As website visitors expect the website they access to be fast, it is important to optimize the website speed. WordPress sites can become slow when you install plugins or use feature-rich WordPress themes that execute hundreds of lines of JavaScript code and have large stylesheets that contain several classes. There are several free caching extensions but in reality, the plugins come with locked features. You can unlock the features only after subscribing to their premium plans. If the plugin is completely free, it may not have features that will really help your website. For example, WP Super Cache is a free WP extension. This plugin doesn’t have ads, but it comes with only 3 to 4 useful functions – page caching, browser caching, preloading, etc. It doesn’t have the option to minify CSS/JS files nor does it generate critical CSS.
Instead of using a freemium product with limited features, why not use a premium caching plugin? WP Rocket has proven that it is a great extension. To best honest, it is the most affordable premium WordPress caching plugin. According to its developers, WPR is being used on over a million sites. NitroPack, on the other hand, is a new kid on the block. This extension has decent ratings on WordPress.org. The free version of NP is ad-supported and has several limitations. Is WP Rocket better than NitroPack or vice versa? Which plugin among the two offers more features? Below, we’ve compared the two WP caching products.
Critical CSS: Critical CSS improves the website paint times significantly. If you generate and add critical CSS to your website manually and test the site’s loading time with the Google Pagespeed insights tool, you will be impressed with the results. Like WP Rocket, Nitro Pack can also generate critical CSS for a website.
Minification: When minification is active, WPR and NP will strip whitespaces, eliminate redundant CSS/JS code, etc and lower the size of the JavaScript file or stylesheet.
Browser caching: Browser caching, when enabled, makes a web browser on the website visitor’s PC store CSS/JS files and load the same when the visitor revisits the site. Both NitroPack and WP Rocket support Browser caching.
CDN: NitroPack is a CDN service provider. WP Rocket doesn’t offer CDN service yet. The company bundles CDN service with each of its plans. We have shared the plans below.
GZip compression: Both WordPress caching plugins support GZIP compression. GZipped files are smaller than the original files. NitroPack is one step ahead by supporting Brotli compression. JS files compressed using Brotli compression are smaller compared to the files compressed with Gzip.
Cache preloading: WP Rocket preloads the cache automatically when you make some changes to the site. This feature ensures that the website visitor has instant access to the latest articles.
Pagespeed: The premium plans of NitroPack employ the Google Pagespeed module on their server to minify HTML, CSS/JS files, etc. WP Rocket uses a non-pagespeed module to achieve better/similar results than pagespeed.
NitroPack has launched four plans – 1 free and three paid. Each plan supports a single site only. The free subscription offers 1GB CDN bandwidth and supports 5000 page views. It inserts a NitroPack branding in the site’s footer. The 17.50 dollar subscription supports 50000 page views per month and offers 25GB CDN bandwidth. The 42 dollar subscription provides 100GB CDN bandwidth and supports 200k page views monthly. There’s a 1000k pageviews plan as well. This subscription costs a whopping 146.67 dollars every month, and it comes with 500GB CDN bandwidth.
WP Rocket, on the other hand, is an affordable caching solution. Its pricing starts at 49 dollars per year. Unlike NP, which supports one website per plan, WPR has launched plans that support 3 to unlimited websites. The subscription that supports three websites is priced at 99 dollars, and the plan that lets you use the plugin on unlimited websites is priced at 249 dollars.
Closing words: As you can see above, WP Rocket and NitroPack offer similar features, but there’s a massive difference between the pricing of the two plugins.
