Just a couple of years ago website speed was not that important to google.

And we as a human had a lot of patience when browsing the internet.

Not anymore

We tend to jump out of a website if it takes even 4 sec or more to load, resulting in google adding website speed as an important metric of SEO to improve the user experience.

In short, If your website is not loading in less than 5 sec,

Consider forgetting about good User engagement on your website and ultimately less organic traffic.

But the good news is, it is really simple to increase website speed.

In my experience of making over 150+ wordpress websites, I have discovered a pattern that if followed properly your website can have a decent Speed.

And one of them is having a good caching plugin – Caching plugin will do most of the Speed optimization for your website without even touching a single line of code.

Although there are many caching plugins out there and I guess you are here to learn about two of them i.e. Swift performance Vs WpRocket.

So I will not keep you waiting for long and I will try to provide all my past experiences with these two plugins in the most comprehensive Fashion.

Shall we start?

Use of a caching plugin

When you start a youtube channel or a blog or any website there are so many moving pieces that must be fine-tuned with time especially website code and server disk.

But most of us running a wordpress blog are not that technical to optimize website code or understand server cache memory.

So we need a good caching plugin to do this for us.

Here is what caching plugins like swift performance or Wprocket can do for your website:

• Minify heavy JS or CSS code.
• Optimize database 
• Clear browser cache 
• Image optimization
• Lazyload your Page assets
• And many more optimizations

And just to perform these basic optimizations on your website without these caching plugins would have been a real headache for you.

You can say

” a caching plugin is like Robin from the batman movie, who takes care of all the technicalities and fine-tuning of the project so that the Batman (your website) can focus on the most important tasks “

So now that you got an idea of what these caching plugins do for you,

Let us look at the 2 most popular plugin and understand which one is better.

Wp rocket plugin overview

This plugin is easily the most popular plugin among the wordpress hunter community and whenever I make a video on speed optimization for wordpress one or two comments will be on this plugin’s complete tutorial.

But is this plugin that powerful, does it fulfill the promise on the hype this plugin is getting over the years,

The answer is partial yes and partially no

See Wp rocket is a veteran when it comes to caching plugin, they have all the features of a classic speed optimization plugin should have like page-level caching,  Database optimization, and other such features which were unique in its time but now we have more advanced caching plugins out there which can performer more task in less price.

However, the wp rocket still does an amazing job to optimize your wordpress website for speed.

Here are some of the powerful features of the wp rocket.

• Mobile device optimization: Using wp rocket you can optimize your website for the mobile user in just a click means it will have all the features to enhance the user experience of a user coming for a mobile device
• GZIP compression: This is just a fancy term used for compression of database resources,  wp rocket does it to optimize the rendering speed of the browser for your website.
• Image optimization: Wp rocket does Image optimization using an additional service called Imagify, which is not free but does a good job with image optimization.

So these are some of the many features that you get with the wp rocket plugin, it is not the best caching plugin out there but certainly the most popular plugin for wordpress caching.

If you want to learn more about wp rocket click the button below.

However, there is one more powerhouse caching plugin for wordpress called ‘ SWIFT PERFORMANCE’

Let’s talk about this plugin.

Swift performance plugin overview

The swift performance was an underrated caching plugin for a long time until we all realized how powerful this plugin is and they offer so many features and are way less expensive than other alternatives.

If you are someone who has no understanding of how to configure and fine-tune your caching plugin. Swift performance is just a tool that you would like.

They have an auto-config option which will do a self-analysis of your website and automatically, set all the necessary preset to optimize the speed of your website.

All you need to do is clear cache from time to time with a click of your mouse.

And not only this Swift performance has an edge over other caching tools because of its amazing features that no other plugin in the industry has.

Here are some of the special features of the swift performance plugin:

• Smart youtube embed: means browser will not load server asset for youtube embedded video until the user decides to play that video
• Early load optimization: With this feature, swift performance will be loaded Before all the other plugins with all the optimization settings to enhance the user experience.
• Inbuild image optimization: Most of the caching plugin knows their target customer, they know once they bought a caching plugin soon they will need an image optimization plugin, so they upsell us an Image optimization tool. This is not the case with the swift performance, they have an inbuilt powerful image optimizer that can put any overly charged image optimizer tool to shame. Just think for a moment, we just bought a premium plugin for our website speed optimization and realize, Oh! I also need an image optimizer, let’s pull out our credit card once again. that’s the case with most of the caching plugin (not swift performance)  

Swift performance has many other optimization features, but those features are common across all other caching plugins, so I have not listed them here.

If you want to learn more about swift performance 

Now that you have an introduction to both of these tools, let us start a part by part comparison of both of these plugins.

