. Please note that action is required from your side:
    Non-dismissable warning message - WP Rocket 3.14
     Non-dismissable warning message – WP Rocket 3.14
    • If the cache by device type is enabled on Cloudflare and not WP Rocket, you’ll get the following dismissable message. In this case, you can take action or not:
    Dismissable warning message - WP Rocket 3.14
    Dismissable warning message – WP Rocket 3.14

    Wrapping up

    3.14 comes with full synchronization between WP Rocket and Cloudflare, allowing a simpler integration between the two tools.

    An important note about updating WP Rocket to 3.14: from this version, you must upgrade your WordPress version to 5.8+ and your PHP version to 7.3+, otherwise, the plugin won’t work anymore.

    Do you use the Cloudflare plugin? Let us know your experience with 3.14 in the comments!

    The post 3.14: Cloudflare Plugin & WP Rocket Are Fully Compatible appeared first on WP Rocket.

  • 3.13: Making Delay JavaScript Easier Than Ever

    At WP Rocket, we know how addressing some performance issues can be challenging. Release after release, we do everything possible to make it easier for everyone.

    Optimizing JavaScript is a key performance optimization task – yet it can be complicated to manage while avoiding any issues. For instance, delaying JavaScript is an effective way to make your website faster. But there’s something to keep in mind: some JS should be loaded immediately to ensure the page works properly and users can interact. 

    Knowing which JS to load first is not always straightforward, even with an easy feature like Delay JavaScript. Many of you asked us to make the option simpler, and we listened.

    You can guess it: WP Rocket 3.13 focuses on enhancing the Delay JavaScript option, immediately making performance optimization easier and more efficient.

    Say hello to our new release, watch our video, or keep reading to discover what it entails!

    What’s Delay JavaScript Execution?

    All websites contain many JS files – essential to making you interact with any content on the page you’re browsing.

    At the same time, JavaScript files can slow down the page’s loading time, thus delivering a bad user experience and making users leave your website. Therefore, you must ensure JavaScripts are only loaded when needed. That’s what the Delay JavaScript feature does: it delays the JS files loading until a user interaction, such as scrolling or clicking on a button.

    It goes without saying: Delay JavaScript is one of the most powerful options to tackle JS issues and optimize JS files. Nonetheless, not all files should be delayed. Some are in the viewport –the visible area on a user’s screen– and should be executed as soon as possible. For this reason, excluding some JS files from being delayed is important – and it’s not always easy.

    How WP Rocket 3.13 Makes Delay JS Simpler

    You can see why WP Rocket 3.13 is an important step toward easier and more effective JS optimization. The new release aims to help users easily exclude scripts that should not be delayed.

    Let’s say you enable the Delay JavaScript option. As a result, your slider can’t be loaded until a user interaction, but you need it to work right away. In the past, to solve such issues, you needed to go to our documentation page, identify the JavaScript to exclude, and paste it in the text area under the Delay JavaScript execution feature of WP Rocket – spending time and effort.

    Thanks to the 3.13 enhancement, such exclusions are now included in the UI. You only need to check the checkbox according to what you must exclude.

    WP Rocket 3.13 comes with another important benefit, too. Adding new compatibilities or fixing existing ones is now straightforward. WP Rocket applies all changes immediately – you won’t need to update the plugin or check the documentation for updated exclusions. 

    Introducing the New Delay JavaScript UI

    WP Rocket 3.13 has a simpler UI that makes it intuitive to exclude the JS files. 

    Thanks to a more readable and easier solution, it’s straightforward to improve a website’s performance and not create any issues from a user experience standpoint.

    The new UI contains an option to flag three types of JS files: Analytics and Ads, Plugins, and Themes. 

    Delay JavaScript execution – Accordions

    The plugin and themes accordions will automatically retrieve the active plugins and themes installed on your website. In addition, the analytics accordion will list the most popular tools you may use.

    Let’s say your website uses Google Analytics and Stripe, and it’s built with Astra. You’ll see these options listed in the checklist. Flagging them will be enough to exclude such scripts from being delayed. As simple as that!

    Flagging the JS files

    You’ll always find the script option, allowing you to specify additional JavaScript files and exclude them from being delayed.

