Although Wp Rocket ranks high in the Core Web Vitals rank, it may not suit everyone.
Wp rocket has support for or can work together with different caching solutions like Redis, Memcache, and Varnish. You can also check for Wp Rocket Hosting Compatibility to see if your hosting caching works with it.
Wpalpha compiled a top list with 5 Wp Rocket alternatives to improve Pagespeed and Core Web Vitals.
Cloudflare APO and Cloudflare Pro
Cloudflare Automatic Optimization is a new tool to improve WordPress TTFB. Cloudflare made a study and concluded that APO optimized their WordPress client’s websites TTFB for a 72% improvement.
Not only that, but their clients FCP(First Content Paint) and Speed Index had an improvement of 22% and 13% respectively. Cloudflare APO setup requires changing your domain DNS records.
Cloudflare currently offers Automatic Platform Optimizations (APO) for $5/month, and it caches the HTML of your WordPress website. This is possible due to Cloudflare Workers that cache dynamic content.
Cloudflare APO is compatible(you need to manually purge Cloudflare APO cache) with WP Rocket and many other plugins, check the compatibility here.
Cloudflare Pro is another service that at $20/month offers a myriad of features, including:
- Web Application Firewall (WAF)
- Lossless Image Optimization
- 20 Page Rules (+17 than the free plan) – These are meant to improve WordPress usage overall
Cloudflare Pro and Cloudflare APO can be used alongside many other WordPress cache plugins, paid or free.
Perfmatters
If you don’t need Wp Rocket’s advanced features you can use Wp Optimize and Perfmatters to improve speed, or just Perfmatters and other optimizations offered by your hosting and Cloudflare.
Perfmatters “Script Manager” lists all your scripts and allows you to remove them from loading by device, location, group of users, or using a regex formula.
You can access Perfmatters documentation to make sure what effect each feature will have, and how to fix any issues if encountered. Perfmatters also offers “Testing Mode”, which safely previews features before applying them to the live website.
Perfmatters have many features made directly to improve Woocommerce. If you are using Woocommerce as your choice to have a store online, you must know that your competitors may be using faster alternatives such as Shopify. These features are essential to not have a slower site and worst user experience than the competition.
Another feature of Perfmatters is database optimization. It not only offers full database optimization but also scheduled automatic database optimization.
Other notable Perfmatters features:
- Change your WordPress login URL: change wp-login to avoid hacking or bots.
- Google Analytics locally: speed up your site by reducing extra third-party requests.
- CDN rewrite.
- Add code to header, body, and footer.
- Preloading: Preload images only necessary, improving Core Web Vitals.
- Defer and delay JavaScript.
- Remove unused CSS: creates a different CSS file with removed unused CSS.
- Google Fonts locally: speed up your site by reducing extra third-party requests.
- Multisite support.
FlyingPress and FlyingCDN
FlyingPress is a speed optimization plugin from the WordPress dev Gjio, which has also developed the popular plugin Flyins Scripts.
FlyingPress has many Core Web Vitals (Google SEO algorithm) features, including:
- Caching
- Defer Scripts
- Optimize Google Fonts loading
- Prioritize Resources – Prioritize resources like the above-fold images, and fonts to load in high priority.
FlyingPress offers the FlyingCDN addon that adds their CDN, which offers custom domain & SSL.
Pricing: FlyingPress $60/year + FlyingCDN $36 (3$/mo) 100GB/limit, 1-year plan: $96/year
Nitropack
Nitropack is a CDN + Cache/Performance plugin solution, also described as an all-in-one speed optimization solution. It stores your entire website assets on the cloud to improve all areas of Pagespeed and has a built-in “script manager”, which delays Javascript based on the selected optimization level.
As for Core Web Vitals field data results, Nitropack ranks slightly above Wp Rocket on mobile and desktop metrics with a minor margin percentage advantage. It also does have a better median Lighthouse and lower page size (kb) than other plugins.
Nitropack ranks above Wp Rocket on LCP(largest contentful paint) for mobile, with 54% vs 48% of WP Rocket. Wp Rocket has better CLS(cumulative layout shift) results. While choosing an option for improving your Core Web Vitals, have in mind these stats.
Nitropack 1-year plans:
- Nitropack 50.000 pageviews/mo limit(25GB max bandwidth): $199/year*
- Nitropack 200.000 pageviews/mo limit(100GB max bandwidth): $485/year*
- Nitropack 1.000.000 pageviews/mo limit(500GB max bandwidth): $1672/year*
*Exclusive 5% Nitropack discount for Wpalpha readers.
Litespeed
LiteSpeed Cache is a WordPress plugin meant to be used on Litespeed servers. With the combination of the Litespeed cache and its plugin, the server requests(HTTP) that your website can get will increase compared to using Nginx + FastCGI Cache or Apache Server + W3 Total Cache, according to Litespeed.
Having availability is essential to an eCommerce website.
To use the Litespeed plugin, you need to use a server with Litespeed. Check Litespeed hosting and Cloud partners here.
Wp Optimize
Wp Optimize is a plugin alternative to free cache plugins and a strong competitor for paid WordPress performance and cache plugins.
On the free version, Wp Optimize offers unique features that directly improve the Pagespeed such as loading css asynchronously and better Google fonts/Font Awesome loading, alongside so popular as CSS/JS minification, combination, and others.
It also offers Mobile-specific cache, Database Optimization, and Image Optimization which are features most seen on paid cache/performance plugins, on the free version.
Wp Optimize Premium features
The main features of Wp Optimize Premium are lazy loading and image compressing. Another feature labeled as premium of Wp Optimize is “Preload key requests”, which allows the preload of any asset. The remaining features of Wp optimize premium are as follows:
- Multisite support
- Preload key requests
- Optimize individual tables
- Optimization Scheduling
- Enhanced logging and reporting
- Multilingual and multi-currency compatible caching
- Geolocation and tax country for WooCommerce stores
- Cloudflare support
Autoptimize
Autoptimize is the closest to a free version of Wp Rocket, apart from Wp Optimize. Offers a range of optimization features, both basic and advanced:
- HTML/CSS/JS minification & compression
- Cache
- Lazyload
- Preload and preconnect
Get your WordPress website optimized!