More than 40% of your website visitors will close your site and leave if it takes over three seconds for your website to fully load. This phenomenon becomes more relevant as technology continues to advance with other devices vying for your attention, causing the global attention span to decrease. By now it should come as no surprise that site speed is crucial to the success and usability of your site and influences your website’s search engine rankings. Knowing this, if you run a WordPress based site, a common dilemma at this point will be ‘what website performance boosting and optimization plugin should I use?’ To answer that, we will compare and contrast two of the most popular optimization plugins: WP-Optimize and WP Rocket.
What’s an optimization plugin?
Every website has a dedicated storage space reserved for keeping temporary data to ensure your WordPress website loads faster and generally performs more efficiently. This storage space is called a ‘cache’. When your website is opened for the first time it collects files, images, text and other necessary information about your device. It’s this data from the first visit that ensures your website loads faster on subsequent visits.
Your cache system will require decent levels of RAM and CPU to properly carry out this function. But no matter how good they both are, increasing traffic will soon consume it, causing the page to render slower. This is where performance-boosting plugins come in. They are able to cache your WordPress site, clean your database and compress your images. This helps to increase the overall performance and efficiency of your WordPress site.
WP-Optimize
WP-Optimize is an all-in-one optimization plugin that cleans your database, compresses images and caches your website. Put all of these functions together and you get what the name implies, a well-optimized WordPress website, performing seamlessly and efficiently.
WP-Optimize currently has over a million active installations. If you are serious about keeping your WordPress website in the best shape and providing a high-end user experience, you have to install WP-Optimize for your website.
WP Rocket
WP Rocket is another optimization plugin that allows you to speed up your website in a few steps. It ranks among the most functional WordPress website performance plugins in the world. Like most optimization plugins (including WP-Optimize), WP Rocket can help to cut down your load time and boost your Google PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals scores.
Comparison of WP-Optimize and WP Rocket features
| Features | WP-Optimize | WP Rocket |
| Free version | Yes | No |
| Database Optimization | Yes | Yes |
| Browser Caching | Yes | Yes |
| Page Caching | Yes | Yes |
| Gzip compression | Yes | Yes |
| Lazy Load | Yes | Yes |
| Image Compression | Yes | No |
| Cache Preloading | Yes | Yes |
| HTML/CSS/JS minification | Yes | Yes |
| Mobile Specific Cache | Yes | Yes |
Why is WP-Optimize a better caching plugin than WP Rocket?
WP-Optimize has a free version
You can install WP-Optimize on your WordPress website and start using it for free without any hidden charges. You get instant access to several features including database optimization, caching and image compression. WP Rocket does not offer a free version and as such, all of its features come at a premium. Buying a premium product without being able to test out it’s features and functionality can be an expensive and risky endeavor. With WP-Optimize, you can test out many of the major features and get a better feel for how the plugin can improve your site, without having to spend your hard earned money first.
WP-Optimize is a better Premium option
While prices are subject to change over time, the general pricing levels of these two plugins show a significant difference of price and number of websites the plugin can be used on. While WP-Optimize not only offers a free version of it’s plugin, it also has a premium version that gives access to additional features, including logging, lazy load, multisite support and top-notch optimization scheduling.
The premium version of WP-Optimize is more affordable than WP Rocket and will let you install it on more websites compared to WP Rocket.
WP-Optimize
| Name of plan | Cost | Number of websites |
| Starter | $39 | 2 |
| Business | $69 | 5 |
| Unlimited | $179 | Unlimited |
WP Rocket
| Name of plan | Cost | Number of websites |
| Single | $49 | 1 |
| Plus | $99 | 3 |
| Infinite | $249 | Unlimited |
WP-Optimize comes with an image compression feature
In the bid to increase website speed and facilitate large file savings, WP-Optimize offers both Lossy and Lossless image optimization. Large, uncompressed images can be one of the leading factors on why a site could take so long to load. As an additional feature, you can also backup your original high-resolution image files, in case you need them in the future. WP Rocket does not come with a built-in image compression feature. You would have to install Imagify, a third-party plugin, to compress your images.
WP-Optimize is integrated with UpdraftPlus backup
WP-Optimize uses UpdraftPlus to back up your site. UpdraftPlus is the world’s leading backup plugin and is an essential plugin to install in order to safeguard your files. The integration is so seamless that the backup and restore functions are automatic and super-convenient. WP Rocket does not have this option, which is an especially necessary and crucial feature when making any changes to your site.
WP-Optimize is more effective for page caching
Page caching gives your WordPress website the capacity to generate more than just a set of files for separate visits from different devices – This feature allows for an overall better website performance, and while both WP-Optimize and WP Rocket offer this feature, WP-Optimize is more effective in delivering noticeable results.
Conclusion
As you have learned from this blog, both plugins will do a good job in optimizing your website. However WP-Optimize is the more effective option and can deliver better results. The addition of a free version of the WP-Optimize plugin also allows the user to experience and test out the basic features within the plugin, without having to make an expensive purchase. If you are looking to speed up your site, reduce image size and find the best caching option available, WP-Optimize is the plugin for you. Download and install it today!
The post WP-Optimize vs. WP Rocket: Which is the best WordPress optimization and caching plugin? appeared first on UpdraftPlus. UpdraftPlus – Backup, restore and migration plugin for WordPress.