As your site traffic increases and you add additional content, your site may begin to slow down because WordPress has to recompile a page every time a visitor accesses it. By utilizing caching and enabling additional optimizations, you can reduce the amount of work WordPress has to do for each page load, which in turn speeds up your site.
With the WP Rocket plugin, you can enable caching and many other optimizations for a WordPress site.
- You must install WordPress on your site before you can install the WP Rocket plugin.
- WP Rocket is incompatible with other caching plugins like WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache. If you have one of these plugins installed, you must deactivate it before you activate WP Rocket for your site.
INSTALLING WP ROCKET
To install the WP Rocket plugin, follow these steps:
- After you purchase a WP Rocket license, download the plugin .zip file to your local computer.
- Log in to your WordPress site as the administrator.
- In the left-hand pane, click Plugins.
- Click Add New.
- Click Upload Plugin.
- Click Browse, select the .zip file on your local computer, and then click Open.
- Click Install Now.
- After WordPress finishes installing the plugin, click Activate Plugin.
After WordPress activates the plugin, WP Rocket validates the license and displays your key.
CONFIGURING WP ROCKET
After you install and activate the WP Rocket plugin, it enables the following features:
- Page caching.
- Gzip compression.
- HTTP header management.
- Image optimization.
These optimizations alone can significantly improve site performance, so additional configuration is often unnecessary. However, if you want to enable additional optimizations (such as CSS and JavaScript minification), or customize WP Rocket settings for your site, follow these steps:
- Log in to your WordPress site as the administrator.
- In the left-hand pane, click Settings, and then click WP Rocket.
- Select the settings you want, and then click Save Changes.