WP Rocket Review 2023 – Pricing, Features & Details

Having tried many speed and performance optimization plugins on this blog, website performance is still far from good, especially CWV. I decided to give WP Rocket a try in July 2023.

So, this WP Rocket review is based on real user experience. 

Far from echoing the plugin features, settings, or documentation. You will learn how the plugin optimizes performance in real-world website usage. 

It’s pros and cons, and how certain settings can improve or break your site. Some optimization settings can negatively impact site appearance, breaking CSS files.

And how you can get the best out of the plugin, ensuring your website page loads insanely fast for users regardless of location and network quality.

But first, let’s begin with the big question.

What is WP Rocket?

WP Rocket is a premium cache and performance optimization plugin created in 2013 by WP Media.

The group WP Media’s bold mission is to make the web better, faster, and lighter.

So, they created a caching and performance optimization plugin, WP Rocket. All the tools, features, and setups you need to achieve faster website speed are in one package.

Instead of installing multiple WordPress performance optimization plugins, you can have one that effectively handles all the dirty work.

That’s one of the benefits or advantages of WP Rocket over its competitors in the market.

Activating WP Rocket eliminates installing other known WordPress speed and performance tools like image optimization, code, and file minification.

For instance, you don’t need another lazy load plugin, HTML, CSS, and JS minification plugin, or hosting analytics code locally if the plugin is installed and active on your site.

It has all these features and many more built into it.

According to stats on the website, there are over 130,000 happy WP Rocket customers. And it has been used by more than 3.7 million WordPress websites.

How Does WP Rocket Work?

To learn how WP Rocket works to speed up your site, you must first understand how WordPress handles and processes requests and serves web pages to users.

For every visitor that requests information on your site, WordPress runs a PHP call to the database to retrieve the information.

This process involves many steps, connections, stops, and HTTP requests to the origin servers.

Considering these processes, retrieving and downloading website data from the WordPress database takes several seconds to complete, slows down the server performance, and leads to poor user experience.

To bypass and speed up the processes, WP Rocket automatically creates a static HTML copy (cache) of your website pages for faster and lighter downloads for users.

So the next time a user request information from your site, WP Rocket serves the cached copy, removing the need for a WordPress database call, improving performance and faster download.

The plugin also enables browser cache and stores regularly accessible website files in the client’s local browser cache storage. This process significantly improves user experience the next time the user request information from the website.

A minimum of PHP 7.3 and WordPress version 5.8 is required for the plugin to work effectively on any of these servers:

• NGINX.
• Litespeed or Windows.
• Apache server with mod_rewrite, mod_expires, mod_deflate.

How I tested WP Rocket 

If you Google WP Rocket Review, most of the top articles claiming to have tested the plugin only do so on a demo site and share the results.

The problem with such experiments is that most of the sites used are newly created and often very small in page size, with fewer external resources and little to no images, making the experiments lack purpose and substance.

In my case, my test site is this very blog with performance and speed issues, so I got the plugin to help with my site and not just for experimenting.

This site has 241 published posts, 17 installed plugins, 19k+ uploaded images, dozens of video content, and several other third-party files and analytics codes since WP Rocket was installed. 

This blog also has the Astra Pro WordPress theme with the Pro plugin installed.

So, it’s safe to conclude that this is a better scenario to test and understand how effective WP Rocket is.

Now that I got your attention let’s dive into the review of the WP Rocket plugin based on personal experience using a live working site.

First, I bought WP Rocket to solve a few issues, increase site speed (especially TTFB), improve website performance, and solve Google Core Web Vitals (LCP longer 2.5s on desktop) and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.138 on desktop and 0.119 on mobile. 

How does WP Rocket perform to resolve the issues?

The results are in.

Before installing WP Rocket, here is what most of the pages measure on PSI for mobile. The image below is the blog homepage.

After installing WP Rocket and enabling file optimization (JS/CSS) features in its settings, here is what the blog homepage measures on mobile.

And here is the desktop score on page speed insight.