I feel when we are looking for a solution, among 1000s of question popping in our head, two of them are universal among all of us

1. What we will get – Features and solutions
2. What we need to pay – pricing of the solution

And that is exactly what we are going to see in the next section

Swift Performance vs WP Rocket- FEATURES

I will keep this comparison short and simple. here’s a quick snapshot.

There are at least 100+ features in both of these tools and I will not kill your brain cells by talking about the ALPHA-GAMMA DECAY, ( technicalities talk )

Features that are hard to consume for people like me and you, we don’t even use them either.

I will only throw light on the features that are most commonly used and are easy to understand 

• Caching and optimization – Removing unused files

• Content delivery optimization and CDN – How effectively web browsers will deliver your website to the user.
• Image optimization 

And for most websites, these are the only 3 features that are needed to be optimized to extract maximum speed out of your current web host using a caching plugin.

So in this section, we will see how these two caching plugin helps us to do our website speed optimization.

Let us start with features no 1 i.e. caching and basic optimization

Swift Performance vs WP Rocket- Caching

Consider your website as your office and you will understand the importance of cleaning it.

You know with time how messy it can be and if not cleaned it is going to affect your work efficiency.

So what you do…

You take out your good old vacuum cleaner and start cleaning unnecessary files from your workstation.

This is exactly what you do, whenever you click that ‘ CLEAR CACHE’ button on both of these tools.

And in my experience, both of these tools do an amazing job in finding what is unnecessary and clean them especially when you are using page builders like elementor, Divi, or Thrive Architect.

After all, they are called caching plugins – that’s their primary job.

Now let’s go back to our office cleaning example once again.

Do we only clean the dust and wastes of our office?

Don’t we try to rearrange important documents, shift daily use items on easy to navigate places, and try to do all those small changes that will improve our productivity in the office?

Of course, we do.

Similarly, when we are cleaning our website with these caching plugins we try to make it more effective with features like

• Minification of HTML, CSS, JS codes 
• A clear previous version of our website from Database 
• Lazy load of codes and much more

And both of these plugins are really good at this, I would say WP rocket is slightly better than swift performance on this.

Let’s keep it this way if you are someone who just wants to do all these optimizations easily without any confusion WP rocket is just the best tool for you.

But if you want to have more control and you have some knowledge of coding and website structure, Swift performance will help you to tap on to these resources easily.

So now when you will see these options i.e. Minification, Lazyload, etc. you know what you are doing, Right?

Now with that, we have understood how website caching and basic optimizations work.

Let us move to feature no 2  i.e. our content delivery optimization

Swift Performance vs WP Rocket- CDN

Understanding how the content of your website is delivered to the User is very important for you and if I will start explaining this to you in the language of web developers, you will surely have a headache.

So let’s not make this thing more complicated than what actually it is and try to understand what is Content delivery optimization by continuing with our office cleaning example.

I will try to make it easy for you to understand.

Generally, our customers (users) try to connect directly with us via our office (website).

When they will enter your office they will have to first face the reception area (web browsers) and there they will have to submit their request over there, a receptionist will then call the back office ( website server) to confirm their appointment and reason for the arrival. Then they are allowed to enter for the meeting.

This is exactly what is happening when a user is trying to access your website.

First, they will go to a web browser and submit their request ( your domain )

The web browser will deliver your website content to the user.

This is what generally happens.

Now imaging instead of a receptionist doing those manual verifications, when your customer arrives at your office you have a robot asking them to enter their name and email which is then verified on the spot, and they are allowed to enter.

Will that not be a smooth user experience – This is where content delivery optimization comes and both of these caching plugins can perform this in their own way.

Instead of disturbing your website server (back-office) what if we can set some parameters which will fulfill basic user requests.

This is where swift performance pulls out its trump card, they have a unique feature called browser caching – Swift Performance adds the necessary headers to enable browser caching. Browser caching will speed up page loading and also decrease the traffic on your server.

This is what they are saying on their website, do not kill your brain cells in trying to understand what is that? rather try to understand why is that?

The swift performance plugin will add some headers so that browsers can understand the most commonly used resources and will prefetch it quickly for the next user request

Wp rocket does have this feature but they do it differently, Wp rocket your images and Js file will be preloaded if the user clicks on a different page on your website.

It’s like saving your customer information so that they will not need to verify them in the next meeting.

Apart from this, you can use a CDN to deliver your server content more effectively for both of these caching plugins. We have a free content delivery network – Cloudflare integration.

But in WP rocket we also have a paid CDN called rocket CDN. 

Well, this was the second feature that we need to pay attention to and we have seen how both swift performance and Wp Rocket play their role in this Content delivery optimization for a website.

I hope I was able to make you understand what is the importance of this optimization,

The last feature that we are going to talk about will be Image optimization, although it is very straight forward.

But…

Since we are enjoying our Office example I will be trying to convey the importance of Image optimization with this example.

