WP Rocket is a popular WordPress caching plugin that works great on WPML-powered websites. Learn how to set up the basic configuration for multilingual sites and what to pay attention to.
Having a nice, functional design along with quality content are key ingredients to having a successful website. Yet, if your website is slow, all the efforts and time that you have spent on your website design and content won’t pay off.
Having a slow website negatively impacts the user experience. On top of that, your site would have less chance of getting a high search engine ranking due to slowness.
Testing Your Site’s Performance
It is important to test your site’s performance. You can do this using one of the following tools:
These services provide you with a detailed report of your website’s performance along with a list of the issues that contribute to your site’s slowness.
How to Use WP Rocket
WP Rocket is one of the best performance optimization plugins that speed up your site. Upon activation, WP Rocket applies the most recommended performance optimization configuration.
When it comes to caching plugins configuration, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. This means that a specific configuration that works well on one site might not work on another.
You should always activate one optimization option at a time. Check if it improves performance, and is not causing any issues. If you activate all the options at once and run into an issue, you won’t be able to know which one caused it.
WP Rocket doesn’t require any special configuration to run on multilingual WPML-powered sites.
Page Caching
When you enable caching, it creates a static HTML version of the page that the server delivers to your users. This helps decrease the amount of processing on your server to deliver the page and as a result, contributes to decreasing the page loading time.
Upon activation, WP Rocket automatically enables page caching. You can tweak caching options such as enabling caching for mobile devices and logged-in users by navigating to the Cache tab under Settings → WP Rocket.
Caching options
WP Rocket caches pages in both the default language version and the secondary language. You can check this by following the steps below:
By default, WP Rocket delivers cached pages to logged-out users. Hence, make sure that you are not logged-in or use an incognito window.
Right-click on the secondary language version of the page and choose View Page Source.
Scroll to the bottom of the page and look for WP Rocket’s caching footprint.
Checking on WP Rocket caching footprint
How to Clear A Page’s Cache
You can clear/preload the cache of any page in any language. Simply visit the page on the front-end and use the WP Rocket menu in the top admin bar.
Clearing the cache for all languages or a specific language
Additional Resources About Caching Multilingual Sites
File optimization includes CSS and JS minification. This reduces CSS and JS file sizes by removing white spaces, comments, and line breaks. Additionally, you have the option to combine these files into one which helps with reducing the page’s loading time.
You can customize the file optimization options by navigating to the File Optimization tab under Settings → WP Rocket.
Setting File Optimization options
To check that CSS and JS minification is working correctly on your secondary language pages, follow the steps below:
Open the secondary language page on the front-end. Right-click and choose View Page Source
In the head section, look for URLs that end with .css and .js. They should include a path to the folder named min inside the cache folder.
Checking on CSS and JS minification
Lazy Loading
As images add to the size of a page, it increases the loading time. There are several ways of reducing the negative performance impact of images. One of them is lazy loading.
Rather than loading all the images on your page at once which increases the page loading time, lazy loading loads the images only when the user scrolls down the page and reaches them.
You can enable lazy loading by navigating to the Media tab under Settings → WP Rocket. On this screen, you can also find other media optimization options such as disabling WordPress embeds and allowing WebP caching. To learn more check out WP Rocket’s documentation on media optimization options.
Setting media optimization options
Lazy loading works with images on your default and secondary language pages alike.
Content Delivery Network
One of the factors that impact your website performance is the distance between the server that hosts your website and the user’s location. Generally speaking, the closer the user is to the server the faster your website will load for him/her and vice versa. This is referred to as network latency.
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers that are distributed in different locations. Each of the servers has a copy of the static content on your website including images, videos, styling sheets, and JS files with the purpose of delivering the content faster to users based on their location.
WP Rocket is compatible with the majority of CDN providers. It also provides its own CDN service, RocketCDN.
You can enable CDN and tweak its setting by navigating to the CDN tab under Settings → WP Rocket.
Configuring CDN
Known Issues
WPML works fine with this plugin, but sometimes there could be minor issues we're working on. This is expected as both plugins provide frequent updates.
