Plugins comparison: WP Rocket vs WP Super Cache

WP Rocket is hands down, the best speed optimization and cache plugin for WordPress. And this comparison shows real live website data using WP Super Cache, and later switching to WP Rocket.

I have recently purchased WP Rocket Plus license, and I plan to switch all my websites to WP Rocket. Dev4Press website uses WP Rocket for about 2 years now, and I am extremely satisfied with its performance, it is the only cache and speed optimization plugin I recommend to friends and clients. But, saying that one plugin is better than some other plugin, especially when the supposedly better plugin is not free, is not enough. So, here is the live website test migration from WP Super Cache to WP Rocket.

Testing environment

The website in question is TiniART.net. This is the showcase website for the artist Tijana Nikolic Petrovic (my wife), and at the time of testing, the website uses WordPress 4.8.3, it is hosted on SiteGround and runs custom build theme based on Dev4Press own xScape2 Theme Framework.  This website used WP Super Cache for the last 2 years.

Testing is done using Pingdom Website Speed Test from San Jose, California, USA location. The test is done with 4 pages: home page, exhibitions archive, single post and contact form page. Each test is run 10 times, and after testing each page, the cache is cleared. Test results include first load speed, average load speed (from all 10 runs) and fastest load speed. For both plugins test included CDN via Amazon CloudFront.

WP Super Cache was setup using Expert options and using CDN and it is tweaked and configured the best it can be done. WP Rocket was tested twice: the first time it was the plugin with all default settings (with CDN enabled), and the second-time test was done with optimized WP Rocket (CSS minification and concatenation into single CSS file with the removal of resources version query string for both CSS and JS files).

Performance Grade

This is Google PageSpeed test, and it can have a maximum value of 100. Here are the chart and table with results.

There is no contest, WP Super Cache is on average 15 points behind WP Rocket, and optimized WP Rocket gets close to 100 points. Even without optimization, WP Rocket goes to 90 on average.

Page Load Time

This is a most important test: how fast your website page loads. Here is the chart showing average page speed values and the table with data (time is in seconds).

So, just by installing the WP Rocket, page load time has gone down on average by 20% to 30%. And, if you optimize it further, page load time has gone done to 1 second, or almost 3 times faster then with WP Super Cache. This is a really amazing result.

And, here is one more table, with the lowest load times recorded during the test.

Again, really amazing results, proving that by just installing WP Rocket you will get almost 50% faster loading times, and with proper optimization, your website will be almost 3 times faster than with the WP Super Cache plugin.

Other Tests

Results also included page size and a number of requests. I will not include those here, but WP Rocket delivered about 20% smaller page size and WP Rocket with optimization had about 25% fewer requests (due to the CSS concatenation into one CSS file).

Conclusion

Well, these results say a lot. WP Rocket is a lot faster than WP Super Cache, and with proper optimization, your site will load 3 times faster than with WP Super Cache. WP Rocket is not a free plugin, it starts from $39 for one website, $99 for five websites and $199 for an unlimited number of websites, and you will get discounts and bonus months with renewals. But, this price is more than fair considering how faster and better optimized your website will be. You can try it out for 14 days and if you don’t like it, you can get a refund.

Next time, I plan to test WP Rocket against W3 Total Cache plugin when I get to migrate another of my websites.