    Excluded JavaScript files option

    Wrapping up

    WP Rocket 3.13 makes crucial JS optimization easier, allowing you to take care of your website performance in a few clicks and save time and effort.

    Do you want to see how effective it is to exclude JS files from being delayed and ensure your website properly works while loading as fast as possible?

    Update WP Rocket to the new version immediately, and let us know what you think in the comments!

    The post 3.13: Making Delay JavaScript Easier Than Ever appeared first on WP Rocket.

  • Announcing WP Rocket’s New Pricing

    At WP Media – the company behind WP Rocket, Imagify, and RocketCDN – we care about transparent communication. That’s why we want to announce we’ve decided to increase the license prices for WP Rocket.

    This change will be effective in the upcoming days, impacting new licenses and upgrades.

    An important note: All existing customers are being grandfathered and will keep their renewal price.

    Agathe Medvedieff, Chief Marketing Officer, explains why current customers won’t see an increase in their renewal prices:

    Grandfathering our existing customers despite the inflation pressure was essential to us. They trusted us for a while now and helped us shape a great product with their feedback and encouragement.

    Let’s see in detail how the new prices work.

    What Are the New Prices?

    New customers will pay their licenses as follows:

    • Single license (one website): $59/year. 
    • Plus license (three websites): $119/year.
    • Infinite license (unlimited websites): $299/year.
    The new prices for licenses
    The new prices for licenses

    The prices of upgrades have also changed as they are the difference in price between the current license and the one customers are upgrading to. Here are the new prices: 

    • Upgrade from Single to Plus: $60/year.
    • Upgrade from Single to Infinite: $240/year.
    • Upgrade from Plus to Infinite: $180/year.

    Why We Increased Our Pricing

    There are two important reasons why we decided to increase the price for all the licenses.

    The first and most important one is related to our plugin’s quality. If you’re already a customer, you know how easy and powerful WP Rocket is to speed up a website’s performance, optimize key metrics such as Core Web Vitals, and improve the PageSpeed performance score. 

    The last time we increased WP Rocket’s price was in February 2019. Since then, we have released game-changer performance features that dramatically improved thousands of websites’ loading times. 

    The typology of our features has also evolved to offer cloud-based options like the Remove Unused CSS, which is crucial to enhance performance – and we aim to add more cloud-based solutions in the future.

    You can see how the price increase reflects the tremendous evolution of the plugin and will help its future growth.

    It’s not only about the features, though. WP Rocket also provides top-notch support – the TrustPilot reviews speak for themselves. Customer support is made up of highly professional and passionate people that ensure a fast and effective response, which is why it’s very much appreciated and praised. 

    Agathe says:

    As a customer, seeing a price increase is always frustrating. But we believe setting a fair price/performance ratio for our product is key for both our users and the company. Providing a great value proposition in a sustainable way is part of our core commitments.

    Another reason involves the rising cost for our company. Worldwide inflation isn’t a secret and has impacted us on two levels.

    On the one hand, we’ve been affected by higher prices for maintaining our technology infrastructure and the server-based features to ensure all WP Rocket features work efficiently. 

    On the other hand, our employees have also been affected by a rising cost of living. For this reason, we decided to increase salaries to help everyone working at WP Media keep up with the inflation rate. The salary increase is not the only perk and benefit of working at WP Media – if you want to take advantage of working at a full-remote company that takes care of their employees, check out our job openings.

    Wrapping Up

    Announcing a price increase is tough. We hope you understand why we made this decision and how we wanted to take care of the Rocketeers who have trusted us so far. 

    We believe WP Rocket continues to offer great value to everyone wanting to speed up their websites easily. We hope to see your website in orbit soon, alongside other 2,8 million ones!

    The post Announcing WP Rocket’s New Pricing appeared first on WP Rocket.

  • WP Rocket 3.12: Revamping Preload Cache to Improve Reliability and UX

    Delivering a great user experience is more crucial than ever – you’re probably aware of it. Do you also know how to make a great first impression when new users visit your website? The easiest way is to take advantage of the preload cache option.

    And preload cache is exactly at the center of our new major release. Say hello to WP Rocket 3.12! Our latest version focuses on enhancing the Preload Cache feature, making it more reliable and effective in improving user experience.

