7 Best free WP rocket alternatives

Hi i am Praneeth kumar.

In this blog you will learn 7 best free & paid WProcket alternatives along with their features and pros and cons in detail.

So if you want to increase your website loading speed and looking for a better caching plugin in budget, you have come to the right place.

Caching is only one thing out of many things you can do to improve your website speed, learn more about how to increase website loading speed here.

So without further ado let’s get started.

Here is a 30000 foot view of the blog post.

What is WProcket, features & Its price?

WProcket is the most powerful, popular and premium wordpress caching and performance booster plugin.

Unlike most other plugins what makes WP rocket so special and unique is that it is so feature packed and very user-friendly to use with a simple interface, with a single click you can enable or disable any features you want.

This plugin has every feature you can possibly imagine to increase your website loading speed from caching to minification to cleaning the database and deferring JavaScript files and content delivery network.

If your website does not pass the core web vitals test of loading the website under 2.5 seconds of largest contentful paint and other Metrics then using this plugin will certainly increase your website loading speed and pass the web vitals test for sure (as long as you have a reliable web hosting service).

You also get premium customer support and update of the plugin after you purchase the premium version.

Because of all these reasons it has 1.8 million websites using the plugin and 5 star rating on trustpilot.

This plugin is very easy to install and it works fine with any hosting and themes and plugins without causing any conflict and issues.

This plugin also has ecommerce and multilingual compatibility so that you can use it in any language you want depending upon your convenience.

The only disadvantage I have found is that this plugin does not compress the image size but it will help you optimise the image by lazy loading it.

And, unlike other caching & performance booster plugins, you can’t directly install it from wordpress plugin directory; rather you have to upload this plugin after you purchase it from the official website of WP rocket.

So, there is no free version available whatsoever.

What’s the price?

The pricing of this plugin starts from $49 for one website with 1 year support and updates and $99 for 3 websites with 1 year support and updates and 249 dollars for unlimited websites with 1 year support and updates.

You also have a 14 days 100% money back guarantee.

Even though wp-rocket is one of the best wordpress caching and perform booster plugins but

there are lots of different alternatives you can use which are much better and even free so if you are on a tight budget let’s take a look at a couple of alternatives to this plugin with their features, installations and ratings and price.

So let’s dive right in.

7 WProcket alternatives (free&paid).

There are 7 main alternatives to WProcket both free and paid options, we will take a look at all of them along with their features, total installations and rating and also see the price of the plugin.

So let’s dive right in.

1. Wp optimize

If you know the most popular wordpress backup plugin called updraftplus, you should know that this plugin is developed by the same company which owns that backup plugin.

WP optimize is an all in one wordpress performance booster plugin like WP rocket.

Unlike WP rocket, this plugin is one step ahead of it and it will also compress all the images you upload on your website.

To summarise in simple words, this plugin does 3 tasks very well and for free.

  • Compress images on your website.
  • Improve your website loading speed with caching and other methods.
  • Cleans your website database files.

Let’s take a look at the installations and ratings.

Total installations and ratings:

This plugin has 1 million plus active installations and 5 star rating which is magnificent.

This plugin is also tested and works smoothly with the latest wordpress version and php version without any conflicts.

Some key features of this plugin:

As I have mentioned earlier, this plugin does 3 things very well: clean and optimize website databases, compress images and increase website speed.

Here are a few features,

  • It helps you minify html, css and java files.
  • You can also remove and defer or asynchronous render blocking resources and javascript files.
  • It will clean your wordpress database files and tables removing unnecessary files with automattic weekly cleanups.
  • It will also enable caching preloading, Gzip compression, device specific cache, browser caching,

Although most of the features of this plugin are free to use, there is also a premium version of this plugin.

Price:

You can get this caching plugin starting from $49 for two websites for one year support and updates, you can get 5 websites license for $99 and unlimited websites licence for $199 a year support and updates.

By using the premium version of this plugin you get access to customer support, lazy loading, and much more advanced features.

Most of the time, a free version of this plugin is more than enough for a normal website and a blog.

