You have a WordPress (WP) website, and you’d like it to be even faster and to help you with your SEO results. There happens to be a great tool from WordPress itself called Rocket – and a great agency available for you too nearby on the page. It immediately improves the loading time of your website upon activation.
WEBSITE CACHING
Website caching makes websites extremely fast, which leads to better SEO scores (Google is making speed a top priority in their rankings) and much happier visitors. When a visitor with their website browser “arrives” at your website and requests a web page to view, that website’s server has to make a lot of calculations and retrieve things like headers and footers and sidebar images and the top news items, and so on.
The idea behind caching is to ask the server to remember what it did the last time a request was made of it rather than processing each request separately.
When your content changes like with a new post on the homepage, the caching systems will delete the cached version of the homepage, but it would leave all other pages untouched, since those would not be changed.
By implementing caching, you are making your website faster and perform better which will equip it to handle any sudden traffic spikes.
ROCKET FEATURES
Page Caching
Page caching is the Rocket’s most basic feature. A website cache stores selected page contents once a user visits a page for the first time. When the user revisits that same page, the website cache recalls the stored content and loads it much more quickly than on the first visit.
Browser Caching
By using browser caching, a webpage’s static files are stored in the browser. Once the visitor revisits this page, the static files do not need to be loaded again, leading to faster loading time.
Minification
Rocket reduces the weight of your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files through a technique called minification leading to a faster loading time.
Database Optimization
Rocket can clean up your database to remove bloat and reduce its size. You can even set up a regular database cleaning schedule.
Lazy Load
Images slow down your page and the lazy load feature only loads images as the visitor scrolls down the page versus loading every image at one time.
The features of lazy load, image optimization, and database optimization really help deduce loading times, reportedly by as much as 75%!
CONCLUSION
Being a paid plugin ($49 a year for one website), it is updated as often as three times a month to get rid of bugs and to further enhance its performance. It also ensures that it is always compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
If you want to speed up your website, WP Rocket is a great choice. There are other WordPress caching plugins available, but with something as important as caching, you are going to want access to top shelf website maintenance support agency too.