    Keep reading and learn what WP Rocket 3.12 entails for your site. You’ll discover why we decided to work on Preload Cache and how your site will benefit from enabling the new option right away.

    Read until the end of the blog post – there’s also an announcement all Rocketeers were waiting for!

    Introducing the New Preload Cache Feature

    Let’s take a step back and understand why preload is important for enhancing user experience and what’s the difference between cache and preload cache.

    When you enable WP Rocket without the Preload Cache option, users landing on your site for the first time will experience a pretty slow page. That’s normal because it’s just the first session, and the pages are not cached yet. In fact, the cache will be generated after the first visit. So, the same pages will load much faster during the second and subsequent sessions. 

    What happens when you take advantage of the Preload Cache? In this case, users will get a faster page as soon as they visit the website for the first time. That’s possible because the preload cache option will simulate a visit to that page before any user session. So, when users land on the same page for the first time, they will immediately get the cached version. That’s helpful, especially because a bad first impression on your site could mean that users will leave and never return. A cached version also allows search engine bots to visit the pages quicker and improve page indexation and crawling budget.

    Can you see why Preload Cache is a great asset to improve user experience and optimize SEO performance?

    Of course, we do! That’s why we focused on revamping the Preload Cache feature for WP Rocket 3.12. The previous Preload Cache option didn’t provide the most effective results because the process could be a bit slow or incomplete – meaning that not all URLs would be preloaded. As a result, some pages could still be too slow when visited for the first time.

    And there was something more. Looking at some usage data about WP Rocket 3.11, we noticed that not all our customers would take advantage of such a useful feature.

    On the one hand, 89% of Rocketeers enabled the Activate Preloading option to preload only the homepage and the links included on the page. 

    The old Activate Preloading option 
    The old Activate Preloading option 

    On the other hand, only 48% also activated the Sitemap-based cache preloading option – which would fetch the sitemap and preload almost all URLs.

    The old Sitemap-based cache preloading option
    The old Sitemap-based cache preloading option

    We realized there was room for improvement for the feature itself and the adoption from our users. Preload greatly affects user experience and can impact websites, starting from their conversion rate.

    We aimed to make the Preload Cache option easier, more reliable, and more powerful when providing a better UX to anyone browsing our users’ websites.

    You can watch our video or jump to the next section to find out what we achieved.

    What Are the 3.12 Preload Improvements and Changes?

    The biggest 3.12 enhancement entails the way the feature works. When enabled, the Preload Cache option will always preload all URLs. This is possible because WP Rocket automatically looks for one of the most popular sitemaps so that it can preload all pages by default. If the plugin can’t find any sitemap, it will use the WordPress built-in sitemap as a fallback.

    In short, WP Rocket will always find a way to grab all the URLs and preload them. 

    Moreover, the URLs and data are now stored in a database. In other words, there isn’t anything that could block the preload process or slow it down –  it’s an asynchronous process running in the background.

    The other change involves what you’ll find in the Preload tab. The Preload Cache feature now includes only one option to preload all the website’s URLs. So, you don’t need to tick two boxes for the homepage and the sitemap anymore. Instead, just flag the Preload Cache feature, and the plugin will take care of everything.

    The new Preload Cache option – WP Rocket 3.12

    You’ll now get a different message. In the current notice, there is no counter. This is because preload is supposed to be ongoing, so no counter will be accurate. Every time a page’s cache is deleted, it should be preloaded automatically.

    The Preload message 

    You’ll also see new messages in the menu and the dashboard tab. 

    You won’t find “Preload cache” in the menu anymore.

    Old Preload Cache button - Menu
    Old Preload Cache button – Menu

    In the dashboard, the option about Preload Cache is also gone.

    Old Quick Actions - Dashboard
    Old Quick Actions – Dashboard

    Here’s what you’ll find instead.

    • If Preload is enabled, you’ll see a “Clear and preload cache” button in the menu. 
    The new button when Preload Cache is enabled – Menu

    If you go to the dashboard tab and look for the Quick Actions button, you’ll find the same option to Clear and Preload Cache.

    The new button when Preload Cache is enabled – Dashboard
    • If the Preload is disabled, the button will only say “Clear Cache”.
    The new button when Preload Cache is not enabled – Menu

    You’ll find the same “Clear Cache” button in the dashboard tab.