Testing with Pingdom – Location – North America, USA, Washinton DC

Blog homepage with WP Rocket active.

Blog homepage with WP Rocket disabled – Location – North America, USA, Washinton DC

Comparing with GTMetrix reveal the real power and magic of WP Rocket. Here is the homepage result testing with GTMetrix – Location – San Antonio, TX, USA on Chrome Desktop view.

The GTMetrix result on the left of your screen (All Green) is when WP Rocket was enabled, and the result on the right (All Red) is when WP Rocket was disabled.

Aside from the CLS score, which is even, WP Rocket improve every aspect of the homepage performance, especially reducing page seize by 720KB and Total Blocking Time by 440MS. 

While individual pages have different performance scores due to diversity in how pages are being created, WP Rocket improves most pages Core Web Vitals and averages 0.02ms time to first bytes.

You can test any page on this website yourself and see the result.

To know the difference WP Rocket has on the test result, just include this query string ?nowprocket at the end of the page URL to bypass WP Rocket cache and optimization for the test.

Now that we’ve got this settled let’s jump into the settings of WP Rocket and get access to the plugin.

Getting Started WP Rocket

First, get the plugin from this link, and complete the checkout process. Then download the zip file to your computer and upload it to your WordPress blog.

To upload the zip file, go to your WordPress admin dashboard and hover your mouse on “Plugins.” It will reveal three menu options:

• Installed Plugins
• Add New
• Plugin Editors

Click “add new,” and it will open a new tab where you will see the “upload plugin” button.

Click it. This action will reveal a panel just below the page.

Click the “choose file” button and select the WP Rocket plugin in a zip file from your computer. Next, click the Install Now button.

Wait for the upload to complete. It may take a few seconds or minutes, depending on your network quality. Once the upload is completed, click on activate.

Activating your WP Rocket license takes place in the background. Unlike other plugins, where you need to enter API keys and other details, you don’t need to do anything to validate your WP Rocket license.

It will be activated automatically. But if your license validation fails, here are a few troubleshooting tips to help.

WP Rocket Best Settings

Now that we’ve understood WP Rocket let’s walk through the best settings. The plugin has several settings, but here, we will focus on those significantly impacting speed and performance. 

For most websites that use WP Rocket, these settings are necessary to go through.

So, in our review of the plugin, here are the recommended WP Rocket settings for most websites.

Important notice.

WP Rocket has built-in help links to supporting articles that explain how a feature works and help increase performance.

If you don’t understand the purpose of a feature or how it works, click the Need Help link to open the sidebar popup instant answer.

Dashboard Tab

The dashboard lets you perform specific quick action optimization tasks like removing all cache files and unused CSS.

You can also view your account’s important details, such as license type, expiration date, and access to activate RocketCDN.

The dashboard also contains links to essential getting started videos, FAQ page, support desk, and knowledge base articles. Just in case you need to find solutions to performance issues quickly.

Other than this, there is nothing much in the dashboard.

File Optimization Tab

File optimization is one of the core features of WP Rocket, but not activated by default. So, you must access the setting tab and manually enable your site’s best feature/setting.

The functions remove unnecessary white space from your website’s HTML code and optimize CSS and JavaScript files. It also combines JS/CSS files into one to reduce connection requests and size.

For example, if you have 15 JS files on your website, WP Rocket will combine the files into one to reduce the number of HTTP requests.

However, some features cannot be used together at the same time.

You cannot enable the combine CSS files option if “removed unused CSS” is enabled in the optimize CSS delivery section. Also, if your site uses HTTP/2, combining CSS files is not recommended.

Contact your host if you are unsure whether your site uses HTTP/2 or HTTP/3.

Besides, WP Rocket recommends using the removed used CSS option for best performance instead of Load CSS Asynchronously.

In the JavaScript setting section, if you enable the JS delay execution (which has a better impact on performance), combining JS files is automatically disabled to avoid compatibility issues and possibly breaking your site appearance.

