WP Rocket Review 2022 – Pricing, Features & Details

Are you searching for the best WordPress cache plugin? You’re on the right page. In this WP Rocket review, you’re going to find the fix to your slow WordPress pages.

There are over 59,000+ WordPress Plugins with added blog functionalities and features. But there are a few that most WordPress blogs need.

Improving page speed, website performance, and user experience are some of the vital areas every WordPress blog needs to work on and improve upon.

A cache and performance optimization WordPress plugin fall into the latter categories. Every WordPress blog needs caching and optimization features.

A plugin that’s straight out-of-the-box optimized enabled. No complex configuration setup is required. Download, install, activate, set it, and forget it.

This is where the WP Rocket comes in. One of the best WordPress cache plugins.

In this review, you’re going to discover why it is such a great caching and website performance optimization plugin for WordPress blogs. And why is such an essential tool worthy of your investment?

Going by the sheer size of its customer database, WP-Rocket is undoubtedly one of the best caching plugins today.

What is WP Rocket?

WP Rocket is a premium cache and performance optimization tool created by the WP Media team back in 2013. The team, 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 together in one package.

Instead of having multiple WordPress cache 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.

The activation of WP Rocket will save you from installing other known WordPress caching and performance tools.

For instance, you don’t need another lazy load plugin, HTML, CSS, and JS minification plugin, or hosting analytics code locally if you have WP Rocket 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 1.7 million WordPress websites.

How Does WP Rocket Work?

For every visitor that requests information on your site, WordPress runs a PHP call to the database to retrieve the information. This process involves a lot of steps, connections, stops, and HTTP requests to the origin servers.

To simplify the process and make the information available to the users quicker, there is a need to enable caching features on the host server.

WP Rocket optimizes page load by enabling caching on your server to keep a copy of your website pages.

So when a user visits the first time, the server downloads a fresh copy of the request to the client browser. For subsequent visits/requests, the cached copy is compressed and served to the user to make the download process faster.

The plugin, by default, automatically enabled Gzip compression to reduce the file size and improves performance and page speed significantly.

WP Rocket automatically enables caching upon activation for desktop traffic. Mobile visitors get separate cache pages. This helps to optimize mobile traffic better.

WP Rocket is one of the few cache plugins allowed in top-managed WordPress hosting environments. In its documentation, you will find a list of WordPress hosting providers that work seamlessly with WP Rocket.

A minimum of PHP 5.6 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.

WP Rocket has many caching and optimization features that set it apart from other optimization and caching plugins.

How to Install and Activate WP Rocket

First, get the plugin from this link, then download from the website to your computer and upload it to your WordPress blog.

To upload the zip file, go to the WordPress admin dashboard and hover your mouse on “Plugins.” It will reveal 3 menu options:

• Installed Plugins
• Add New
• Plugin Editors

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

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

Click on the “choose file” button and select the WP Rocket plugin in a zip file from your computer.

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 others, 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.

How to Configure WP Rocket Best Settings

Now that we’ve understood what WP Rocket is, let’s walk through the best settings for WP Rocket. There are several settings in the plugin, but here, we are going to focus on the ones that make the big impact. 

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.

WP Rocket Dashboard Tab

The dashboard is where you can perform specific optimization tasks like purging the entire cache, restarting cache preloading, removing unused CSS, and purging Opcache content.

You can also view your account’s important details such as license type, expiration date, and access to activate RocketCDN. Other than this, there is nothing much in the dashboard.

WP Rocket File Optimization Configuration Tab

From your WordPress admin dashboard, go to settings>>wp rocket>>, on the interface, click on file optimization. 

You’ll want to go through the following features:

• Minify CSS files – This helps to reduce the file size by removing white space and comments.
• Optimize CSS delivery – you can choose between the “removed unused CSS or “load CSS asynchronously”.
• Load JavaScript deferred – If you’re getting the render-blocking warning in testing tools like page speed and Pingdom, this setting can help fix that.
• Minify JavaScript files – It helps reduce the file size and remove white spaces 
• Delay JavaScript Execution – You can specify important scripts that need to load early 
• Combine CSS and JavaScript – This feature helps reduce the number of HTTP requests on a page. But if your host uses HTTP/2 you might not use it.

WP Rocket Cache Tab

Here you can configure WP Rocket’s basic settings such as enabling cache for mobile visitors, cache lifespan and logging in users.

• Cache mobile visitors – If you enable cache for mobile visitors, then, you need to check the box “separate cache files for mobile devices”. This is the recommended best setting for enabling cache for mobile device users.
• Logged-in users – If you have content on your website that requires users to log in before they can access it, this feature is handy. If otherwise, leave the setting as it is.
• Cache lifespan – By default, WP Rocket will store cached pages for a maximum of 10 hours, but you can change this setting depending on how frequently you update your website content. You can make it longer if you don’t update more than a few times per week.