    The new button when Preload Cache is not enabled – Dashboard

    What Will Happen to Your Old Preload Cache Option?

    You may wonder what happens to your existing option once you update your WP Rocket version to 3.12.

    That’s easy. If you had at least one of the old preload features activated in 3.11, you’d get the feature enabled when updating to 3.12. Of course, we highly encourage you to activate the Preload Cache feature if you previously didn’t do it.

    The more websites using WP Rocket 3.12 with Preload Cache enabled, the better. As explained, the option will provide a better user experience to all users landing on your websites for the first time – and that’s what we would like to see more and more!

    Why Your Site Performance Will Benefit From the New Preload Cache

    We’re glad we achieved all the goals we had in mind when we decided to work on enhancing the Preload feature. And here’s why you should enable the revamped option right away.

    1. You’ll benefit from complete and reliable cache preloading. As mentioned above, the feature will always preload all the URLs. It doesn’t matter what happens to the cache – for instance, if it’s deleted. WP Rocket will always have all the information stored in the database. As a result, no matter what, the cache will be available and provide users with pages loading fast from the first session. 

      The plugin will keep the same compatibilities with the following sitemaps: All-in-one SEO, Yoast, Rank Math, SEOPress, and the SEO Framework. In addition, there will always be a fallback to WordPress built-in in case there would not be any sitemap to crawl.

    1. You’ll get the easiest Preload Cache ever. Now you only have one option to flag to preload all your website’s pages — no need to worry about anything else.
    1. You’ll provide your new users with a better first impression. A great user experience is essential for conversion rate – just to mention one of the reasons why visitors should enjoy the best possible experience on your website. Hopefully, the revamped feature will allow more and more users to enjoy our Rocketeers’ sites.

    Remove Unused CSS: Goodbye, Beta Version!

    That’s right: WP Rocket 3.12 comes with the finalized Remove Unused CSS. This powerful feature now works completely well, and it was time to remove the Beta mention for good. 

    Remove Unused CSS is one of the most powerful WP Rocket features. It makes it easy to tackle CSS optimization, improve Core Web Vitals and boost the PageSpeed Insights score. Don’t take our words for granted – enable the option and see it yourself!

    Remove Unused CSS - File Optimization
    Remove Unused CSS – File Optimization

    Wrapping up

    Are you ready to try the new Preload Cache feature that comes with WP Rocket 3.12?

    You’ll get your website’s pages cached and fast for all new users. A great first impression is essential to let visitors browse your site, enjoy their experience and return.

    Preload Cache is a no-brainer option. Thanks to WP Rocket 3.12, you need just one click to activate it. The icing on the cake is that the new major release also comes with removing the Beta version for the Remove Unused CSS feature – one of the most effective options to improve your site performance easily.

    Give it a try, and let us know your experience in the comments!

    The post WP Rocket 3.12: Revamping Preload Cache to Improve Reliability and UX appeared first on WP Rocket.

  • How WEBK SEO Improved Their Clients’ Performance and Conversions with WP Rocket

    Do you manage many websites simultaneously and want to improve their web performance easily and quickly? Even better: do you run a web agency, and your clients keep asking you how they can optimize their Core Web Vitals and PageSpeed Insights score – and you don’t have enough time to work on manual implementations? You’ll be glad to know that the solution to your performance optimization issues can be quicker and much less stressful than you think.

    WEBK SEO is a digital marketing agency focused on SEO and web performance. They have many clients, from eCommerce to editorial and corporate sites. Of course, all clients need a blazing-fast site. Keep reading and discover how WEBK SEO delivered outstanding web performance results and helped their clients grow their businesses – yes, we talk about conversion rate, too!

    Everyone Wants (and Needs) a Fast Website

    Bernardo Klock is the WEBK SEO founder. He starts explaining what business success looks like for his company.

    He says: “WEBK SEO offers speed optimization and SEO services. Our company’s success means helping clients achieve great SEO and speed optimization results – and not just for the sake of it. We succeed every time clients get a fast website that increases the number of leads and sales.”

    He goes on: “Nobody likes to browse on a slow website. It’s annoying and affects the conversion rate. Depending on the niche of our customer’s business, we can see a concrete improvement in the bounce rate once the site gets faster. 