One important piece of advice here is that for each setting you enable on the file optimization tab, test your site on incognito browser mode or use a VPN to check appearance and performance.

If you’re optimizing for Core Web Vitals, running a few performance tests in PSI (Page Speed Insight) after each feature you turn on is important.

This will let you know if a feature has a positive or negative performance impact on your web page.

In summary, you’ll want to go through the following features:

Cache Tab

WP Rocket automatically enables page and browser cache on your sites by default. Other than deciding whether you want to have a separate cache for mobile visitors, there’s nothing much to do here, too.

However, there are instances where you may want to disable the WP Rocket cache, like when you prefer using your host’s built-in cache; in that case, you need the helper plugin to deactivate the WP Rocket cache.

The helper plugin lets users access WP Rocket’s built-in features and finetune their settings to work seamlessly with their site preferences.

Learn more about the WP Rocket helper plugin in this KB article.

By default, the plugin does not enable cache for logged-in users, so you must decide what best suits your site and make the changes.

The cache lifespan is 10 hours, but I increased it to 24 hours because I don’t hit published too often. If you do publish daily, leave the cache lifespan as it is.

WP Rocket will automatically clear and preload the cache regardless of the setting whenever you change your website frontend.

If you want to disable automatic cache deletion, here is more information on changing the setting or behavior.

To recap, here is what you can do in the cache tab.

Media Tab

In addition to caching and code optimization, WP Rocket tends to act on image files hosted on your website.

Learning more about how WP Rocket optimizes images on your website is important. While the plugin does work to improve perceived image loading and performance, it has limitations.

First, WP Rocket does not act on images hosted on third-party websites and does poorly on image compression. You must pair WP Rocket with an image optimization plugin like Imagify, Smush.it, or EWWW to completely optimize your WordPress images.

That said. In the media tab, you can enable lazy load for images, iframe, and videos to improve perceived and actual performance reducing HTTP requests.

Lazy load also ensures media files, images and videos are only visible or loaded when the user scrolls to the viewports.

WP Rocket replaces YouTube thumbnails with image previews, so WordPress won’t load the embedded video until a user clicks on the preview image.

It does a better job of optimizing iframes and YouTube videos with image preview thumbnails.

To improve the Google core web vital reports, you can check the “add missing image dimensions” feature, which helps fix the (CLS) Cumulative layout shift error in the page speed insight testing tool.

Note in the screenshot above because I use Jetpack Site Accelerator (which also lazy load and serve images from a CDN), I choose to deactivate WP Rocket Lazy load for images. While leaving other media settings on.

Since WP Rocket is not a complete image optimization plugin, it relies on a WebP image conversion plugin to serve qualified images in that format for supported browsers.

Another reason you may want to use a separate image optimization plugin.

Disabling WP Rocket’s lazy load on a page-by-page basis is possible via the setting panel on the WordPress editor. Disabling cache and other settings at the page level is also possible via the setting panel.

Cache Preload Tab

This feature is turned on by default; you should leave it as it is. It improves loading time for first-time visitors using your site.

Instead of WordPress serving first-time site users from the database, WP Rocket preloads the pages into the cache and the cached copies even on the user’s first visit.

The plugin uses several methods to detect your site pages upon activation. Once the URLs are discovered, full or partial preloading will start making it serve these pages for site users faster.

And anytime the cache is cleared, automatic cache preload with start to make cached pages available to users.

Additionally, enabling WP Rocket preload links will likely improve perceived website performance but may not have a noticeable effect on the page performance testing tool.

The link preload feature loads the HTML of a page in the background when a user touches or hovers over a link for 100ms or more. The page loads instantly when the user clicks the link, giving the impression of a fast-loading web page.

You should enable this feature, too. It helps improve on-site user experience and makes pages appear more responsive and load instantly.

Other settings depend on your website setup and third-party code usage.

Use the Prefetch DNS request to allow WP Rocket to load third-party code and files from their server quickly.

