NitroPack vs. WP Rocket - An In-Depth Comparison of Features [2024]

Website speed is an important part of the user experience. If you are looking for a way to boost your website’s performance, a WordPress speed optimization plugin can help with that.

You can find some excellent plugins to improve the performance of your WordPress website quite easily. But the concept of page speed has changed over the years with the addition of Core Web Vitals. So selecting the right performance plugin may not be that easy.

You need a plugin that not only boosts your website’s speed but also improves the Core Web Vitals. Two popular options in that regard are NitroPack and WP Rocket. But which one should you use?

To figure that out, you need to go through a frustratingly long process of trials, testing, feature comparison, and much more.

Or a simple solution would be to just read this blog because we did all the hard work for you and prepared a detailed comparison.

This blog will help make your decision easier with a thorough comparison of both plugins, their pros and cons, and everything else. So stay with us as we narrow down your list to the best performance plugin with our detailed comparison of NitroPack vs. WP Rocket.

NitroPack vs. WP Rocket Side-by-Side Comparison:

Before we go into the details, here’s a side-by-side comparison table between the two.

Now that you have a general comparison of the two, let’s dive into a few more details.

NitroPack:

NitroPack is a 360° performance optimization tool for your website. It takes care of all your website performance needs. Instead of having multiple plugins, you can just install NitroPack on your website. It takes care of caching, full image optimization, CSS/HTML/JS minification, and compression, built-in Cloudflare CDN (with GZIP and Brotli Compression), font subsetting, and more!

The thing that sets NitroPack apart from the rest is its guarantee of a 90+ Core Web Vitals score. It is fully automated and takes care of everything, so you can focus on other important aspects of your business. These features have made it an amazing choice for performance optimization, and its large customer base of 180,000+ (as of writing) can attest to that.

NitroPack offers all speed optimization features in one place. It can help improve your website’s Core Web Vitals in no time. And if you ever face any problem, their excellent support team is available 24/7 to help you with it. The cherry on top is the free NitroPack plugin. It is excellent for people who are just starting out. Overall, NitroPack for WordPress is an excellent choice if you need a completely automated optimization solution for your website.

Pros and cons:

Here are some pros and cons of NitroPack:

WP Rocket:

WP Rocket is one of the most popular WordPress caching plugins. It helps you improve your PageSpeed performance scores and optimize your Core Web Vitals. WP Rocket not only provides page caching, browser caching, or GZIP compression, but also offers advanced options to boost your performance even more. These advanced options include delayed JavaScript execution, removing unused CSS, minification, and LazyLoad.

The WP Rocket plugin does all the heavy lifting for you by automatically applying 80% of web performance best practices right upon activation. You can just optimize the settings according to your preferences manually afterwards. 

Overall, WP Rocket is an excellent choice for small to medium-sized businesses because it offers high-end features at a very low price. 3.7 million website owners (as of writing this blog) trust it for their performance requirements, making it a valuable addition to your site.  

Pros and cons:

Let’s discuss some pros and cons of WP Rocket:

NitroPack vs. WP Rocket – Key features and functionality:

Both of these plugins are pretty similar in terms of their functionality. Let’s put them both head to head to compare functionality and features. So NitroPack vs. WP Rocket continues.

• Caching mechanisms:

Both plugins allow caching to serve your web pages faster. There is, however, a difference between the caching mechanisms. 

NitroPack uses server-side caching. This means that it creates and saves cached versions of your pages on its web servers. When a user requests a page, the cached version is served quickly instead of regenerating the page from scratch. This can significantly boost performance for frequent website visitors by reducing the time it takes to regenerate a page. Server-side caching is great for all kinds of websites, especially large websites with dynamic content.

NitroPack also offers a warm caching option that prepares site pages even if they are not being requested by the users. This allows your websites to be ready for user requests and serve pages instantly when requested. 

WP Rocket, on the other hand, uses client-side caching. This means that it stores the cached version of the web page on the client’s device (browser) to load it on revisit. Client-side caching may not be as powerful as server-side caching, but it can still improve page speed. This type of caching is great for smaller or static websites.

NitroPack wins in this department as it offers a much better caching mechanism.

• Cache Purging:

Cache purging means clearing the cached versions of a page upon update to show the latest content to site visitors. Both NitroPack and WP Rocket offer cache-purging features. 

In WP Rocket, you have to manually configure the cache purging settings to be able to serve updated pages correctly. With NitroPack, you don’t have to manually configure the settings. 

Whenever a page is updated, NitroPack automatically invalidates and purges the cached pages from the server to regenerate new cached versions of these pages. This means your visitors will be able to see the latest content as soon as you update it. 