    When we ask users what they liked about visiting a website on a list of ten options, speed is always one of the top three answers. Customer benefit is the main reason to make sites faster – it’s even more important than getting a better ranking on Google.”

    What Does it Take to Optimize Multiple Sites?

    Web performance optimization is not straightforward. If you want to optimize websites at a large scale manually, you should have strong technical knowledge – or you should hire developers, as WEBK SEO did at first. Bernardo explains: “When we needed some help to optimize our websites’ clients, we used to hire freelancers. However, it wasn’t the most convenient solution, and we started to look for the best caching plugin to fine-tune the performance optimization on our own”.

    At this point, Bernardo and his team did what everyone usually does: they started trying all free caching plugins out there. Rings a bell? 

    Bernardo says: “Some plugins were even pretty good, but we realized that a paid option could give us the extra gas to deliver better performance to our clients. We are a well-established company selling professional services, so why not buy the best plugin to deliver the most outstanding results?”.

    So, WEBK SEO started to look for the best caching plugin for WordPress. And the team came across WP Rocket.

    The first thing the agency did was to test the WP Rocket homepage. According to Bernardo: “If you test the WP Rocket homepage, you’ll see an outstanding result. It’s lightning-fast – and that’s impressive. We realized that WP Rocket site was blazing-fast also thanks to their plugin and that we could replicate a similar performance on our website”. 

    WP Rocket homepage - Source
    WP Rocket homepage – Source

    Bernard admits: “At first, I wondered if WP Rocket would be like the other plugins in terms of settings and results. Nonetheless, we decided to give it a try. And we were right. Since the beginning, WP Rocket has been a superior solution to anything else we have tried. It quickly brought better results, and we got outstanding performance results. We were amazed by such a complete solution in terms of UX, settings, and support – all of these contributed to the great outcomes”.

    What Do Great Results Mean for an Agency?

    For starters, WEBK SEO realized they no longer needed to hire developer freelancers. 

    “A tool like WP Rocket gets the job done”, continues Bernardo. “The plugin is easy and provides the best results even if you don’t have any technical knowledge. That’s the magic behind WP Rocket. Thanks to its powerful features and amazing customer support, we can achieve great results without finding the right developer – saving time and money!”.

    Even more importantly, the results on clients’ websites were amazing.

    Here’s what Bernardo tells us about one of his clients: “A client in a niche industry had a very slow website. After optimizing performance with WP Rocket, the conversion rate increased by 16%, and the bounce rate reduced from 77% to 35%. That’s a huge improvement!”

    And there’s more.

    “For another client in the medical products wholesale niche, we launched an optimized website version using WP Rocket. As a result, the bounce rate dropped from 67% to 49%. Such improvement positively impacted the number of quotes generated online – there was a 6% increase in lead generation right away”.

    Bernardo adds: “Depending on the niche, you’ll get a greater or smaller impact – in any case, you’ll see a clear performance improvement. Using WP Rocket on any new website project is always a good idea. There’s no doubt that WP Rocket is helping us to deliver super-fast and optimized websites that convert better”.

    WP Rocket is the perfect caching plugin for agencies that need to deliver excellent results at scale – and quickly. 

    On the one hand, the plugin helps you save time because you can optimize websites on a large scale. Plus, you can export your settings to apply the same set of optimizations to multiple websites in the blink of an eye.

    On the other hand, it also allows you to save money because you don’t need to hire developers.

    On top of that, clients are amazed by the performance improvements they can get – which positively impact conversion rate and other key business metrics.

    Powerful Features, Easiness, and Great Customer Support All Together

    Bernardo continues: “WP Rocket is the best cache plugin on the market and the most complete in terms of what you need to get the best results in performance. Together with other tools like Oxygen Builder, AssetCleanup, and Cloudflare, WP Rocket is part of our secret weapon to easily boost the speed and performance of our clients’ websites”.

    Some key features made a difference for WEBK SEO.

    According to Bernardo, Remove Unused CSS, Load JavaScript Deferred, and Delay JavaScript execution were the biggest features that impacted that “last mile” goal. 

