WP Rocket Review, is it Worth Buying?

I have bought WP Rocket for myself and have now used it for several of my sites. I have been using it for about 9 months now and this is what I think.

Previously to using WP Rocket I had tried W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache  but at the time I could get my head around what setting were best. I did a bit of research to try and figure out what settings to use but it seemed a bit complicated for a novice WordPress user. That was when I found WP Rocket.

The first thing that struck me was the simplicity of the plugin. There weren’t 1000’s of configurational setting I had to configure to set the plugin up.

WP Rocket comparison table vs Hyper Cache, Super Cache and W3 Total Cache

I found that, when using other caching plugins (WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache), I had to use several plugins to achieve the same thing that WP Rocket already does. This can be seen via the comparison chart above that they don’t do lazy loading and the minification isn’t great as it tends to break the site. Whereas with WP Rocket, all this is very smooth and simple, plus it’s all-in-one plugin.

WP Rocket Configuration

Basic Settings 

As you will be able to see from the image below, you want to enable:

• Enable lazyload: Images and iframes & videos.
• Enable minification: As you’ll be able to see I have ticked all minification and concatenation settings. Please be aware as the notice on the page says that concatenating files can cause display errors. If this does happen, just watch this video and it’ll explain what you have to do to correct this.
• Enable mobile caching

Also you would want to enable SSL cache if your site has a SSL certificate and is now running https:// instead of the standard http://.

Advanced Options

I have enabled reducing the number of minified files in one file on, this can cause issues sometimes as the notice says. To help resolve this, WP Rocket also released a debug tool to see all the CSS and Javascript files your website uses. This tool will be helpful if you have to exclude scripts from the minification. To be able to find out which script/scripts you need to disable, you can individually add scripts from the debug tool to the WP Rocket exclusion list.

If you are using WooCommerce with WP Rocket you will want to exclude the following pages from caching:

▪ /basket/

▪ /checkout/(.*)

CDN

You can easily connect your CDN with WP Rocket. I use Key CDN and highly recommend it. 

Tools

Within the tools section, you are able to clear and preload the website cache. What the preload feature actually does is: when you clear the cache, or when it is cleared automatically, it triggers our preload bots. These will then crawl your site to “emulate” a first visitor, so that your real first visitor will see an already cached page. It takes 1 visit to refill the cache so basically WP Rocket makes that 1 visit by machine.

WP Rocket also added a shortcut to the WordPress admin bar, from where you can access the top pages such as settings, documentation and support. They also include a very handy link to clear site-wide cache and then a button to preload it.

It’s not always the case you want to clear sitewide cache. This is why they have included the option at page/post level to be able to individually clear that page’s/post’s cache.

Pricing

All of this does come at a cost, compared to other free caching plugins. 

• $39 for personal licence, 1 site.

• $99 for business licence, 3 sites

• $199 for pro licence, unlimited sites.

As you will be able to see from the pricing image above this includes 1 year of updates and support. You will still be able to use the plugin after this time expires but you won’t have access to updates and support unless you pay to renew your licence with them. This renewal, from what I can see, is at a reduced rate of around the 50% off the original licence cost before the expiration. However, after that it goes back up to the full price.

They offer a 30 day money back guarantee. I know from reading around that a few people encountered issues with this. But ever since then, the money back guarantee has changed for the better.

Support

With a paid-for plugin you get premium support. If you run into any issues or errors, the WP Rocket team will be able to help sort out or fix these. I’ve spoken with them a few times either by their live chat or by submitting a support ticket. They were quick to respond and sorted out the issues I was having. For someone who isn’t technically savvy, having this support undoubtedly must be good. You would have to pay for this kind of support for other such plugins. So, when you might have a free plugin elsewhere, support isn’t as good and might have to be paid for.

Speed compression

WP Rocket VS WP Super Cache VS W3 Total Cache

WP Rocket – Load time 263ms

WP Super Cache – Load time 312ms 18.6% slower

W3 Total Cache – Load Time 310ms 18.6% Slower

As you can see from my test where installed one caching plugin at a time (and then deactivated and deleted) that there was a 18.6% slower load speed difference. As you will also be able to spot, the amount of requests is less using WP Rocket which is a big help to reducing load speed.

So is it really worth paying for?

There will be people reading this going: “NO! I’m not paying for this when I can get another plugin for free.”

Yes, that’s true, but you’re not everybody. I think this plugin is right for some people. I believe that if you want speed, then you’ll be willing to spend a few bucks to make this happen, as I did. The results don’t lie and the plugin is quicker than W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. Secondly I think that this is a fantastic plugin for people that have set up their own WordPress website that aren’t techie. You can see how simple the set up is, compare that to other caching plugins and it’s a breeze.