Issue #186 Loop WP

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #186 of Loop WP!

Last week was about prepping your WooCommerce store's hosting for the long holiday season.

This week is about two of my favourite plugins for boosting WooCommerce performance.

Let’s go! 👇

💡 WooCommerce performance is never just about hosting, but as we discussed last week, it’s where good foundations are laid.

Plugins can make a measurable difference, especially in stores with heavier themes, page builders, or many third-party extensions.

Two of the most popular optimisation plugins are Perfmatters and WP Rocket.

I use both Kinsta and Rocket.net for hosting WooCommerce sites.

Kinsta recommends WP Rocket in their setup, and so does Rocket[dot]net, which even offers a free license for each site.

Most people treat WP Rocket and Perfmatters as competitors.

🧠 In reality, good performing WooCommerce stores often use both…not because they overlap, but because they solve completely different problems:

(The above is an oversimplification, but you get the idea.)

They complement each other when configured correctly, and the combination is often stronger than either tool on its own. That’s exactly how I use them for my clients.

WP Rocket’s strength is its all-in-one approach. It handles caching, preloading, basic asset optimisation and database cleanup.

For WooCommerce stores without server-level caching, this is incredibly valuable. **

What WP Rocket is best at:

🚀 This gives you the performance foundation: fast pages, reduced server load and consistent response times.

** (Although you will have to turn off Preloading with some hosts due to PHP threads [e.g. Kinsta], and CPU resources on shared hosts. WP Rocket page caching is also turned off by default with Kinsta.)

Perfmatters works at a different level than WP Rocket.

Instead of caching entire pages, it controls what loads on each page. This complements WP Rocket by reducing unnecessary assets before caching even takes place.

What Perfmatters is best at:

** (This is my favourite feature of Perfmatters, but the new code snippets feature has me excited!)

Both tools share some features, but they are not competitors.

🚨 You will have a choice about which plugin to use for those specific features, and some to be aware of:

✅ You can safely use both plugins side-by-side if configured correctly.

But overall, I am still happy to recommend WP Rocket, and Perfmatters can have my money, “no questions asked.” 🤣

I am a legacy user of WP Rocket, so recent changes have caused me a little bit of concern for the future:

There are lots of performance plugins out there, like NitroPack or FlyingPress (which get good user feedback), so do some research, but it’s hard to go wrong with Perfmatters and WP Rocket. ❤️

Last week, I was going to share Karol Król’s video 10k+ WordPress Plugins Analyzed Through PCP and PHP_CodeSniffer, as WooCommerce came out terribly.

Something didn’t seem right (and it’s not Karol’s fault). I reached out to James Kemp (WooCommerce Core Product Manager)and showed him Karol’s original LinkedIn post, where James noted something very important: things aren’t as bad as they seem.

That’s it for this week, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,

WP Rocket, Perfmatters and WooCommerce are trademarks of their respective owners. They are used here for identification and illustrative purposes only, and this image does not imply any endorsement or affiliation.