    Here’s the example of the WEBK SEO homepage after WP Rocket’s optimization:

    WEBK SEO Homepage - Source
    WEBK SEO Homepage – Source

    Bernardo also shared the before and after results with GTmetrix:

    GTmetrix score before using WP Rocket GTmetrix score after using WP Rocket

    Bernardo explains that two files were delaying the page loading, and the team was fighting against them with little results. He says: “The Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources message at Google’s PageSpeed Insights was hurting our pride! WP Rocket helped us defer and delay the files and get the awesome results we have now. And it was really easy”.

    💡 Load JS deferred and Delay JS execution are key features to optimize JavaScript files and address crucial PageSpeed Insights recommendations, such as reducing JS execution time and removing render-blocking resources.

    🚀 If you want to tackle CSS optimization and its render-blocking resources, the Remove Unused CSS feature is what you need.

    In addition to such powerful features, Bernardo also highlights WP Rocket’s easiness: “WP Rocket is simple to set up. Plus, everything inside the admin panel is so well explained and designed that it makes it very easy to use. If a problem shows up, and we struggle to fix it, your support team is always ready to help – and it makes a great difference, too”.

    Support is the last essential point that makes WP Rocket the best option on the market: “The value of paying for a cache plugin today is also about support and the quality of results. Your Support amazed us with the fast responses and the team’s knowledge. We’ve always got a fast and straightforward response. Such customer service showed us the knowledge of your staff, which is what we need from a partner”.

    A message to Other Digital Marketing Agencies

    Lastly, we ask Bernardo what he would say to any other web agency facing the same web performance challenges. He explains two things matter the most when a digital marketing agency chooses its tools: easiness and reliable customer support.

    “Our company is an example of how you can get better results not only because of the powerful plugin per se but also because of customer support. Only a paid plugin with a team of experts can assist you like a PRO – and we need fast support from experts. We need to deliver better results to our customers. 

    Besides great support, WP Rocket is the perfect solution to achieve performance goals easily. In a digital marketing agency, easiness is also key because we don’t have developers. That’s why WP Rocket is the best choice in the market, hands down.”

    Want to see how WP Rocket is powerful for yourself? Give it a try right now! You can always count on our 100% money-back guarantee. Although we don’t think you’ll ever want one, we’ll gladly provide a refund if you request it within 14 days of purchase.

    The post How WEBK SEO Improved Their Clients’ Performance and Conversions with WP Rocket appeared first on WP Rocket.

  • Yes, Your WordPress Site Can Deliver Outstanding Web Performance: Here’s Why (and How)

    It’s all over the industry news: WordPress has lost 0.4% market share since February. While the percentage is small and doesn’t change anything for real, the WordPress community has discussed the reasons for this drop. Among the culprits, there’s the assumption that WordPress sites don’t perform as well as other CMS speed-wise – at least when looking at aggregate data. 

    At WP Rocket, we deeply care about educating users on achieving better web performance and making it easier for everyone – and that’s why we want to share our point of view on the matter. For starters, we think it’s nonsense to compare WordPress performance to other CMS because there are several variables to consider that make it unfair and misleading. 

    The truth is, WordPress can deliver excellent web performance. In our opinion, this is not why market share is slightly declining. 

    The difference between WordPress and other CMS lies in the actions you are required to do on your own to improve your site speed. These steps are not necessarily complex and can be done in a few clicks according to your specific needs. Yet, they add some complexity to the overall experience of WordPress.

    In this article, you’ll understand what makes WP different from other CMS and why saying that WordPress can’t deliver excellent performance is inaccurate. Plus, you’ll learn how to make the most of the WordPress site for performance. 

    Debunking 4 Misconceptions About WordPress Performance

    When it comes to WordPress performance, there are some common wrong assumptions. Let’s start by clearing them up.

    1. WordPress can’t deliver excellent performance for complex and high-traffic sites such as eCommerce

    It’s not true. Performance hugely depends on the hosting, the page builder, and the plugins you choose. It doesn’t matter how many visitors your site gets every day or the type of site you have – get the right things in place, and you’ll achieve the results you want. 

    2. Plugins: the more, the better for performance

    This is also not true. You don’t need many plugins to make your site faster. It’s quite the opposite: you should carefully choose what to install to prevent your site from dealing with many JS-based plugins and slowing down. Do you even have a slider? Then you should read our article on the bad performance practices.

