This tutorial shows you how to set up WordPress with WP Rocket, a caching and performance optimization plugin to increase the loading speed of WordPress websites. Installation and configuration of WP Rocket can be completed in less than 3 minutes.
This tutorial assumes you have already created a Pull Zone and purchased the WP Rocket plugin.
Setting up WP Rocket
- Login to your WordPress admin dashboard and navigate to Plugins -> Add New.
- Use Upload method to install the plugin.
- Search your computer for the
.zipplugin installation and click on Install button. - After plugin is activated you can enter the configuration area:
- Navigate to the CDN section and enter your CDN domain into the text field called
Replace site's host name with:.
Your site is now using MaxCDN!
To ensure you implemented MaxCDN correctly, you can view the source code of any page to confirm that the CDN domain is being used for static assets instead of your origin domain. You can also use tools like pingdom or webpagetest that can give you more detailed reports on your CDN implementation status.
You can also use tools like Pingdom or Catchpoint to measure your site's performance.
The domain used in the example above (cdn.yourdomain.com) is a virtual presentation of how you can mask your generic CDN domain provided by us (ZONENAME.COMPANYALIAS.netdna-cdn.com) with your own uniformed custom domain. Learn more about how to create a custom domain.
Extra Features of WP Rocket
- Minification: Provides the ability to minify CSS/JS files.
- SSL: Supports caching for https (SSL) pages.
- Mobile Cache: Provides caching for mobile versions of your site.
- Logged-In User Cache: Caches content for logged-in users. (Use this option with caution.)
- Lazy Load: Loads images only when they are about to be shown to the browser. If the page takes too long to load, then images that are located on the lowest parts of the page won’t be loaded upfront, rather, only when the browser is about to go to that part of the page where images are located.
- Clear Cache Lifespan: Defines cache lifetime. By default, it’s 24 hours.
Advanced Options
- Prefetch DNS Requests: Provides an option to define external domains that are often used to load external assets. This way it can pre-resolve those domains, thus lowering the overall loading time.
- Deferred Loading: Add JavaScript that will load asynchronously with page loading.
- Exclude JS and CSS Files: Exclude certain files that have functionality that conflicts with how caching works. Checkout pages, plugin files, etc. One specific example of exclusion is WooCommerce.
If you have any questions about the content of this article, please feel free to reach out to the Support Team for assistance, we're available 24/7 for your convenience.