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WP Rocket: We went over this plugin with a fine-tooth comb [2024 Review]

It took me a while, but I finally found it. Yes, I found someone who dared to criticize the WP Rocket plugin sharply. What a nerve!

A criticism of the WP Rocket plugin

This reader of an American site specializing in WordPress, says that this plugin has broken his site, that it’s worthless, and it shouldn’t be used.

A little angry, this guy. His opinion comes as a surprise because it is rare.

Try to look for info on this plugin that helps speed up your WordPress, and you will understand.

The vast majority of people who use it are overflowing with rave reviews.
Top WordPress professionals also have a few nice things to say, like Nick Roach, CEO at Elegant Themes (the company behind Divi):

As for the designers of WP Rocket, they present it as “the most powerful caching plugin in the world,” as indicated on their website’s homepage.

In this article, I invite you to find out if this plugin really deserves all the praise we give it.

In particular, I will detail how to install it, how to configure it, its impact on the performance of your site, and its strengths and weaknesses.

Originally written in August 2018, this post was last updated in February 2024.

This article contains affiliate links to the WP Rocket website. This means that WPMarmite will earn a commission if you decide to get the plugin. This allows us to pay for the research and writing work of the blog editors. Despite everything, we remain impartial. If a product isn’t worth it, we say so (or we don’t talk about it). Take a look at our publishing policy for further details.

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What is WP Rocket?

Presentation of the Rocket

WP Rocket is a premium (paid) plugin that makes it possible to accelerate the loading of the pages of your website “right upon activation” and without the “need to be a tech expert or touch the code,” as its website indicates.

More technically, WP Rocket is a cache plugin. The cache is a system that keeps the pages of your site already loaded in its memory, to be able to offer them to your visitors in a faster way, later.

In summary, WP Rocket explains that it acts on two types of caches:

As a result, this (usually) improves the loading time of your site.

But if WP Rocket presents itself as a cache plugin, it is much more than that.

It also includes multiple options to boost the performance of your site, globally: delayed loading of images and JavaScript, minification of HTML code, minification and concatenation of CSS and JavaScript files, etc. I will detail all of this later.

A French plugin launched in 2013

Oh, I didn’t tell you: WP Rocket is a French plugin.

Let’s rewind it all a bit to understand its genesis. It all started in 2013.

At the time, its creators were frustrated with the offer of cache plugins existing on the market, and they observed the following: “We found that the user experience was not optimal. There was a multitude of options, and the configuration took a lot of time, even for an experienced user.”

To overcome this problem, they created their own solution. At the time of writing, WP Rocket prides itself on having nearly 3,800,000 sites optimized by their plugin.

As they point out in their article celebrating the 10th anniversary of the plugin’s launch, the WP Rocket team adopted the “decisions, not options” approach dear to WordPress right from the start.

Instead of offering you dozens of options and leaving it up to you which ones to choose, WP Rocket takes a different approach.

It automatically activates the best features to improve web performance, such as automatic page and browser caching (just one example).

More generally, you should know that WP Rocket is a product offered by the startup WP Media, which also provides Imagify, a plugin to reduce the weight of your images (Check out our dedicated article on Imagify, if that piques your interest).

WP Media was acquired in April 2021 by the Swedish company group.ONE (a specialist in online services), in particular to roll out its services in the Nordic market.

Why should you care about the performance of your site?

Using a cache plugin is strongly recommended if you want to try to improve the performance of your site.

WordPress’ official documentation also recommends it in its section dedicated to CMS optimization.

And, frankly, this is not to be taken lightly for three main reasons:

  1. A slow site has disastrous consequences on the user experience. For example, nearly one out of two people (40%) leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
    The user experience is also evaluated by Google through several Core Web Vitals, which take into account the loading speed. This means that Google will take into account this signal — among others — to rank a page, even if its impact will be small on the ranking of a page in search results.
  2. Your page load speed can have an impact on your SEO. Not so much on the ranking of your content.
    The real added value of a fast loading page is the following, in terms of SEO: it facilitates the indexing work of search engines, which will be able to crawl more pages of your site (that is to say, explore them and retrieve information to be able to index them).
  3. It can boost your conversions, i.e. specific actions that you want your visitors to perform (e.g. signing up for your newsletter, buying a product, downloading a white paper, etc.).
    The faster your pages load, the more likely you are to encourage conversion. Among online shoppers, 67% report site slowness as the main reason for cart abandonment.