My rating & review:

I would personally rate and review this plugin as 5/5 because of its amazing features and this single plugin can replace lots of additional plugins for speed optimization like caching and performance booster and image optimization plugin.

And even the dashboard is pretty neat and clean and it has such a great user rating of 5 out of 5.

In my personal opinion this plugin is a perfect alternative to the premium plugin WP rocket, this is the exact plugin I use on my wordpress website to improve the speed.

2. W3 total cache

This is another most popular caching and performance booster plugin for wordpress websites and a great alternative for WP rocket.

Total installations and rating;

This plugin has more than 1 million + active installations and 4.4 stars rating out of 5.

This plugin has also been tested with the latest version of wordpress 5.8 and it does not have any conflicts.

Some key features of this plugin which I really like;

The features worth mentioning are,

  • It has both AMP and SSL support.
  • Other than caching it also helps to minify CSS HTML and JavaScript files.
  • It defers non critical javascript files & solves render blocking resources issue.
  • It also has CDN support.

This plugin is an open source software and most of its features are free of cost but there are a bunch of more features like better customer support and advanced minification and performance boosting which you can only access with the premium version.

Price;

Even though this plugin is an open-source software after it is acquired by boldgrid company it now has a premium version for $99 a year.

They also offer a 30 day money back guarantee.

My review and ratings;

I would personally rate the plugin as ⅘.

There are few drawbacks of using this plugin as per the users they say that the plugin is very complicated and overwhelming to use for beginners because it has a lot more options than you could expect to handle and

even the dashboard is not so beginner friendly, other than that there are not many issues using the plugin.

3. WP super cache 

This is the most popular and highly downloaded caching plugin for your wordpress website.

Unlike other caching plugins on this list what makes this plugin so special and unique is that it is developed by the company automattic which is led by Matt Mullenweg who is the creator of WordPress open source software.

Total installations and rating;

This plugin has a whopping 2 million plus active installations and 4.3 star rating out of 5.

Some key features of the plugin which I really like;

Here are a few features worth mentioning.

  • The plug-in serves caches in three different methods, expert, simple and WordPress caching.
  • The plug-in also has CDN support.

The only disadvantage is that unlike other caching plugins I have listed in this blog this plugin does not do things like minification of HTML CSS scripts and removing render-blocking resources.

It does one thing very well which is caching.

Price;

This plugin is an open source software created by an automattic company and it is absolutely free of cost without any premium plans.

My rating and review;

I would personally rate this plugin ⅘.

You should use this plugin for three main reasons, 

  1. It has been created by company Automatic which is also the founder of WordPress open source software.
  2. This is one of the best and most popular wordpress caching plugins with more than 2 million + active installations.
  3. This is one of the simplest and easiest to use caching plugins for absolutely free of cost.

4. WP fastest cache

This is another most popular and a good alternative to WP rocket as a caching plugin.

It is an open source software.

Total installation and ratings;

This plugin has more than 1 million + installations and 5 star rating in WordPress plugin directory.

The Plugin has also been tested with the latest version of the wordpress 5.8 and latest PHP version.

Some features which are worth mentioning of this plugin.

  • It has SSL, CDN & cloudflare support.
  • It will Minify HTML CSS and JavaScript files.
  • It will enable gzip compression to increase the speed of the website from server to the browser.
  • It will also help you disable emojis on your website if you don’t use one.

There is also a premium version of this plugin which has a lot more features like minify and compress JavaScript files, defer JavaScript files and remove render-blocking resources as a warning which you get in pagespeed insights,

it will also help you optimise your images and convert then into webp format from other formats like PNG and JPG, it’s also help you clean the database of your website and much more features with premium support.

Price;

There are three different pricing plans of this plugin starting from 50 Dollars for which you can get only one website licence, 3 website licence for 125 dollars and five site licence for 175 dollars.

What’s good is it is not confined to one year; rather , once you pay the payment, you can use the premium version forever and you will get constant support and updates for the premium version, unlike premium wordpress caching plugins.

There is also a 30-day money-back guarantee available.

And by the way if you want to purchase the premium version of this plugin you first have to download the free version from wordpress plugin Directory on your website and then purchase it from the settings section and upgrade to premium plan.