In summary, here is what you can do on the cache preload tab:

Advance Rule Tab

The Advanced tab contains settings for excluding specific pages from cache and optimization. Here you can specify which URL or content to cache and which should not. 

For example, an eCommerce site may never want to cache checkout, payment, and login pages. 

Sensitive pages might be excluded from the cache. WP Rocket allows you to define advanced rules for the followings:

• URL to never cache
• Cookies to never cache
• User-agent to never see cache pages.
• URL to always purge from the cache

This section is up to individual websites to determine what works best for your business type. For the most part, e-commerce businesses will need this setting mostly.

Database Tab

WP Rocket also optimizes WordPress database, like post revisions, tables, trash posts, transients, and auto drafts.

Additionally, the plugin performs database cleanup for trash and spam comments and auto-schedules database optimization.

Though this feature is helpful and saves one additional plugin, WP Rocket is insufficient for this task.

I would prefer you use WP-Optimize for the database cleanup. WP-Optimize does a better job at optimizing the database, running schedule optimization and undoubtedly optimizes database tables better.

If you prefer WP-Optimize for database cleanup, disable the same function in WP Rocket. And ensure other optimization features, like cache, image, and file optimizations in WP-Optimize, are disabled to avoid conflict with WP Rocket.

As from WP Rocket 3.14.1, the plugin is incompatible with WP-Optimize. To avoid further conflict, you can run WP-Optimize on demand and uninstall it when you optimize your WordPress database.

CDN Tab

If your website uses Cloudflare CDN, there is nothing much to do here. WP Rocket automatically integrates with Cloudflare and adjusts its setting to work with Cloudflare cache.

WP Rocket has extensive information on using the Cloudflare Cache Everything feature with the WP Rocket CDN add-on.

WP Rocket synchronizes and automatically purges the cache with Cloudflare APO.

However, if you use Cloudflare Enterprise through Cloudways hosting (which I’m using), you need to clear the Cloudflare cache manually each time you make changes to the WP Rocket settings.

Alternatively, you can disable the WP Rocket cache through the helper plugin to allow your website to use the Cloudflare CDN cache. But in my experience, the WP Rocket cache is more effective and significantly improves overall site performance than the Cloudflare cache.

You can activate the RocketCDN (WP Rocket’s CDN) from its dashboard, which costs an extra $7.99/month for unlimited bandwidth usage.

Stackpath, a global name in the website performance optimization service industry, powers RocketCDN.

Apart from CDN integration, you can enter URLs that should not be served via CDN services.

You can create rules for these file types:

• All files
• Images
• CSS & JavaScript
• CSS only
• JavaScript only

Heartbeat Control Tab

Because the heartbeat API is always on and requests data from the server, this can cause a slight performance issue.

For example, if the WordPress admin tab is left open, the heartbeat API will send POST requests every 15 seconds to the /admin-ajax.php file to run AJAX calls.

This can lead to unnecessarily high CPU usage.

You can reduce its frequency or altogether disable it from the heartbeat tab.

Add-on Tab

There are a couple of add-ons in WP Rocket you might want to look at;

Other Tabs

Other WP Rocket tabs include the option to download your plugin setting and importing setting from a file from your computer. This tab also contains the rollback feature just in case the last version causes your site compatibility issue.

The last tab contains video tutorials for getting the best of the WP Rocket plugin.

The video content includes the getting started video, passing Core Web Vitals, like the CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift), FID (First Input Delay), and LCP (Largest Contentful Paint).

It also has tutorials on troubleshooting issues using the WP Rocket plugin and a guide on using the Cloudflare add-on.

WP Rocket Core Features

In summary, these are the WP Rocket core features you will experience when you buy a license.

WP Rocke Support

The support response time is not too great if your issue requires urgent attention. I received a reply from support about 48 hours after submitting the ticket.

Look at the timestamp in the email below.

That’s about 48 hours from the time I submitted the ticket. 

And from what I read in the WP Rocket Facebook group, this isn’t just me not being lucky. It seems the support usually responds late to tickets. 

