Hi Matthew,

Thank you for your interest in W3 Total Cache Pro, this is a very good question! If you’re managing 40 sites, ease of use as well as having a comprehensive set of optimization tools are likely both critical factors that you want to consider. WP Rocket is more straightforward and includes essential performance optimizations. However, if you need advanced caching features, CDN flexibility, and fine-tuned controls, W3 Total Cache Pro offers more power.

W3TC Pro is an extension of the standard version of the plugin and offers a similar setup wizard as WP Rocket but with a guided approach. The wizard helps you optimize certain areas of your sites right out of the box and afterward you can use the many available performance tools and features to further optimize.

W3TC Pro and WP Rocket have similar features like:

• Page Caching: Both plugins provide powerful caching features, but W3 Total Cache Pro has more advanced settings for granular control, while WP Rocket is simpler to configure.
• Browser Caching: Both support browser caching to store files locally and improve page load times on subsequent visits.
• Lazy Loading: Both plugins offer lazy loading for images, which defers the loading of images not in the viewport, improving initial page load speed.
• Minification/Concatenation: Both support CSS, JS minification, and concatenation to reduce the number of files loaded on the page, improving speed.

Some Advantages of W3TC Cache Pro:

• CDN Integration: W3 Total Cache Pro excels in CDN integration with more flexibility. It allows for fragment caching, reverse proxy integration, and more advanced CDN support than WP Rocket.
• Database Caching: W3 Total Cache Pro supports caching database queries, which can improve performance for sites with heavy database interaction. WP Rocket does not offer this.
• Object Caching: This is crucial for dynamic websites and helps in reducing the load on the database by caching results from repetitive queries. WP Rocket doesn’t include object caching out of the box.
• Fragment Caching: With W3 Total Cache Pro, you get fragment caching, which lets you cache specific parts of a page while leaving other parts dynamic. This feature is helpful for sites with highly dynamic content.
• Opcode Caching Support: W3 Total Cache Pro supports Opcode Caching (using APCu or XCache), which helps with caching PHP scripts to improve server performance, especially on complex sites.

See the full comparison here

Being that we have so many features it has been said that WP Rocket is easier to configure than W3 Total cache. It works well out of the box with minimal settings, making it more beginner-friendly, but in my opinion with our world class support and recent updates to the plugin focused on user experience I feel that W3 Total Cache would be the best plugin for a larger project like yours because it better accounts for all possible user scenarios.

I hope this helps Matthew, we would love to help you optimize your site with W3 Total Cache Pro!  Please let us know if there’s anything else that we can answer for you!