WP Rocket is a very powerful caching plugin, and it is easier to setup than most other cache plugins for WordPress. And, you have extensive documentation about setting it up.
But, sometimes it is usefult to see on a practical example what settings to use, and what is a real world use for some settings. There are many settings that documentation recommendes, but they don’t produce any real gain. All settings and recommendations in this tutorial are based on the WP Rocket settings used on this website. We will start from the first, Cache tab.
On the Cache tab, you should enable caching for mobile devices. But, we don’t use Separate cache for mobile devices, because there are no files loaded for mobile devices, compared to destkop. If you load some files on mobile devices only, enable this option too. It is useful to enable caching for logged-in users, escpecially if you have personalized content for logged in users. As for the cache lifespan, 24 hours is good expiration value.
Files optimization is the tricky part, and from experience, enable all basic settings: Minify HTML, Combine Google Fonts files and Remove query strings from static resources. As for the CSS and JS caching, this can be very benefitial, but it can be very hard to configure, especially if you have a lot of plugins in use because there is always one that will break the JS or CSS cache. Also, if your server supports HTTP/2 protocol, there is really no need to minify and merge multiple files into one, because over HTTP/2 number of served files doesn’t slow down loading.
On the Media tab, I only use the option to disable Emoji. As for the Preload tab, if you use sitemaps, enable the preload, and set it up as Automatic.
Finally, the CDN tab. If you don’t use CDN, start using it. If you use Cloudflare or some similar service, CDN is included, so you don’t need to use the CDN tab. But, for other cases, CDN setup depends on the CDN service you use, but generally, you need to provide one or more CDN names to use for replacing your media URLs. WP Rocket allows you to use CDN for images, JS and CSS files, and you can provide different CDN URLs for each one.
As you can see, WP Rocket is not complicated to setup, but, for some more advanced settings, you need to invest sime time in experimenation. And, make sure to test your website after making changes, because if you setup something wrong, you can break it.