If you wish to modify how NitroPack purges the cache, you can do that through their dashboard. This earns NitroPack another win over WP Rocket.

• Image Optimization:

Images could improve the overall look of a webpage, but they are not very quick at loading. If your page has a lot of images, it may load slowly, which is not good for the user experience. Image optimization is important to ensure your page loads perfectly and users have a good experience.

NitroPack has an automatic image optimization feature that handles everything related to images. It automatically resizes, compresses, and converts images to make sure they are loaded and served faster. 

NitroPack offers both lossless and lossy compression options, along with WebP support. It also resizes images to fit their containers, which helps fix Google’s page speed insights messages. With NitroPack, you can be sure to get rid of those annoying Google Page Speed Insights issues related to images while your website loads faster.

In contrast to NitroPack, WP Rocket doesn’t have any built-in image optimization features. It does provide lazy loading, which can improve the website’s loading time a bit, but that’s just it. You have to use third-party image optimization and compression plugins, such as Imageify.

NitroPack wins in this department with its amazing image optimization features.  

• Code Optimization:

Both NitroPack and WP Rocket offer file compression and minification for CSS and Javascript files. Minification and compression help load resources faster, which can in turn improve your overall site speed. 

Both tools also combine multiple CSS and JS files to reduce the number of requests required to load a page. This can help reduce initial server response time and improve Core Web Vitals. 

Another feature is the above-the-fold critical CSS. Both tools can extract the critical CSS (required for the above-the-fold content to load) and place it inline. This helps the page load faster by deferring non-critical CSS.

Another common code optimization feature you can find in these tools is delayed JavaScript execution. These tools can help delay the execution of JavaScript files until other resources on the page have been fully loaded. This can improve your website’s initial load time. 

This may seem like a tie between the two, but NitroPack takes the process of code optimization one step further by offering HTML optimization as well. It optimizes your HTML files by minifying and compressing them without breaking your website. This can help make your website even faster. They also allow DNS Preconnects for required resources to ensure fast connections and resource loading.

So, with some advanced features, NitroPack is a clear winner in this department.

• CDN:

A CDN helps serve your website faster by loading resources from the server closest to the visitor’s location. NitroPack does a great job with its built-in Cloudflare CDN by automatically storing your static content and serving it quickly. NitroPack has a dedicated Cloudflare integration, which allows them to provide a widespread global CDN with servers across the globe. 

To make your resources load even faster, their servers come with GZIP and Brotli compression formats. Their built-in CDN is also HTTP/2 compatible. HTTP/2 allows faster connections to your website’s resources. They utilize this protocol wherever it is supported to optimize your site.

All these features of their built-in CDN are impressive and allow your website to be served more quickly and efficiently. In contrast to NitroPack, WP Rocket does not have any built-in CDN. Although it is compatible with many third-party CDNs, such as CloudFlare and RocketCDN, the configuration and set-up process can be complex.

So, in this department, our winner is NitroPack because of its amazing built-in CDN. NitroPack takes care of your CDN requirements, so you don’t have to perform complex manual configurations. It saves you all the hassle. But with WP Rocket, you have to purchase a CDN service separately and take care of the configurations yourself. So, NitroPack is the winner.

NitroPack vs. WP Rocket – Performance Testing:

Now that we have compared our options based on some key features and functionalities, let’s go ahead and see them in action. So we will be putting NitroPack vs. WP Rocket in a live testing environment on the Cloudways Hosting server.

Cloudways is a next-gen managed cloud hosting platform that simplifies the process of deploying, managing, and scaling cloud servers. Its amazing features, like multiple server options, an easy-to-use interface, and security, make it a great platform to host your website. Also, it offers a 4-day free trial, so you can check out the platform and see if it is the right choice for you. 

We will be using Cloudways WordPress hosting for our testing environment. More details are below;

Testing Environment:

Here are the details of our testing environment;

Hosting Server: Cloudways WordPress Hosting with DigitalOcean Server

Server RAM: 4 GB

Server Disk Space: 80 GB

Server Location: New York

WordPress Version: 6.2.2

Themes: We are cross testing the plugins based on their compatibility with multiple themes, so we will be using two different themes to test. We will use the XPro WordPress theme and the Astra WordPress theme.

Plugins: NitroPack, WP Rocket, Elementor, WooCommerce, Astra Starter Templates, XPro Elementor Addons, and other plugins required by the themes.

Testing Tools:

For our testing, we will be using the following tools to calculate the loading time and performance metrics for both our plugins.

