Want to use WP Rocket for a faster website? Watch this!

Intro

Do you have your own website or webshop? Then you probably already knew that the speed of your website or webshop is very important. What is good to know is that a fast website is not only important for a good user experience. The speed of your website also plays an important role in the findability of your website or webshop in Google.

Therefore, you cannot avoid making your website or webshop faster. Within WordPress, there are a lot of plugins that can help you do this. One of the most popular plugins for a faster website is WP Rocket, but it can come with a problem. Therefore, in this article I'm going to show you what the problem is, how it arises and how you can fix it.

What is and does WP Rocket do?

Most people will already be familiar with WP Rocket. In fact, WP Rocket is one of the most popular plugins within WordPress that you can use to make your own website, relatively easily, a lot faster.

Are you not yet familiar with WP Rocket? Then I can definitely recommend you to check out this tool, because it can really make your website a lot faster. Even when you are using a heavy page builder like the Divi theme.

The fact that WP Rocket can make your website so much faster is because of the following features they apply:

1. Page caching & browser caching
2. Cache preloading
3. GZIP Compression
4. File optimization(CSS and JavaScript)
5. Media optimization(Lazy Loading, WebP converter)

With all these features, you can really make your website a whole lot faster. So after installing and setting up the plugin, you should be able to pass Google' s Core Web Vitals.

What is the problem now?

As you just read, WP Rocket is a very useful tool when you want to make your website faster, but for many websites it does come with a problem. Let me explain this.

When you get started with WordPress, all the urls of your website end with a "/". Do you enter a url without "/" at the end? For example, think /rank-tracker then this url is automatically redirected to /rank-tracker/.

The only thing I've noticed now is that after setting up WP Rocket, this doesn't always work. What results is that you get two pages with exactly the same content. In fact, each url on the website exists both with and without "/" at the end.

The version without "/" at the end does have a canonical to the version with "/". This does signal to Google that the url with "/" at the end is more important, but for a canonical, it is up to Google to decide whether or not to follow it.

As a result, I have seen several Web sites where these problems occurred. In some websites it was even so bad that both the version with and without "/" at the end of the url were indexed. The result of this is duplicate content and of course you want to avoid that.

How do you check if your website has this problem?

Is your website or webshop using WP Rocket? Then it is good to check if you are also experiencing this problem. If this problem occurs, it is best to solve it as soon as possible to prevent damage.

1. Manual control

If you want to quickly and easily check if this problem is affecting you, you can perform the manual check. What you do here is navigate to a page on your website. Next, you will land on a url that ends in a "/". What you can do now is remove that "/" at the end of the url and hit enter again. If you now end up on a page and are not automatically redirected to the version with "/", this problem is playing into your hands.

2. Control with Screaming Frog

Want to do an instant check for your entire website? Then of course this cannot be done manually. In this case, you'll want to use a tool like Screaming Frog to verify that it can see both urls with and without "/".

For Screaming Frog, it's good to know that this tool is free up to 500 urls. Does your Web site or Web shop consist of more than 500 urls? Then you need a paid version of Screaming Frog.

3. Control via Search Console

Don't have a Screaming Frog? Then you can also perform the check through Google Search Console. The best way to check this is to go to "Indexing" → "Pages" in Search Console. Here you can then check for urls that Google sees both with and without "/".

Another thing you can do within Search Console is to go to "Performance" → "Search Results." Here you can then filter on an important keyword of your website. Then you can check which urls score for this keyword. If both the url with and without "/" are displayed here, you know that your website or webshop is already experiencing the problem.

How do you solve this problem?

By now, have you checked if this problem affects you? If so, there are now 3 scenarios:

1. Your website or web shop does not have this problem
2. Your website or webshop has this problem, but the pages are not yet indexed
3. Your website or webshop does have this and pages are already indexed

Do you fall under scenario 1 or 2? Then you obviously want to solve this problem and there are actually two ways to do that. Below I will highlight both methods you can use to solve this problem.

1. Add code

Since I experienced this problem with several websites and web shops, I contacted WP Rocket. They then immediately came up with a solution to the problem with a link to this page.

What it really comes down to is that you need to add a few extra lines of code to the htaccess file. If you are using NGINX servers, this involves the following code:

2. Add Plugin

Are you not super tech-savvy? Then adding the above code to the htaccess file is probably going to be a bit tricky. In this case, it is good to know that you can also install an additional plugin. This plugin then takes care of this same problem.

The plugin cannot be found in WordPress itself, but you can easily download it via this link from Github.com. After clicking this link, a .zip file is automatically downloaded that you can then upload into WordPress.

Conclusion

If you want to make your website or webshop better findable in Google, a tool like Ranktracker is very useful, but do not forget the speed of your website or webshop.

For making your website faster, you have a lot of options, but one of the most popular solutions is WP Rocket. It's just good to know that using WP Rocket can be associated with this problem.

Therefore, in this article I have shown you the problem that can occur when you start using WP Rocket, how you can check if this problem occurs on your website and how you can solve this problem when it occurs.