WordPress Performance: Cloudflare vs. WP Rocket

Cloudflare and WP Rocket do not serve the same purpose.

But if you’re asking whether a performance plugin helps you improve performance, then perhaps you do not need it indeed.

You’re confusing a few parts.

WP Engine = host/server

Cloudflare = DNS and CDN (to keep it basic)

WP Rocket = WP cache plugin

WP Engine is a hosting service for WordPress sites, providing server space and optimized performance. Cloudflare offers DNS and CDN services to direct and speed up traffic, while WP Rocket is a caching plugin that enhances site loading speed.

WP Engine + Cloudflare:
[https://wpengine.com/support/cloudflare-best-practices/](https://wpengine.com/support/cloudflare-best-practices/)

But if you’d like better hosting and a more powerful Cloudflare set up, checkout [rocket.net](https://rocket.net)

Comes with Cloudflare enterprise

I think a bit of complexity needs to come out to better understand the answer to your question:

* When someone views your page in their web browser, (skipping DNS and networking) the request to serve the page comes to your server.
* This goes to your web server, which looks in the folder where your web site is located, and finds that to handle the user’s request it needs to run some php scripts.
* This is basically a program that runs on the web server. It needs to be compiled and run, which isn’t instant. And…
* The data that is required to respond to your client and serve the web page also comes from a database, so the web server will make database queries and wait for them before serving the page.
* All that takes time, then the response needs to go back to the user’s web browser, and part of that response is also a “download these x dozen files,” and *that* takes more time – each connection needs to be created, then the file needs to be requested, and downloaded, and then displayed in the right place.
* Plugins? yeah, that’s more php code that needs to be processed as well.

So there are lots of places in this process that can slow your web site down. To speed things up, you can use a faster processor, and faster drives, and a well-tuned database server, and some web server optimization, but all that costs money and is on your provider.

**The thing you can do is implement caching to speed things up**.

So, caching isn’t just one thing:

* That process where PHP gets compiled and then interpreted? If you’re getting 1000 users an hour, that needs to happen 1,000 times, which is kind of dumb because the code isn’t changing. So you can do something called **opcode caching**, where that code gets compiled one and gets cached, until the source PHP changes.
* Those database queries? They can be cached as well, and having the answer right there in memory is way faster than asking the database. Depending, having it saved on disk might be faster.
* Pages themselves can be cached, so if your landing page never changes that can be cached as a generated HTML page, and when the web server comes looking to display your site it can be told to just serve the HTML instead.
* And all those files that the browser needs to download? They can be saved to hundreds of computers across the Internet, so when a user in Vancouver requests your page a little bit of techno magic makes him download all those files from a server that’s really close to him. This sort of caching can be very useful.

Then, there’s **optimization** that can be done.

* If you install a plugin to make creating contact forms easy, that code may load on every page by default even if you only ever use it on the Contact-Us page. So smart optimization software can see that and make it only load where it’s needed.
* All those css and js files? You can strip the comments out of them to make them smaller, and join them all into one file so it can be served faster.
* Images can be optimized, served in webp format instead of the image you uploaded, set to load only when necessary to speed page load times (if it’s below the fold it will load when the user scrolls down and not before,) and so on.
* Maybe you want a fast experience, so when a user mouses over a menu it loads in the background, so clicking on that menu results in an instant display.

You can get more and more aggressive, and take greater and greater risks of breaking things trying to save a few bytes, but in general caching and optimization help.

Now, WP Rocket does a great job of caching and optimizing. I like it, and use it, and install it for others.

Cloudflare is a CDN – it is one of those services that caches files close to the user.

You can use them together and do very well. The defaults may get you where you need to go, and then you just need to remember to dump and reload the cache when you make changes to the site or load plugins.

WP Rocket and WP Engine go very well together. Cloudflare is a layer in between your site and server. I believe WPE now has free Edge caching on your primary domain, too, so check into that.

Point is, leave WP Rocket. Add Cloudflare as a layer of security and CDN, activate Edge cache on your primary domain.