1. Google PageSpeed Insights
2. Pingdom
3. GTMetrix

Performance Before Using Optimization Plugins:

Before we go ahead and review the performance improvements made by NitroPack and WP Rocket, let’s first see how our site performs without using these. For that, we’ll install the XPro theme and the Astra theme one by one and test their performance using different tools. 

Performance Results for Astra:

We will first be testing the Astra theme. So for that, we will install the theme and the Starter Templates plugin to import a demo site and test it. First, let’s import a demo blog theme using the Starter Templates plugin and test it out. 

The Starter Templates plugin offers a lot of free and paid templates to use. So for the sake of this test, let’s use the Creative Blog free template.

Once set up, let’s check the performance for this theme using our testing tools.

1. Google Page Speed Insights:

Google Page Speed Insights found quite some issues with Astra’s performance. Both for Mobile and Desktop devices, there are some issues with the speed index due to the longer time spent rendering the largest contentful paint. 

• Mobile:

• Desktop:

2. GTmetrics:

GTmetrix recorded an 80% performance score for Astra. The structure score is 98%. 

3. Pingdom:

In the results from Pingdom, Astra received a B grade with a performance rating of 86.  

Performance Results for XPro Theme:

Now let’s test the performance of the XPro theme. To import the demo templates, we need the  Elementor Addons plugin by WPXPRO. It’s one of the Best Elementor Addons on the market that comes packed with 140+ Elementor widgets, 25+ Elementor Extensions, and 300+ pre-built themes and templates. XPro has an excellent collection of well-designed Elementor templates. So you are sure to find an amazing template for your next WordPress project.

Along with the XPro plugin, we will also be using the Elementor Page Builder plugin. So download it from the WordPress repository as well.

So with all that done, let’s import a blog template similar to the one we used with Astra. We will use the Magazine free blog starter template.

Once it is imported, we are ready for our performance test. So let’s check that out. 

1. Google Page Speed Insights:

Google Page Speed Insights showed a low performance score for mobile devices, but for desktop devices, the performance is an impressive 91. 

• Mobile:

• Desktop:

2. GTmetrics:

GTmetrics also returned some amazing results, with 93% performance and 94% structure scores.

3. Pingdom:

With Pingdom, the XPro theme got a B grade with a score of 86.

Now that we have our initial metrics for the themes, let’s check out what performance improvements we get from our optimization tools.

Test Results for NitroPack:

Let’s start our testing with NitroPack first. We are using the free NitroPack plugin with the default configuration. By default, NitroPack is set to the Ludicrous mode, which comes with a pre-defined configuration to achieve the fastest possible speed. We changed no other settings, and it worked like a charm. None of our themes were broken, and they loaded perfectly. Let’s see the performance improvements.

• For Astra:

NitroPack seamlessly integrates with the Astra theme without breaking anything. Every part of the website functioned perfectly. NitroPack made quite amazing performance improvements with Astra.

1. Google PageSpeed Insights:

For the Google Page Speed Insights test, the performance went up from 79 to 91 on Mobile and from 73 to 95 on Desktop, which is an impressive performance boost.

• Mobile:

• Desktop:

2. GTmetrix:

GTmetrix recorded perfect scores for both performance and structure. 

3. Pingdom:

For Pingdom, the performance went from 86, Grade B, to 96, Grade A. The page size and load time also decreased.

• For XPro:

NitroPack had no compatibility issues with the XPro theme. It worked like a charm without breaking the page or causing any other issues.

1. Google Page Speed Insights:

For XPro, the primary issues were with the Mobile performance on Google Page Speed Insights. It went from 78 to 95, fixing the largest contentful paint issues. For Desktop, it went from 91 to 96.

• Mobile:

• Desktop:

2. GTmetrix:

GTmetrix also recorded a perfect score for the XPro theme. The load time for the Largest Contentful paint element also reduced a lot.

3. Pingdom:

Pingdom also recorded some impressive performance improvements. It went from 86, Grade B, to 98, Grade A, while also reducing the page size and load time.

In terms of performance boost and compatibility with different themes, NitroPack worked perfectly. Another impressive thing to notice is that these performance scores were boosted using the free version of NitroPack.

Test Results for WP Rocket:

Now let’s move on to the performance improvements made by WP Rocket. Like NitroPack, WP Rocket also worked perfectly with both themes without causing any compatibility issues. We used the WP Rocket infinite plan. Just like we did for NitroPack, we used the default configurations. Let’s go ahead and see the improvements it made.

• For Astra:

We first tested the Astra theme using WP Rocket. Here are the results from the testing tools.