My review and ratings;

I would personally rate this plugin ⅗.

The reason being is that you can find a lot of the features in premium version in free wordpress plugins like wp-optimize and W3 total cache.

You do not necessarily need to invest money in the premium version of the plugin and even the latest version of the wordpress which is 5.8 also supports webp image format so you can easily convert your images using this tool and then upload the webp format to your website.

Apart from that it is also an excellent plugin for caching as you can see from the installations and ratings.

5. Autoptimize

This is another popular open source wordpress caching and performance booster plugin.

Total installations and ratings;

It has 1 million + active installations and 4.7 star rating out of 5 and it is also tested in the latest version of wordpress 5.8 and PHP version.

Some features worth mentioning;

  • It will minify CSS, html files on your website.
  • It will help to remove render-blocking resources.
  • It will also enable http2 loading of your website.
  • It will async Google fonts.
  • It will also add expired headers on your website.

And as I have mentioned earlier it will also help you with caching of your website.

Price;

This plugin is an open source software and it is completely free to use.

My rating;

I would personally rate this plugin as four out of five.

This plugin has Some excellent features like add expires headers and enable http 2 which will help your website load fast drastically.

6. Perfmatters

Just like wp-rocket this is also a premium wordpress plugin that you cannot directly install from your wordpress plugin directory rather you will have to upload it after you purchase it.

Unlike other caching and performance booster plugins this plugin will help you disable all the unnecessary features and

things that wordpress uses by default which cause lower speed at the same time it will also help you improve the website security with the features of this plugin.

Total installations and rating;

Although we don’t know how many people use this tool, you can check the reviews of this plugin from top bloggers here.

Some features worth mentioning;

  •  This plugin will disable emojis on your website and reduce the number of http requests.
  • It also disables xmlrpc and improves the security of your website.
  • It will remove some features like wordpress version, jQuery migrate, rsd link, short link, RSS feeds & links.
  • It will help you remove all the unnecessary scripts and files that load on your webpage for example contact form which loads on every page increasing the webpage size.
  • It will also help you optimise your WordPress database tables.
  • It will also defer and delay JavaScript files to remove render-blocking resources and increase the website speed.

This is not just a performance booster caching plugin but it will also help you improve the security of your website by adding a few features like,

  • It will also help you remove the wordpress login URL from wp-admin to something custom and improve the wordpress security.
  • It also gives you access to CDN and its own security features.
  • You can easily add any code to your wordpress core files like header, body and footer for example Google Analytics code without touching & editing the code by yourself in just a single click.

You can refer to this guide to learn more about WordPress security and best wordpress security plugins.

Price;

For 25 dollars you can get one site licence with a 30 day money back guarantee for 1 year support and update of the plugin,

for $55 with one year support and updates we can get the licence for three websites and for 125 dollars you can get unlimited website support and licence for this plugin.

There is always a 30 day money back guarantee.

My rating and review;

I would personally rate this plugin ⅗ because it will help you in both optimising a website loading speed at the same time securing your website from hackers which is a good deal but there are free alternatives to paid features of this plugin.

7. Cache enabler

This is the last caching plugin in my list of WP rocket alternatives.

This is a lightweight open source popular caching plugin created by keycdn. This plugin has a very clean and user-friendly interface and dashboard to use.

Total installations and ratings;

This plugin has more than 100000+ active installations and 4.4 star rating.

Some features worth mentioning;

  • Minification of HTML excluding or including inline CSS and JavaScript
  • WordPress multisite network support
  • WebP support (convert images to WebP with Optimus)
  • Gzip pre-compression support
  • Automatic smart cache clearing.

Price;

Since it is an open source software it is absolutely free of cost to use these no premium versions or plans for this plugin whatsoever.

My ratings and review:

In my personal opinion, I would rate this plugin ⅘.

These are all the popular wp-rocket alternatives you can find online.

With that said let’s conclude the blog post.

Ending remarks;

These are my favorite alternatives both free and paid to WP rocket.

Share the blog post if you have found it helpful, sharing is caring.

Do comment down your favorite caching and performance booster plugin in the comments section below.

I will catch you next time till then keep learning and keep growing.