Wp Rocket has been a long-standing Wordpress plugin with immense technical documentation, covering almost any issue that you might find when using it on Wordpress, and Wp Rocket has worked making it compatible with also almost any popular Wordpress plugin and themes.
✨Best Alternative: Perfmatters
Wp Rocket has also a large development community on Github, covering the most edge issues from Wordpress users.
Another advantage of WP Rocket over its opponents might be its UI and UX, which makes it possible even for non-developers to optimize their websites.
Wp Rocket Features
Wp Rocket has released lots of new features to help improve the Core Web Vitals in Wordpress, including new features like ‘remove unused CSS’ and updating the delay Javascript feature, which now delays all javascript but not essential ones by default.
Wpalpha has a complete and beginner-friendly guide for improve your Core Web Vitals with Wp Rocket
These news features have a key function in improving Core Web Vitals even on bloated plugins such as Elementor and other website builders. Wp Rocket also offers beginner-friendly features to improve Web Vitals or your backend(database).
- Tools to improve Core Web Vitals LCP
- Tools to improve Core Web Vitals CLS (Filters to Critical CSS and RUCSS)
- Delay JS until user-interaction
- Critical CSS
- Cloudflare integration
- Database Optimization
- Lazyload
- HTML/CSS/JS minification & compression
- DNS prefetching, preloading
- Remove unused CSS
- CDN (Rocket CDN $8/month)
- Image Optimization + WebP (Imagify $10/mo)
The yearly pricing on Wp Rocket plans are:
- WP Rocket 1 website license: $59
- WP Rocket 3 websites license: $119
- WP Rocket Unlimited website license: $299
Core Web Vitals and Pagespeed
Google’s Pagespeed doesn’t check or have a user-interaction feature to give your website a real user testing experience, and because of that, you must ensure you’re passing Core Web Vitals field data. Having good lab data with Nitropack while using any of their Javascript optimizations, doesn’t guarantee a good score. You must also certify you’re passing with field data.
The same applies to Wp Rocket, due to it now delaying all Javascript but not internal javascript files/Jquery/inline scripts.
From Google data, Nitropack ranks slightly above Wp Rocket. Nitropack also does have a better Pagespeed(Lighthouse) score than other speed optimization plugins. Nitropack ranks below Wp Rocket on CLS(Cumulative Layout Shift) for mobile, even as Nitropack has a built-in CDN. While choosing an option for improving your Core Web Vitals, have in mind that Nitropack may lack features to improve CLS.
