Tag: Inside WP Rocket

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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. 

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.

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!

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. 

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.

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:

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:

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

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.

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.

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:

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:

• 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:

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.

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. 

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!

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

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.

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 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.

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. 

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Here’s what you’ll find instead.

• If Preload is enabled, you’ll see a “Clear and preload cache” button in the 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.

• If the Preload is disabled, the button will only say “Clear Cache”.

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

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.

2. 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.

3. 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!

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.