But as the Facebook user reported (in the image above), once you hear from the support via email, they tend to go the extra mile to help you resolve the issue.

I did get the same treatments, too. My support rep was passionate about helping and did all she could to provide a solution, which eventually worked to improve CLS on the desktop.

However, WP Rocket does not offer optimization services, so don’t expect someone from the support reps to log in to your site and help you troubleshoot. 

No, the support is to offer advice, provide detailed insight, and direct you to resources that might solve your website performance issues. 

That being said, WP Rocket has an extensive library and documentation, KB articles, and video tutorials providing helpful advice and tips for resolving most performance and speed issues. 

There is no lack of information on the website. 

As per the type of support offered, you only have to submit a ticket if you can’t find solutions through the blog content and videos. 

WP Rocket does not offer live chat or phone call support.  

In all, the support service is excellent, and as you should expect, offering optimization services will distract the company from its core mission, which is to provide the best WordPress cache plugin. 

WP Rocket License Validation Error

There are a few reasons your license validation might fail, but taking this step will, in most cases, resolve the issues.

Save Changes

99% of the time, clicking the save changes button on the validation page is all needed to resolve the issue.

Before trying any other tip on this list, give this one a go.

IP Address

Some web hosts have a list of blocked IP addresses. Check with your hosting provider to allow WP Rocket IP address. The IP address is given here; 146.59.192.120

Check WP Rocket status.

If the above options didn’t solve the license validation error, next is to check the WP Rocket status.

It might be that the server itself is down for some reason. If this is so, you need to check the status to confirm.

You can always check the status in real-time from this link.

Deactivate WordPress security plugins

WordPress security firewall applications like Wordfence blocks malicious or suspicious logins IP on your site.

Sometimes, legitimate requests to your origin server might be blocked too.

If you have a security application active on your site, disable it before validating your license.

Reinstall The Plugin

If all the above doesn’t work, it’s time to deactivate the plugin, delete, reinstall, and activate it again.

Probably, there is something wrong along the way. Taking this step might fix the problem.

For more troubleshooting guides, visit the helper page.

WP Rocket Pricing 

There are three standard WP Rocket pricing; apart from pricing, the only significant difference among the three licenses is the number of allowed websites. 

All three licenses come with similar features and tools. Purchasing a specific license does not require unique treatments or feature limitations.

Here are the three WP Rocket prices and licenses available:

All plans come with one year of plugin updates and WP Rocket support. However, if you choose to renew your license, you get a 30% discount on renewal.

WP Rocket Pros and Cons

The pros and cons are subjective to the individual specific needs of WP Rocket. In my review of the plugin, here is my observation about the advantages and disadvantages of using the WP Rocket plugin.

Money-Back Guarantee

You have nothing to lose if you purchase WP Rocket today.

This is because you have 14 days to test the waters and see if the WordPress caching plugin is exactly what your blog needs.

If, within 14 days of your purchase, for any reason, you don’t like the performance of the WP Rocket plugin or it’s not compatible with your hosting environments, all you must do is ask for a refund of your money.

That’s it. No questions asked. You get your money back.

People Who Trust WP Rocket

If these marketers can trust WP Rocket with their website or that of clients, you are in good company. From small business owners to industry top influencers like Yoast, WP Engine and BIG Commerce, thousands of digital marketers use and trust WP Rocket.

FAQ About WP Rocket Review

Do you have any questions? Check the FAQ section below if I already answered it; otherwise, leave your comment below.

Conclusion…

If you want to achieve maximum page speed, increase website performance, and give a better user experience, a caching plugin like WP Rocket is all you need.

In this WP Rocket plugin review, I have given you much of the information you need to decide if the cache plugin will help boost page speed and increase site performance and revenue for your site.

WP Rocket is the choice cache plugin for top marketing gurus like Neil Patel, Yoast, Ana Couto, Topher DeRosia, and more.

If you’ve discovered something helpful in this post or want to share your experience, leave us a message in the comment box below.