Let’s get into the last feature

Swift Performance vs WP Rocket- Image optimization

So we have done a lot of hard work, we have cleaned our office, we have verified our customer’s appointment for the meeting.

But…

When your customer arrives at the meeting room, you ask them to sit on a bed instead of a chair.

Even though the bed is way more comfortable than chairs, is it appropriate?

This is what happens when you try to show a HIGH-Resolution image to your website users.

Even though the quality is best, is it appropriate?

No, if you will try to do that you will destroy the page loading speed due to the size of that high-quality images.

So what should we do? 

After all images and graphics are the things that grab our website visitor’s attention.

This is where Image optimization plays its part.

We have come a long way in the field of technology and every day some group of smart people is finding answers to all our problems.

Now we can have two images looking almost the same at a fraction of its size.

But how do we do this?

There are a couple of ways either you can do optimization for all your images manually or you can use a good image optimization plugin (usually paid)

Wp rocket has a service called Imagify which is a premium service that will cost you up to $10/MONTH additionally after paying for the Wp Rocket plugin.

And this is where the Swift performance plugin is killing all its competitions.

“ You get a powerful image optimization tool along with the Plugin”

Yes, you have read it correctly, you get an inbuilt image optimization feature which will allow you to compress an unlimited no of images without any monthly fees.

If you don’t believe me see it for yourself

With this feature, we are going to save a lot of our hard-earned money in the long run.

So this is it, we have discussed all the three major speed optimizations which you can do with a WordPress caching plugin.

So far if you are enjoying what you have learned from this article, I would really love to hear from you in the comments below.

Remember I told you, when we are looking for a solution, among 1000s of question popping in our head, two of them are universal among all of us i.e

• What solution we will get 
• What we pay for it

So far we have seen what solution we will get with both of these powerful caching. plugins.

Now it’s time we take a look at what we need to pay for these solutions.

Swift Performance vs WP Rocket- Pricing

Whatever we have learned so far will become irrelevant, if we will not understand the smart marketing behind the pricing structure for both of these caching plugins.

Let’s start with Wp Rocket

Wp Rocket Pricing 

So on paper, you will see a Wp Rocket license starting from $49/ year which is just a bit higher than swift performance.

But is it really the case?

With the Wp Rocket plugin, you don’t get the Image compression feature, you will have to pay for it separately 

This means first we will have to buy a license for Wp Rocket then we will have to sign up for a monthly fee of $10 for image optimization.

Yes, you will get the best possible service but is it really worth what we pay?

That answer I will leave up to you, there are some die heart fan of Wp Rocket whom I don’t want to offend 

Here’s in a nutshell what you will need to pay

If you will ask my personal opinion, I think I was overpaying for the services, and just a couple of months ago I made a switch from Wp rocket to Swift performance on this website.

Now that we have discussed the pricing of the Wp Rocket plugin let us see what Swift performance has to offer when it comes to pricing.

Swift Performance Pricing

Pricing of swift performance pro is very straight forward for a yearly payment, license starts from $39 with no hidden cost or monthly subscriptions 

And as I said earlier you get an inbuilt image optimizer tool that will not cost any extra 

Here’s what you will pay for swift performance pro

Now that is what we say, a comparison between the best in the business.

I have put forward all my knowledge and experience in front of you to make a better decision for your website.

But before I give my final verdict about these two plugins, I would love to tell you about my experience with both of these plugins which you can not see in papers.

Let us see some of the pros and cons of both of these tools

Swift Performance vs WP Rocket- Pros and Cons

Although both of these plugins are good, there are some drawbacks with both of them I hope with time it will be improved with future updates.

let’s look at them one by one

Swift Performance Pros and cons

Wp Rocket Pros and Cons

So these are some of the pros and cons for both of these caching plugins for wordpress.

with that let’s move to the conclusion for this comparison, what is my final verdict?

let us find out.

Swift Performance vs WP Rocket- Conclusion

Congratulation, you made it right till the end and to your surprise let me tell you not all of them out there has the patience to FINISH.

But you did…

I guess you want to know what are my final thoughts on which caching plugin you should go with.

I will not keep you hanging and will give a straight forward answer.

For years I have been using Wp Rocket for all of my website and clients’ website.

But recently I made a switch to Swift performance for a couple of reasons.

First, I wanted to save money on Imagify’s monthly subscription with Swift performance’s inbuilt image optimizer

Second, I feel Technology which comes with swift performance are more advanced and suits my need.

But which one you should buy?

Hey, listen buddy…

I have given my honest opinion and my experiences, but in the end, it is you who wants to have a solution for your website.

If you want to have an easy beginner solution go for Wp Rocket.

But if you want to have a long-term goal and want an advanced solution along with saving money in the long run Go with Swift performance ( Recommended ).

well, that’s all I have to say about this article, I really appreciate your valuable time and effort to read this.

 Tell then see you in my next Article.