July 9, 2020 by Editor Team Leave a Comment Interview With Jean-Baptiste Marchand-Arvier, Co-founder of WP Rocket, One of the Best WordPress Caching Plugin Jonathan Buttigieg along with his cofounder Jean-Baptiste Marchand-Arvier knew the importance of having faster websites. But they were not happy with the available WordPress caching plugins. They found that most of the existing solutions were too complex to use for beginners. Being a strong believer and practitioners of a very famous WordPress philosophy “decision not option”, they have decided to create their own caching plugin – WP Rocket. Their top priority was to create an efficient and easy to use caching plugin. Within a short period of time, WP Rocket became the best WordPress caching plugin in the market. WP Rocket was quickly acclaimed by the WordPress community and the users. Today, from Jean-baptiste, we will try to know the importance of a faster website and some suggestions for boosting WordPress websites’ performance. You can know more of Jean-Baptiste from the WP Rocket Blog or catch him on twitter, @jb_ma. Hello Jean, Thank You So Much for Accepting Our Request. Could You Please Tell Us About the Starting of Your Career? How Did You Start Working With WordPress? Jean-Baptiste: Hello, that’s great to be there! I started using WordPress in 2007 a long time ago when it was still a small project at this time. I was running several websites (blogs in fact) and at this point, WordPress was (and still is) the best choice for running a blog. Can You Please Tell Us How WP Rocket Was Born and a Little Bit About Its Team? Jean-Baptiste: That’s the first fact I’ve met Jonathan, my confounder. We were both quite involved in WordPress and web-performance, in other words, we were quite focused on how to make WordPress faster. We were using our own tools and not really happy with the existing caching plugins, usually too complicated to configure and not necessarily efficient. So we try to put all our expertise into a plugin to allow everyone to have a faster WordPress website. We worked very hard to make something very simple, extremely efficient, and with wonderful support. Today at WP Media (the company behind WP Rocket) we still have the same mission: helping people having faster websites! We are a team of 35 people working from all around the world and we have 3 products to achieve that mission : WP Rocket, the premium caching pluginImagify an image optimizer serviceRocketCDN, a one-click installation CDN Why Should Business Owners Worry About Improving the Speed of Their Websites; I Mean Why is a Fast Site Important? Jean-Baptiste: No one likes to wait. Visitors want fast websites, otherwise, they will go on another website. If you care about your visitors you need a fast website, this has a direct impact on page views, conversion rates. Moreover, this is very important for SEO. Google tries to copy the behavior of a visitor: if it’s good for a visitor that will be good for SEO. How Crucial Cache Plugins Are for Website Owners for Faster Websites? Jean-Baptiste: When accessing any page, there is a lot of information to retrieve thanks to PHP and the database (MySQL). This is by design not very fast and even this can be fast for one visitor, as soon as you have more visitors this will be slower and slower. A caching plugin will make a static copy of your content. That means that no “calculations” will be generated by WordPress and the pages will be delivered instantly. We did write a great blog post to explain caching in plain English: Caching for WordPress, Explained in Plain English. Also, a caching plugin like WP Rocket provides a lot of front-end optimization to make websites even faster. What Suggestions Do You Have for Ecommerce Owners That Want to Boost the Performance of Their WordPress Online Stores? Jean-Baptiste: It’s even more important to have a faster website for eCommerce since the speed will have a direct impact on sales! An important thing is to use a reliable hosting solution. Then of course making sure to have a caching plugin, and finally, good help is optimizing images. Usually, an eCommerce website does have a lot of images being displayed, optimizing them with a plugin could have a great impact on loading time. What Makes WP Rocket Better Than Other Caching Plugins? Jean-Baptiste: It’s always complicated to compare. We try to provide the best experience possible which can be summarized with 3 points : Simplicity, we make sure that everyone can use WP Rocket without being a performance expertEfficiency, we are working very hard to provide the latest performance good practicesSupport, we have a great support team to help our customers if they have any issues or questions about WP Rocket How Easy is WP Rocket for Beginners to Configure and Have Fast WordPress Websites? Jean-Baptiste: That’s something highly important for us. We are following one of WordPress philosophy: “Decisions not options”. As a performant expert, we try to make a lot of decisions for our users in order to reduce the options of WP Rocket. Thus when they install WP Rocket, most of the features are automatically enabled, and it can be perfectly used without a special configuration. What Are the Main Benefits of Web Professionals Obtained Thanks to WP Rocket? Jean-Baptiste: They will have the latest performance good practices directly implemented into WP Rocket, to ensure to always have the best speed for their websites. As we can see on the changelog we are pretty active on the development side. Also, they would benefit from the help of our support if they have any doubts or issues. Is WP Rocket Compatible With the Popular eCommerce Plugins Such as WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads? Jean-Baptiste: Yes and we did especially optimized WP Rocket for popular eCommerce plugins; because we know this is very important. For example, among other things, WP Rocket will automatically exclude from the cache the order or checkout pages. Thus if you use WP Rocket and a popular eCommerce plugin you won’t have anything to configure. So, What is Your Plan With WP Rocket and WP Media? What Should Your Clients Expect From You in the Future? Jean-Baptiste: We follow the same and only goal, helping people having faster websites. So we put all our energies with WP Rocket and our other products to make sure our users will always have a fast website. On the Whole Today Jean-Baptiste mentioned a real fact “No one likes to wait. Visitors want fast websites. Otherwise, they will go on another website.” Sad but true. Without a faster website, you will always be the last one in the race, regardless of your strategies. Faster websites tend to keep their visitor for a longer time and stick to it. Your site can be slow day by day as the visitor increases, which can impact your SEO. A caching plugin will make a static copy of your content and make it quicker to load it. For this reason, investing in a top-rated caching plugin to make your site fast is the right decision. While choosing a caching plugin, make sure you get the simplest option if you are not an expert. Also, the support and quality of the service are essential. A caching plugin with the latest good practice always keeps you one step ahead of the competition. Take a look at WP Rocket, follow Jean-Baptiste on Twitter, and read WP Rocket Blog to know more from the experts in the industry. 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