1. Google PageSpeed Insights:

With Google Page Speed Insights, it did make some improvements, but not all the way to green for Mobile. The performance scores went up from 79 to 88 for Mobile and from 73 to 95 for Desktop. 

• Mobile:

• Desktop:

2. GTmetrix:

For GTmetrix, we got perfect scores for performance. Structure, however, had no change.

3. Pingdom:

For Pingdom, the results stayed the same. There was no change in the performance grade after using WP Rocket.

• For Xpro:

WP Rocket had no compatibility issues with the XPro Theme. Here are the performance results we got.

1. Google PageSpeed Insights:

Just like with the Astra Theme, WP Rocket did not get the performance for Mobile all the way to green for the XPro theme. The performance scores went from 78 to 89 for Mobile and from 91 to 97 for Desktop. 

• Mobile:

• Desktop:

2. GTmetrix:

GTmetrix, however, recorded perfect scores for both Performance and Structure for the XPro theme using WP Rocket.

3. Pingdom:

For Pingdom, there was a minor improvement in the performance grade. But it still got a B with a score of 88.

WP Rocket didn’t do as well as NitroPack, considering that we used the free version of NitroPack. In the live testing phase, NitroPack is clearly the winner when it comes to performance boosting.

Pricing and Value for Money:

Now that we have compared the performance features of both plugins, let’s do a Nitropack vs. WP Rocket cost comparison and discuss the value for money.

• NitroPack Pricing Plans:

NitroPack features three pricing plans for different website sizes. Unfortunately, all plans are for a single website only. If you need NitroPack for multiple websites, you can contact the team for a custom plan. 

Their pricing starts at $210 per year with 50,000 page views and 25GB of CDN bandwidth. These plans may seem a bit too expensive, but the features they offer justify the price. 

With NitroPack, you don’t need to purchase a CDN or image optimization plugin separately. It provides and manages everything for you, which justifies the high price.

And if you don’t want to go ahead with purchasing a plan, you can start with the free plan for a smaller website. As we have seen in the live testing section, the free plan can provide quite an impressive performance boost. Although it comes with a limit of 5000 page views per month, it is still a great choice for websites that are just starting out.

• WP Rocket Pricing Plans:

WP Rocket wins over NitroPack in terms of pricing. Just like NitroPack, it also offers 3 different plans, starting at $59 per year. You can purchase plans for 1, 3, or an unlimited number of websites.

Although WP Rocket may have lower prices than NitroPack, you need to factor in the prices for the missing features as well. You need to purchase a CDN and an image optimization plugin separately. Factoring in those prices brings the cost nearly equal to NitroPack. 

On top of that, you need to take care of the configuration yourself. Also, unlike NitroPack, you don’t get a free plan to test out WP Rocket. So consider all this before making a decision.

In terms of pricing, WP Rocket may come out as the winner, but when considering value for money along with it, NitroPack’s prices are also justifiable. So this decision depends solely on your requirements and budget. 

If you are just starting out, WP Rocket may be a good choice for simpler websites and smaller budgets. But if you have an established website with complex functionality and money isn’t a problem for you, there is no better choice than NitroPack.

User Feedback and Reviews:

Let’s put them in competition based on user feedback and reviews. Both plugins have some stellar reviews on TrustPilot. WP Rocket has a 4.8-star rating from 2024 votes. On the other hand, NitroPack has a 4.9-star rating from 633 total votes. 

Both of these plugins have some positive reviews;

• NitroPack:

• WP Rocket:

And then there are some negative reviews as well.

• NitroPack:

• WP Rocket:

But overall, most of the reviews are positive. People have had issues with NitroPack support in the past as they are a relatively new company (established in 2018). But since then, they have worked to improve their support, and the positive reviews are evident that they have done great. So based on reviews, there’s a tie between the two.

So Who’s The Winner?

Well, after a thorough NitroPack vs. WP Rocket comparison and live testing, NitroPack comes out to be our winner. Considering the performance boost it offers along with other features such as caching, image optimization, code optimization, and CDN, NitroPack has a lot to offer. It may have higher pricing, but the value for money is amazing.

For established websites, NitroPack works like a charm to improve website performance and, in turn, boost the user experience. So try out the free plan to see its power in action, and move on to the paid plans when you need them. NitroPack is a good choice for your performance needs.

Conclusion:

So this was all about NitroPack vs. WP Rocket. Now you have a clear feature comparison with live testing, which can make your decision easier. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. If you have any questions, you can also leave them in the comments section, and we will be happy to answer.