    3. WordPress doesn’t perform well on mobile devices

    Mobile performance depends on the theme – you should choose a responsive one. It doesn’t have anything to do with WordPress itself. Simple as that.

    4. WordPress doesn’t include a CDN as default, which makes the site slower

    First things first: CDN is necessary if you have a worldwide audience. Otherwise, you don’t even need it. Either way, installing a CDN can be easy and hassle-free. Once you get it, there won’t be any difference between your site on WordPress and another CMS.

    Now that we explained which ideas about WordPress and performance are wrong, let’s see why WordPress is not like other website building platforms.

    What Makes WordPress Performance Different from Other CMS

    As mentioned in the introduction, comparing WordPress performance to other CMS is inaccurate because there are several factors to consider, and looking at aggregate data can be misleading.

    First and foremost, WordPress is chosen for all types of sites, including tiny ones that don’t even care about performance. This is the first key point to keep in mind. 

    As you can see from the CMS distribution, only 13% of WordPress sites are among the top 10k sites – the ones that get the highest traffic volume.

    CMS Usage distribution - Top 10k Sites - Source
    CMS Usage distribution – Top 10k Sites – Source

    The percentage goes up to 20% when looking at the 100k sites.

    CMS Usage distribution - Top 100k Sites - Source
    CMS Usage distribution – Top 100k Sites – Source

    The distribution gets even higher when looking at the sites included in the top 1 million sites: it’s now 34%. This figure validates the assumption that many small sites use WordPress as opposed to high-traffic ones. It goes without saying that small and low-traffic websites invest in performance less than the big ones.

    CMS Usage distribution - Top 1 Million Sites - Source
    CMS Usage distribution – Top 1 Million Sites – Source

    Another interesting data point comes from comparing WooCommerce vs. Shopify. While WooCommerce is the most popular solution for the top 1 million sites, Shopify does better for the top 100k and 10k sites. Especially for the top high-traffic sites, the distribution difference is vast:

    Top 1 million sites Top 100k sites Top 10k sites
    WooCommerce 29% 15% 8%
    Shopify 21% 21% 21%

    This data brings us to the second important point about managed vs. shared hosting. 

    CMS like Shopify or Wix come with a managed hosting service. On the other hand, WordPress gives you a choice between a more powerful managed hosting and a less potent shared one. Shared hosting is suitable for small sites – and we’ve just seen how many tiny sites WordPress hosts. 

    Some recent stats also show the most popular WordPress hosting providers. On top, there’s BlueHost, which offers shared hosting. The same goes for Automattic and DreamHost.

    Most popular WordPress hosting providers - Source
    Most popular WordPress hosting providers – Source

    While shared hosting is convenient in price, it can’t deliver the same performance as managed hosting. As a result, more sites using shared hosting will perform worse than those using CMS with managed hosting. Can you see why comparing CMS performance is difficult when the starting point is much different? It looks like we’re comparing apples to oranges.

    For instance, look at how sites using WP Engine as their hosting are performing in terms of Core Web Vitals grades. The percent of good Core Web Vitals is up to 38,1% as opposed to WordPress (28,7%):

    Core Web Vitals Technology Report - Source
    Core Web Vitals Technology Report – Source

    And other factors are in play.

    Plugins can make a big difference, too. You should choose the right plugins to make your site as fast as possible. With the right choices, there won’t be any performance difference compared to other platforms with default options. Once again, though, the starting point can be different.

    A CDN also affects performance. On WordPress, you can decide if you want a CDN according to your needs. Other platforms such as Wix, Shopify, and Squarespace already use a CDN. So, by default, they’re faster. Remember that a CDN plays a crucial role in speeding up your site if you have an international audience. 

    What Such Differences Entail for Users (and Market Share)

    You can now see how WordPress has an excellent performance potential – if you know how to do it.

    And here’s the thing. If you’re wondering what makes WordPress less appealing on the market, we say that WordPress is not easy enough for every user. So, complexity is the main culprit for users choosing other CMS (or switching to them). It would be naive not to mention the marketing budget that allows companies such as Wix and Shopify to stand out and get advertised on TV and so on – such coverage can make a great difference in customers’ perception and choices.

