WP Rocket vs RabbitLoader: Which Plugin Would Improve Your PageSpeed Score Better ?

WP Rocket is the most popular cache plugin in the WordPress ecosystem. Since 2013, WP Rocket has been leading the optimization scene for wordpress websites. But how does it compare to RabbitLoader?

Here, we will see a detailed comparison between WP Rocket and RabbitLoader, explore the usability of both optimization plugins, and compare the pagespeed scores after installing the plugins individually on the same website. 

We would test both the plugins on cellofy.shop one by one & see which plugins helps the website reach a higher pagespeed score in the pagespeed insight test.

WP Rocket vs RabbitLoader: in short

WP Rocket is a premium cache plugin to optimize your wordpress website for better pagespeed performance. With close to 4 million websites using the plugin as claimed by WP Media, it is the leading cache plugin by some distance. 

Over the years Wp cache has moved from just being a cache plugin & have introduced other optimization features too, namely minification, preloading & a few more features to make it more than just a cache plugin.

But when you are using WP Rocket, one would still need to install Imagify for image optimization. If you feel the need for a CDN service you need the premium RocketCDN. And for lazy loading, you need Rocket lazy loading.

In comparison, RabbitLoader is an all-in-one optimization plugin, you would not need any other optimization plugins to improve the performance of your wordpress or woocommerce website.

What is WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a premium wordpress cache plugin. The goal of this plugin is to speed up your website, which is necessary to improve the user experience as well as SEO rankings.

Other than the cache, WP Rocket also uses various optimization techniques like caching, minification of CSS stylesheets, JavaScript files, among others. Wp Rocket being a premium plugin you would have to shell out money even if you wish to try it on your website to gauge your needs.

What is RabbitLoader

RabbitLoader is an all-in-one pagespeed optimization plugin that uses a premium Content Delivery Network (CDN), caching, image optimization, lazy loading, and other techniques to reduce web page loading time for your WordPress website.

When you are using our RabbitLoader, you don’t need to use different plugins for caching,Image optimization, CDN or even minification. Everything that’s needed to optimize your website is done by RabbitLoader itself without you having to toggle through 10 different settings.

Another advantage of RabbitLoader over WP Rocket is the availability of a forever free version. So if your website is not yet receiving a lot of traffic, you can just use RabbitLoader for free and spend the money to get more traffic.

Major Differences Between WP Rocket and RabbitLoader

Now you have a basic idea about WP Rocket and RabbitLoader. Lets see the differences between WP Rocket and RabbitLoader. Here we are mentioning some key differences between these two plugins.

What are the Similarities Between WP Rocket and RabbitLoader

Performance Optimizer: 

Both optimization plugins, WP Rocket, and RabbitLoader can improve Core Web Vitals, address Google pagespeed Insights suggestions, and help you to achieve good pagespeed performance scores. Although the pagespeed score you can reach using these plugins would be different for each of them.

Browser Caching:

Caching can store static files like HTML files, CSS stylesheets, JavaScript files, media files, and images. It minimizes the work for the server, the server wouldn’t have to serve that content over and over and serve the web page for the users if you leverage browser caching.

For example, when you are visiting our website RabbitLoader.com, your browser will download the RabbitLoader logo in the cache. The next time you visit RabbitLoader.com, this logo is directly loaded from the cache. This is how you can save data per web page.

• WP Rocket and RabbitLoader, both can improve your website speed by generating HTML files so that in the future, users can access them quickly. It also stores static resources like CSS stylesheets, JavaScript, and image files in the user device’s local memory.

Premium CDN: 

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of interconnected servers that help to speed up a website’s loading time. It reduces the physical distance between the server and the user and proves the latency.

• Although there is a free CDNs present in WP Rocket, its effect on the latency is next to none as it has very few PoPs.

For a better experience, WP Rocket has a custom with more PoPs. Known as RocketCDN, It offers unlimited bandwidth.

• RabbitLoader has an integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN) with 300+ edge locations.CDN cache can save the version of your wordpress website and load this when the same user visits it. The CDN also saves the hosting resources.