I hope everything is clear in your mind. Now, let’s dive into the installation of our plugin of the day.

How to install WP Rocket on WordPress

Step 1: Purchase and download WP Rocket

WP Rocket is not free since it is a premium plugin. That’s why you won’t find it on the official directory.

To get it, you have to go to its official website.

Click on the Buy WP Rocket button (top right, in orange on the screenshot above).

Choose the formula you prefer: I will come back to the rates in part V.

The entry plan, for 1 site, starts at $59. Follow the instructions. Once you’ve purchased the plugin, you can download it whenever you want by logging into your account via the “My Account” link.

On your dashboard, click on the “Download WP Rocket” button. This will start downloading a zip file.

Step 2: Activate the plugin on your WordPress site

On your WordPress administration page, choose Plugins > Add New. At the top of the next page, click on Upload Plugin.

Select the zip file you previously downloaded from your WP Rocket account, then install it.

Don’t forget to activate the plugin right after. In theory, you should find it listed with your other plugins.

To access the settings, you can either click on the link of the same name as you can see on the above screenshot. Or you can go through the Settings menu from your Dashboard.

To see more closely what the beast has in the belly, let’s take a tour. I will now show you how to set up WP Rocket.

How to set up WP Rocket: A closer look at its features

You will quickly realize it: one of the enormous advantages of WP Rocket lies in its ease of use.

The creators of the plugin pride themselves on making simplicity their priority, and it’s difficult to contradict them on this point.

In fact, you don’t even have to activate any features for the plugin to work. Install it. Turn it on. There you go.

As stated in its documentation, WP Rocket “incorporates more than 80% of good web performance practices, even if no option is activated. Its options can be considered as a “bonus” because their activation is not mandatory to improve the loading time of your site.

By default, it will always activate the following functionalities:

You will not see these options on your Dashboard, but they will significantly improve the performance of your site, as you will see in Part IV.

Some default settings will also be activated, when the plugin is used for the first time:

To boost your performance a little more and go further, you will need to use the “bonus” options.

You will find them on the plugin dashboard. In total, you will see 12 tabs.

Regarding these options, WP Rocket indicates that there are no recommended settings.

“There are even settings that will work perfectly fine on one site but won’t work at all on another. So sometimes leaving a setting entirely disabled can be your best bet!”

So you will have to test and readjust accordingly. To help you find the best settings for your site, WP Rocket provides a dedicated video about it.

To see a little more clearly, I suggest we review these options one by one.

Dashboard

This is where you will find information and help on your account, such as:

Cache

The tab contains three parts:

File Optimization

If you want to tinker with this section, be careful. If you act with caution, this section can improve your performance score.

But it can also “temporarily break the website.” I’m not the one saying it; this comes from WP Rocket’s developers.

They add that “If you notice any errors on your website after having activated this setting, just deactivate it again, and your site will be back to normal.

How does it work? You will find two parts.

Optimization of CSS files with WP Rocket

The first one enables you to optimize your CSS files:

Wondering where the “Combine CSS files” option went? WP Rocket removed it with the release of version 3.15. Originally designed for websites using the HTTP/1 protocol, this feature no longer served any purpose with the obsolescence of this protocol. What’s more, with HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 protocols, the option offered no performance advantage. Hence its disappearance.

Optimization of JavaScript files with WP Rocket

The second part of the settings of the tab will roughly help you to do the same thing with your JavaScript files:

Some options available on previous versions of the plugin have disappeared in recent updates. For example, the (technical) option “remove query strings from static resources” does not appear anymore since WP Rocket 3.6 because it does not affect the loading time. If you are wondering where the setting for “combine Google Fonts” went, it is now applied automatically since version 3.7.
Finally, the “remove jQuery Migrate” option has been removed with WP Rocket version 3.8.1 because WordPress no longer uses jQuery Migrate (a JavaScript library) since the release of its version 5.7.

Speed up your website with WP Rocket

Turn your site into a rocket with the most powerful caching plugin recognized by WordPress experts.

Media

Now let’s go to the Media tab. It gives you access to 4 types of settings:

With the release of WP Rocket 3.10, the “Media” tab has been reduced in size. The option that allowed you to disable embeds (to avoid generating additional HTTP requests when you integrate a link to an article on one of your publications) was first removed. To justify itself, WP Rocket said that disabling embeds has a very limited impact on the performance of a site.
In addition, the “WebP Compatibility” option has been moved to the “Add-ons” tab.