WP Rocket Media Tab

This feature allows you to optimize media files such as video, images, iframe, and other media content on your website.

It can significantly improve loading time and give a better user experience for your site. 

For example, if you upload a lot of youtube videos, you can disable the WordPress embed function and replace it with an image preview of the video. Until a user clicks on the preview image, WordPress won’t load the embedded video.

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 pagespeed insight testing tool.

WP Rocket Cache Preload Tab

This feature is ideal if you want to preload a page into the cache even if it has not been visited in a while.

WP Rocket performs this task in two ways:

• Activate Preload – The blog homepage and all links found on it will preload into the cache.
• Sitemap-based cache preloading – You can specify which sitemap to preload into the cache. 
• Links Preloading – This option improves users’ experience but not the loading time. When a user hovers or touches a link, the web page will download in the background, this feature allows instant opening of the page when it finally clicks on.
• Font Preload – WP Rocket has a feature that allows you to preload fonts from your domain. The font has to be hosted on your domain or the one you’d specify in the CDN tab. Then, enter the font URL in the box to start preloading. 

WP Rocket Advance Rule Tab

This feature is helpful if you’re an advanced user or an e-commerce site. Here you can specify which URL or content to cache and which should not. 

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

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 cache
• URL to always purge from the cache

WP Rocket DataBase Tab

One of the benefits of having a WordPress cache plugin like WP Rocket is that it saves you from having too many plugins installed.

Many of the optimizations features you will need separate plugins for are found in WP Rocket. So you don’t have to install yet another WordPress plugin.

WP Rocket comes with a database cleanup feature. And the good thing is, you can schedule the operation to autorun periodically.

you can clean up:

• Revision and draft post
• Trashed and spam comments
• Transition
• Database 

WP Rocket CDN Tab

Combining WP Rocket with content delivery network services can bring an additional performance boost to your website.

WP Rocket allows you to use its CDN service or integrate with third-party services. From its dashboard, you can activate the RocketCDN which costs an extra $7.99/month for unlimited bandwidth usage.

RocketCDN is powered by Stackpath, a global name in the website performance optimization service industry.

You can also integrate with third-party CDN services of your choice such as Cloudflare, Stackpath, Amazon Cloudfront, KeyCDN, and more.

Additionally, you can create separate rules for different file types on your blog and exclude certain files from being served over the CDN network.

You can create rules for these file types:

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

WP Rocket Heartbeat Tab

If you want to control how the WordPress heartbeat API functions, you can do that here. 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 keep sending POST requests every 15 seconds to the /admin-ajax.php file to run AJAX calls. This can lead to unnecessary high CPU usage.

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

WP Rocket Add-on Tab

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

• Varnish – If your server uses Varnish, you need to activate this addon. This will allow WP Rocket to purge both its cache and that of Varnish each time your blog is updated.
• Cloudflare – If you use Cloudflare Cdn, this feature integrates the WP Rocket Cloudflare add-on with your account details, so you can benefit from both optimization tools.
• Sucuri – If you use Sucuri, you need to synchronize with your account so WP Rocket can clear both caches when your blog is updated.
• WebP compatibility – If you use any WebP image convertible plugin, you need to enable this feature. It will improve browser compatibility with WebP images.

WP Rocket Core Features

• Pages cache for quick viewing.
• Separate caching setup for mobile visitors.
• Option to cache logged-in users.
• Preloading the cache of pages in user browsers.
• Fix Leverage browser caching errors in speed testing tools like GtMetrix, Google Page Speed Insights, Pingdom, etc.
• Reduce HTTP requests to improve the site speed.
• Decreasing bandwidth usage with GZIP compression.
• Apply optimal browser caching header’s expiration time.
• Minification and concatenation of JS and CSS files
• Lazy Loading images for optimal performance and load times.
• WebP compatibility for supported browsers.
• Deferred loading of JavaScript files.
• Generation of Critical Path CSS and deferred loading of CSS files
• Database optimization.
• Heartbeat WordPress API control.
• DNS prefetch
• CDN (content delivery network) integration
• Cloudflare integration
• Sucuri integration
• Host Google Analytics code locally.
• Host Facebook Pixel code locally.
• Import/export option of settings.
• Option to roll back to a previous version.

How to Troubleshoot 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, simply clicking on the save changes button on the validation page is all that is needed to resolve the issue.

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

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 block 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 first before trying to validate 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 cost licenses, apart from pricing, the only major difference among the three is the number of allowed websites. 

All three licenses come with equal features and tools. You do not get special treatments or feature limitations by purchasing a certain license.

Here are the three WP Rocket prices and licenses available:

• Single – $49/yr (1 website allowed)
• Plus – $99/yr (3 websites allowed)
• Infinite – $249/yr (unlimited websites allowed)

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.

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 WP Rocket, 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.

FAQ About WP Rocket Review

Conclusion…

If you’re looking 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 useful in this post or want to share your experience, leave us a message in the comment box below.