WP Rocket vs RabbitLoader: Performance Comparison

We can make all the comparisons we want but as they say the proof is in the pussing, so let’s see how WP Rocket fares against RabbitLoader, to find out we would analyze a demo woocommerce website cellofy.shop in three different cases.

Once without any optimization plugin, then after installing WP Rocket & finally we would be testing it with RabbitLoader installed. 

Also, we will attach the video of the test along with the screenshots of the results.

Case 1- Checking website’s pagespeed without using any performance optimization plugins.

Let’s check the pagespeed performance score of cellofy.shop without plugging any performance optimization tools. 

As expected it didn’t do very well in the pageSpeed test and you managed to achieve a measly 36 for the mobile version and 50 for the desktop version.

Mobile Mode:

In mobile mode, the performance score is just 36. Which indicates this website fails the performance test for the mobile version. Which is not a good sign for any website, specially keeping the mobile first policy google in mind. 

Below are the pagespeed metrics which had a heavy impact on the website’s low pagespeed scores.

• First Contentful Paint (FCP) – 5.0s
• Large Contentful Paint (LCP) -5.8s
• Total Blocking Time (TBT) – 1440 ms

Desktop mode:

While the desktop division of the The pagespeed performance score is also not very high either, it looks far better than the mobile version. 

Below are the pagespeed metrics that had the biggest impact on its pagespeed score.

• First Contentful Paint (FCP) – 1.9s
• Large Contentful Paint (LCP) -2.4s
• Total Blocking Time (TBT) – 650 ms

Case 2- Let’s check the website’s pagespeed after installing WP Rocket

While installing Wp Rocket is like any other plugin in the wordpress ecosystem, you would need to “configure” it, go to each other individually & activate them.While it might give the user some satisfaction of them doing the optimization, it is nonetheless a time-consuming process.

But what’s the impact of WP Rocket on the pagespeed score?

            Mobile mode:

Well as far as the mobile version goes, it’s next to no improvement, not only that we can see the Total block time is surprisingly increased after using WP Rocket plugin. Not the best way to spend you 60 odd dollars.

Desktop mode:

However, we do see the value of the WP Rocket in the desktop version of the website. The optimized version of the website managed to achieve a respectable 78 on the pagespeed score.

We can see FCP, LCP & TBT all improving from their previous states to a somewhat respectable score.

See the test video :

Case 3 – Checking the website’s pagespeed after installing RabbitLoader

Finally we would install RabbitLoader after uninstalling WP Rocket of course, & check the performance of cellofy.shop, The website is checked within just 5 minutes of installing the plugin and here are the results.

Mobile mode:

Here, after installing RabbitLoader the mobile pagespeed score has improved drastically, while WP Rockets improved the score from 36 for the optimized version to just 37 RabbitLoader manages to bump up the pagespeed scores to a very respectable 82. 

The score improvement is the pagespeed test is the result of improvements made in,

• FCP ( From to 5.0 seconds to just 3.3 second)
• LCP ( From to 5.8 seconds to 3.6 seconds) and
• TBT ( From 1440ms to 40 ms)

Desktop mode:

Finally, for the desktop version, WP Rocket achieved a respectable 78 from the original score of just 50. RabbitLoader archived a near perfect 99 out of 100. So how did RabbitLoader achieve such an unrealistic looking, near perfect score? That too for the home page?
RabbitLoader has reduced the FCP from 1.9 seconds to just 0.6 seconds.While LCP came down from 2.4 seconds to just 0.7 seconds and the TBT became just 10 ms from 650 ms on the unoptimised website.

See the test video:

Checking the website’s pagespeed score table view: without any plugin, with WP Rocket, and with RabbitLoader plugin

Conclusion

If you are planning to optimize your website or improve the current optimization, now you have the information on your side to make a judgment call. 

If you have enough time on your hands maybe spend a day installing both WP Rocket & RabbitLoader on your website & see the differences in score yourself.

Maybe you are using WP Rocket for a long time, maybe it’s time you try RabbitLoader which can give you a bit more performance, that little bit of an edge that might become a deciding factor for the search engine to rank you higher or  lower than your competition.

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