Six seconds is a lost phone call

Six seconds. That's how long Vince's photo gallery took to load on a phone in a work van. Vince is the other plumber I keep, and his gallery is his whole pitch: repipes, water heater swaps, before-and-afters. He paid for those photos. Customers on cell signal never saw them. They saw a blank screen and a spinner, and then they called the other guy on the search results.

Vince's site runs on WordPress, and WordPress pages get rebuilt from scratch for every single visitor unless you install caching. A caching plugin bakes each page once and serves the finished copy to everybody after. Caching is the cheapest speed you can buy, and $59 a year buys a very good one.

What it costs

WP Rocket is $59 a year for one website, $119 for three, $299 for unlimited. Those prices were current in March, and they include updates and support for the year. There is no free version and no trial, but there's a 14-day money-back guarantee, so you can test it on your own site and get out clean.

It's the only plugin I pay for that does nothing you can see. No new features, no buttons. Pages just show up fast. I pay it myself for Vince's site, one license, and he rounds me up quarterly.

For comparison, Sal's site doesn't run WP Rocket at all. His host builds caching in for free, and paying twice would be exactly the kind of thing I write this blog to yell about. If your host already caches, start there. If it doesn't, this is the fix.

How I set it up on Vince's site

1. Bought the single-site license for $59 and pasted the key into the plugin. Two minutes.
2. Turned on page caching with preloading. That's the whole core fix. The page gets baked and served.
3. Turned on lazy load so the gallery images only load when you scroll to them. His five-year-old gallery alone was worth the ticket.
4. Turned on minifying and deferring, one switch at a time, testing the contact form and the photo pages after each one.
5. Loaded the gallery on my phone in the truck before I drove home. Six seconds had become about two. The measurements matched what the testing tools said, roughly three times faster.

That took an hour and change, most of it testing. The one scare: I got greedy with the JavaScript setting and the booking form went dead. One toggle off, fixed. Turn things on one at a time and test after each, or you'll be the guy who broke his own site on a Tuesday.

The dryer vent version

A slow site is a dryer running with a clogged vent. The machine isn't broken. It's heating the same air over and over, pushing through lint, taking twice as long to do the job. You don't need a new dryer. You need the duct cleared.

Caching is the clean duct. The page is built once, sitting warm and finished, and every visitor after that gets it handed over instead of remade. Same site, same content, a third of the work on the machine. Every site I keep accumulates lint. Photos, plugins, fonts. It never gets better on its own.

The honest downsides: it's $59 a year for something free plugins sort of do, and free caching plugins exist if you like turning eight dials and reading forum threads. I did that once for two weeks and bought WP Rocket at the end of it, which tells you how that went. Aggressive settings can fight other plugins, mostly forms and sliders. Turn things on one at a time and you'll be fine.

What to do Monday

Run your homepage through Google's PageSpeed test tonight and write the number down where you'll see it. Then load your own site on your phone, standing in the driveway, on cell signal, not wifi. If it takes longer than three seconds, your customers are already leaving. Fix the duct before you redesign the laundry room.