Preload

In this tab, you will find 4 options:

Advanced rules

This tab requires a minimum of knowledge. If you’re just starting out, chances are you’ll never need to use it. So I won’t go into detail here.

But if you are interested in exploring the subject, you can refer to this section of the documentation.

Database

Let’s stop now on this tab, which allows you to clean and optimize your database.

This is one of the strengths of WP Rocket, which, as you can see, is not just a cache plugin.

The database is perhaps the most critical element of your site. It stores all your content: pages, posts, comments, settings for your theme and plugins, etc.

In short, if you haven’t already done so, remember to back up your database regularly thanks to a dedicated plugin.

Though the database is vital to your WordPress site, it will tend to slow down your site over time. To put it simply, the more information you store, the more effort it takes to function properly.

To maintain a powerful website, you have to optimize the database.

WP Rocket allows you to do this by activating:

CDN

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a service that can be used to increase display speed.

It allows you to store your files on several servers across the globe. Concretely, if you are looking to display a site that uses a CDN, the CDN will send you the files that are closest to you (for example, via a server located near your city).

WP Rocket allows you to activate a CDN. But should you use one on your site? If you are just starting out, you shouldn’t worry too much about that.

If you really want to, you can also use WP Rocket’s in-house CDN (RocketCDN), which starts at $7.99/month. Its main advantage is its ease of use: it automatically integrates with WP Rocket, so you don’t have to do anything on your side.

On the technical side, RocketCDN has been powered by Bunny CDN since October 2023. It’s one of the fastest CDNs on the market, with over 120 access points worldwide.

Heartbeat

Heartbeat is the name of an API that “can save some resources of your server.”

Here again, we enter a technical and rather accessory part if you are a beginner. It’s up to you to see if you activate it or not. If you realize that your server is getting tired, why not do the test?

WP Rocket warns that “disabling Heartbeat entirely may break plugins and themes using this API.”

An API is the part of a computer program that is freely available to anyone with valid access, and can be manipulated to create a new way of using an application.

Add-ons, Tools, and Tutorials

I have grouped the last three tabs within the same section.

The Add-Ons section allows you to add other functionalities in one click:

Google & Facebook tracking one-click add-ons were removed with the release of version 3.9 of the plugin. In its Changelog, WP Rocket states that it now recommends “to use the delay JS option to optimize loading of those 3rd party scripts”.

The Tools tab allows you to export and import your settings, as well as restore the previous major version of the plugin but also to optimize CSS loading for mobile.

Finally, the Tutorials tab offers videos to learn how to use and set up the plugin, as well as how to improve your Core Web Vitals.

For each of the 12 tabs presented above, I strongly invite you to check the Need help links available when you want to activate an option. They redirect you to the documentation, which is very well done. In case of doubt, you can also contact the plugin support.

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How is WP Rocket’s user experience?

How simple is it to use?

I repeat myself: WP Rocket is extremely simple to use. You can navigate very easily between the different tabs that we showed in the previous part.

The UX (user experience) and ergonomics have clearly been the subject of extensive work.

Two clicks are enough to activate an option. Just check the corresponding box, then save the changes. Not to mention that “WP Rocket automatically applies 80% of web performance best practices.”

Other than that, I really like:

What influence does it have on the performance of the site?

Simple to use, handy, flexible, and efficient without even having to configure it: WP Rocket has everything to win your heart.

But before tying the knot, I bet you want to know if it really deserves its reputation, right?

To get a clearer picture, I put on my overalls to check what was hidden under the hood of the rocket.

To measure performance with or without WP Rocket enabled, I used two services: WebPageTest and Pingdom Tools.

I carried out the tests on the homepage of my own website, where I do a lot of experiments.

FYI, I had 34 active plugins at the time of the test. So there was quite some content!

Here are the results.

I did not check any “bonus” option. All the settings were those already set by default when I activated the plugin .

WebPage Test without WP Rocket

WebPage Test with WP Rocket

Pingdom Tools without WP Rocket

Pingdom Tools with WP Rocket

In summary, my website loads in:

Conclusion: there is no comparison. On average, the loading time was improved by almost 50% when WP Rocket was activated. You can also see that the weight of the page decreases, just like the number of requests (except with Pingdom Tools).

