Google PageSpeed grade does not improve
In most cases, WP Rocket will improve your PageSpeed grade. The extent to which it improves depends on the baseline performance of your site: the hosting, plugins you’re using, content you’ve added etc.
How can I improve Core Web Vitals?
Please see our guides:
Find your site’s baseline performance
Disable WP Rocket and run a PageSpeed test to see what your baseline scores are.
Alternatively, you can also run a test bypassing WP Rocket, by adding ?nowprocket to the URL, to find the baseline.
Then, reactivate WP Rocket and adjust the options as described below.
How WP Rocket can improve your score
Here are the specific WP Rocket features that will directly impact your score:
Page caching
Caching is enabled automatically (unless your webhost is handling it) and will increase the overall score and Core Web Vitals. It also directly improves server response time.
Mobile caching
This option is enabled by default. It ensures your mobile site is cached and all optimizations are applied there.
Delay JavaScript Execution
This is a very powerful feature which can help improve the following recommendations, and therefore have a significant impact on your score:
- Minimize main thread work
- Remove Unused JavaScript
- Reduce impact of third party code
- Reduce JavaScript execution time
Learn more about this feature: Delay JavaScript Execution
Remove Unused CSS
- Addresses: Reduce Unused CSS
- Reduces HTTP requests and overall page size
Load CSS Asynchronsously
- Eliminates render-blocking CSS
- Addresses Preload Key Requests, for CSS files.
Load JavaScript Deferred
LazyLoad for images
- Addresses: Defer Offscreen images
Preload Fonts
- Addresses Preload Key Requests, for fonts hosted on your site
- Google Fonts are automatically optimized
Add Missing image dimensions
- May help with Cumulative Layout Shift
Minify CSS
- Addresses Minify CSS
- Addresses Ensure text remains visible during webfont load
Minify JavaScript
- Addresses: Minify JavaScript
Prefetch DNS requests
- Addresses: Preconnect to required origins
GZIP compression
- This is applied automatically on Apache servers.
- Addresses: Enable text compression
Browser caching
- This is applied automatically on Apache and LiteSpeed servers
- Addresses: Serve assets with an efficient cache policy
Check how if your score has improved
After activating and configuring the above options, run another PageSpeed test to see how it’s improved. Consult the detailed guides provided above to find out more.
How to optimize further
There will likely be some remaining recommendations, which cannot be fixed completely with WP Rocket. We’ve covered the most common ones in the list below:
- Properly size images
- Serve images in next-gen format
- Efficiently encode images
- Avoid enormous network payloads
- Avoid excessive DOM size
- Reduce JavaScript Execution time
- Minimize main-thread work
- Remove Unused JavaScript
- Reduce the impact of 3rd party code
All of our guides on PageSpeed recommendations can be found here.
Why is my mobile score is much worse than desktop?
Please see our guide: How to Improve Your Mobile PageSpeed Score
How long does it take to see the improvements?
WP Rocket's speed improvements take place immediately. The report should change in real time, after you've enabled/disabled the optimization features.
As a note, the Load CSS Asynchronously and Remove Unused CSS features will show a notice to let you know you when they've been completed and are successfully applied to your site.
If you don't see changes right away, please check this guide, or please contact our support team.
My score isn’t high enough, can you optimize my site for me?
We don’t provide an optimization service but our support is here to help if there are specific issues using our features. Optimization is a complex task that will require some work on your part, too. In some cases you may need the help of a developer. In that case, we recommend Codeable.
Regardless of the score, WP Rocket makes the actual loading time of your page faster, improving the experience for your visitors. To get another perspective of the speed, you could use a tool like Pingom to measure the load time.
Core Web Vitals Assessment: Failed
The Core Web Vitals Assessment is the score based on the information taken from real visitors and collected during the last 28 days.
WP Rocket can't change the Core Web Vitals Assessment score. WP Rocket can have an impact specifically on the Performance metrics section.
However, in theory, with good results in the Performance metrics, the assessment could be improved with the time, as visitors will have the chance to interact with an optimized site.
GTmetrix grade does not improve
GTmetrix report is powered by Lighthouse, therefore, in most cases, addressing the recommendations in the PageSpeed report as explained above will improve GTmetrix results too.
Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO sections
WP Rocket's optimizations are aimed to address only audits from the Performance section.
Audits and scores of the Accessibility, Best Practices and SEO sections of the PageSpeed report are outside WP Rocket's scope, and should be addressed as instructed in Lighthouse official documentation:
Core Web Vitals Assessment is the score based on the information from your real visitors, collected during the last 28 days.
WP Rocket can't change the Core Web Vitals (CWV) Assessment score. Instead, WP Rocket will have an impact specifically on the Performance metrics section.
However, with good results in the Performance metrics, the CWV Assessment should be improved with the time.