    WordPress is free and is open-source software – and that’s great. It’s also customizable for any site, including large ones. Thanks to great options among plugins and themes, you have the freedom to choose how to build your site. You don’t have to stick to default options. Plus, you can benefit from free tools if you’re on a budget.

    On the other hand, for the same reasons, WordPress can’t make substantial improvements to its core – for instance, it can’t add a CDN option. Overall, we think there will always be a gap with other CMS in terms of built-in options. And this gap can also affect market share.

    Once again, it’s important to highlight how WordPress still dominates the market share. Looking at the historical trends in 2022, it’s interesting how Wix is growing faster than the other CMS.

    February 2022 30 May 2022 Feb 2022 vs. May 2022
    WordPress 43,3% 42.9% -0,4%
    Shopify 4,4% 4,3% -0,1%
    Wix 1,9% 2,3% 0,4%
    Squarespace 1,8% 2,0% 0,2%
    Source: w3tech

    How to Get an Outstanding Performance on WordPress 

    All that said, you can always make your site as fast as possible on WordPress. Here are some best practices to follow that will help you boost your site speed.

    The first is choosing a managed hosting service over a shared one. A managed hosting solution is more expensive. However, it helps you get the best performance for your site. If you’re looking for a great solution, you have several options, including Kinsta, WPEngine, and Flywheel.

    Next, you should choose only a few plugins – the less, the better. Among them, you should include a caching and performance plugin. If you’re looking for a paid solution, our recommendation is, of course, WP Rocket. Remember what we said in the previous section? Choosing the right plugins can make things easy – and WP Rocket takes care of complex performance issues and boosts your site speed in just a few clicks. As WPMarmite recommends in their article, taking performance to the heart is crucial to achieving excellent results.

    For instance, here’s some data showing how WP Rocket helps get good Core Web Vitals – even more than other platforms such as Wix and Squarespace.

    Core Web Vitals Technology Report - WP Rocket - Source
    Core Web Vitals Technology Report – WP Rocket – Source

    The beauty of WordPress is that you can also go with a free plugin. Regarding improving your site performance, here are a few free options that tackle some of the most crucial performance issues, such as CSS and JS optimization:

    You should also pick an image optimizer. This is essential to make your images lighter and give a crucial boost to your site speed. Imagify is our plugin to compress and convert images to WebP. Want more options? Read our list of the best image optimization plugins to discover other plugins for your WordPress website.

    As already explained, a CDN is also essential for boosting performance for an international audience. You can choose easy and 100% hassle-free solutions like RocketCDN or explore other CDN services like StackPath or Akamai.

    The last key point to remember is choosing a fast and responsive theme. You can pick the best solution among the fastest free WordPress themes we listed in our article or go for a paid solution. It is essential to pay attention to your theme’s performance and ease to make the whole site experience fast and smooth.

    Blazing-fast WordPress Sites: Two Examples

    Let’s now look at a site built on WordPress and performing great. 

    We could include WP Rocket, but it would be too easy, right?

    Instead, we picked two websites. As you’ll see, they differ from each other in size and topics.

    The first one is Olga Zarzeczna’s site. Olga is a technical SEO expert and she already explained how WP Rocket allowed her to focus on the most important aspects of her business because our plugin would take care of performance optimization.

    Her site follows the best practices above and passes the Core Web Vitals assessment. The Page Speed Insight score is 94/100.

    Google PageSpeed Insights report - Source
    Google PageSpeed Insights report – Source

    The second site is completely different. In fact, it’s a French government site on ecological transition. It shows how important sites can also be built on WordPress and achieve outstanding performance.

    Google PageSpeed Insights report - Source
    Google PageSpeed Insights report – Source

    Wrapping Up

    In this article, we explained why we believe WordPress is a great platform to speed up your site and why it’s different from other paid CMS. We also shared our point of view about why WordPress’s market share is shrinking – even though the percentage is so small that it doesn’t matter now. 

    WordPress offers many advantages, from being an open-source software to being customizable for all needs and budgets. Plus, there’s a great community behind WordPress that supports all members through online channels, local events, and WordCamps. If you are worried about performance, remember that this is not a good reason not to choose WordPress. Your site can be as fast as any other site built on another platform.

    The post Yes, Your WordPress Site Can Deliver Outstanding Web Performance: Here’s Why (and How) appeared first on WP Rocket.