In short: a well-deserved reputation.

Why can’t WP Rocket always solve everything?

As you have seen, WP Rocket can significantly improve the performance of a website.

However, in this regard, it is good to take into account certain good practices. You should apply them whether you use WP Rocket or not. Your site will thank you. Your visitors too.

Consider the following:

For more details on the performance of a website, I suggest you check out our article How to optimize a WordPress site without breaking the bank.

And, speaking of money, how much does WP Rocket cost, exactly?

Speed up your website with WP Rocket

Turn your site into a rocket with the most powerful caching plugin recognized by WordPress experts.

Is it worth the cost?

WP Rocket licenses

As a premium plugin, WP Rocket comes at a price, of course. The plugin offers three plans:

Each offer contains one year of support and updates.

The small downside? There is no trial version. If you are interested, you will automatically have to pay to test the product.

However, there is a 14-day money-back guarantee. This gives you time to form your own judgment.

Should you invest in this caching plugin?

Now you might be asking yourself if it is worth investing at least $59 for this caching plugin?

It’s true that, after all, the vast majority of its competitors are free.

In my opinion, the investment is worth it.

I think it should be clear by now: WP Rocket is ultra-simple to use. You activate it, it works. No headache, no confusion, no wasted time (to convince yourself, try to install one of its competitors, like WP Total Cache or WP Super Cache).

Even for $59, I find that this argument already justifies an investment.

There are many other reasons which I will give you in the last part of this article. I’m still building up the suspense a little bit, so stick to your screen. Not too close though, since that’s probably not good for the eyes.

Last but not least, WP Rocket typically offers promotions several times a year.

In general, WP Rocket offers to renew your license 50% cheaper compared to the original price, within 30 days before the expiration date (30% for customers who bought it after February 2019). This is what is specified in their FAQ.

Before you proceed to checkout, I assume you want to make sure you’re getting the right merchandise that meets your needs.

So, let’s compare WP Rocket to its famous competitors.

Can the alternatives to WP Rocket suit you?

You may be familiar with other cache plugins, such as W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, LiteSpeed Cache, or WP Fastest Cache.

We present these plugins, as well as other solutions for clearing the WordPress cache, in this tutorial.

They are giants in the industry. LiteSpeed Cache has more than 5M+ active installations and WP Super Cache has 1M+.

In addition, they’re free! This can make a difference if you don’t have a budget to spend on it. And that can be perfectly understandable.

But aside from the price, I don’t see many other benefits from using the plugins mentioned above, especially if you’re just starting out on WordPress. It’s true they are good quality plugins, nothing to say about that.

However, they usually have a lot fewer features than WP Rocket.

Then, they are not easy to configure and complicated to understand when you start. W3 Total Cache, for example, has close two 20 pages of settings.

Overview of one of the many menus (16 in total) for W3 Total Cache settings. Not so easy to navigate.

Speaking of which, I would add that if you configure those plugins in the wrong way — which is easy to do when you don’t know much about them — you risk making your site crash.

If you’re new to web development, a free cache plugin may do the trick. But if you get anxious at the slightest glimpse of a line of code, well, it’s a long shot.

Remember: WP Rocket already works as soon as you activate it. The options are just “extra bonuses” that can allow you to go even further in performance optimization.

But even without those options, your site should get a good boost in speed: the loading time saved is therefore considerable.

In addition, most of the free cache plugins do not have dedicated support, whereas WP Rocket does.

Our final opinion on WP Rocket

Let’s review the Rocket one last time, before take-off.

Strengths

Weaknesses

Who is WP Rocket made for?

This plugin is suitable for all types of users:

If not, you can try WP Fastest Cache. Though it’s much less complete than WP Rocket, it will do the trick if you just want to clear the cache of your pages.

So, ready for take-off?

Fasten your seatbelts, you are getting to the end of this WP Rocket blog post. Take-off is imminent.

In summary, in this post, you have learned, among other things:

Personally, this is one of my favorite plugins, as I have installed it on my sites.

To get your license, go to the official website by clicking on the button below.

Before you fly away to other horizons, I would like to finish by asking your opinion on WP Rocket.

What do you think of this plugin? Have you used it? Or maybe you hate it (it can happen, remember the beginning of the article)?

Tell me everything in the comments!

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