Does my WordPress site need a Caching Plugin?

What is a caching plugin?

Caching plugins are very popular plugins used in WordPress to help reduce the amount of PHP needed to deliver a WordPress website to a visitor. To do this, they store generated pages in HTML files rather than generating a new page for every visitor.

Do I need a Caching Plugin on Rocket.net?

A caching plugin is not required to use Rocket.net and our Full Page Caching/CDN. But, your site will still benefit from a caching plugin. Why?

Even with Rocket.net's optimized Cloudflare Enterprise caching, not every page visit will be a cache hit. When a page request results in a cache MISS, WordPress must generate the page manually. This results in a PHP process being invoked, which then builds the page and hands it off to the CDN.

To speed up the process on subsequent cache misses, a caching plugin will be beneficial to reduce PHP use on cache misses, because PHP is inherently slow. The result is that your site will still be performant even if the pages are not cached in the CDN.

Which Caching Plugin does Rocket.net recommend?

When it comes to caching plugins, there are definitely quite a few out there and the good news is - we're compatible with all of them.

Now, we do have our recommendations. If you're just looking for a free caching plugin to create a page cache, then you can't go wrong with W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache.

With that said, if you're looking for a "caching meets optimization" type of plugin, then we highly recommend WP-Rocket. WP-Rocket is much more than just a caching plugin. It has many optimization features to help with core web vitals such as:

• Critical CSS Generation
• CSS/Javascript Optimization
• JavaScript Deferment
• JavaScript Delay

These features will drastically help improve your Core Web Vital scores. The article How to install and  configure WP-Rocket will show you how to get WP-Rocket configured to work well on your Rocket.net hosted WordPress site.

If you have any issues or require assistance, please do not hesitate to Submit a Ticket to our Support Team.