WP Rocket is a caching plugin I’ve known about for a while, but never ended up purchasing due to the abundance of free caching plugins that are highly rated on WordPress.org (the one I use here is WP Super Cache). So why should you pay for WP Rocket? The comments below, submitted by people who have paid for WP Rocket and have significant experience using it, should help you answer that question.
Here’s a summary of what people think of WP Rocket. The vast majority of comments so far speak very highly of WP Rocket, and most people are glad they got it. Only 2 comments so far are somewhat critical of WP Rocket (here and here).
I’ll continue to update this piece as new comments come in, so if you’ve used WP Rocket, please add a comment here.
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In my opinion, WP Rocket is the best caching plugin right now. I'm using it on my main website since January 2020, and I have to admit that I love it. My page speed went from around 6 seconds of loading time on average to around 3 seconds. I'm using all the tools provided in the paid version of the plugin including mobile cache, file optimization, lazy loading of images and videos, preloading, etc. 7 What I really like about this tool is the simplicity of the UI. It's super easy to turn on and off the different functionality, and you get an awesome tutorial tab where you can find answers to practically any questions you have. Compared to other free caching plugins, WP Rocket looks super-professional and works perfectly all the time. --Alek Asaduryan, YesCycling |
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I’ve been using WP-Rocket for 2+ years and have a developer license. As a WordPress web designer, I have found it to be worth the price. Creating over a dozen sites a year entails a lot of specifics for each site. Although reducing plugins is essential, they’re a necessary evil and do slow your site down. Add on theme builder for clients to make their own changes, photos, CSS, and JavaScript each site can turn into a monster if not cached properly and consistently. Enter WP-Rocket and it’s a no-brainer. The controls are simple and straight forward. The potential to break your CSS and JavaScript is there but comes with a warning. The heartbeat control is unique and the results are 100% worth the price. I have worked with Autoptimize, WP Super Cache, WP Total Cache, WP Fastest Cache, Breeze for Cloudways, SiteGround hosting’s caching, and various others throughout my 15 years of working with WordPress. When WP-Rocket hit the scene, I loved it. WP Rocket is consistent and has never been an issue on any of my builds. It’s worth the premium price. --Kolleen Shallcross, Shallcross Marketing & Design PERMALINK: https://outwittrade.com/wp-rocket-reviews#kolleen |
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My answer to whether WP Rocket is worth paying for is… well, it depends. WP Rocket is a premium cache plugin in WordPress that brings a lot of benefits to your website. What I personally like about WP Rocket when I used it is that it’s extremely user-friendly and that you’ll be able to create a fast and responsive website without prior knowledge about web design. The plugin is compatible with multiple third-party plugins and it contains multiple scripts you can use to enhance your website. Using the plugin will yield you with a faster and much more responsive website that will raise your Google SERP rankings. So if you’re new to web development or you’re too lazy to handle the backend code and plugins yourself then WP Rocke is definitely with using. On the other hand, if you have knowledge about web development, then you might opt-out to sue free caching plugins or even create your own. Just know that this will take a lot of time, time that can be used for promoting and creating the content of your website. --Kenny Trinh, Netbooknews |
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I wouldn't really recommend you to use WP rocket, I did face CSS breakage when I tried using WP Rocket to speed up my website. I would recommend you use Autoptimize if, you are looking to speed up your website. This never broke my website and made my work hassle-free. The website I mentioned below is using Autoptimize plugin which is quite very fast in page speed loading. However, It's free of cost 😉 --Praful Kharade, Planet Fish |
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Here are my thoughts on WP Rocket vs Free caching plugins WP Rocket is a one stop shop plugin to optimize and decrease page load time. - The preloading feature ensures that website visitors get the cached version of the website straight away. - The Gzip compression reduced the HTML, CSS and JavaScript size and helps save storage space. This speeds up the website load time and first content to paint. - I have not seen any free caching plugins that provide a robust DataBase optimization. WP Rocket is worth investing if you want to store all the content such as posts, pages, settings for themes, plugins and have them load fast and efficiently. - Google fonts have a major impact on page speed time. WP Rocket ensures that Google fonts wont have a significant impact on load times. WP Rocket is certainly one of the most powerful caching plugin and I would certainly recommend it to anyone who owns a WordPress site. --Anand Iyer, anandriyer.com |
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WP Rocket is an excellent caching plugin and worth every penny of the annual cost. We use it with large websites that need additional optimization for speed that cannot be accomplished solely through theme settings, cloud server configuration, and the use of a CDN. One of the strengths of WP Rocket is that it has built-in compatibility with cloud hosting companies like WP Engine, Flywheel, Cloudways, SiteGround, and Kinsta. The plugin allows users to manage the server caching while also managing additional caching features all from one dashboard in WordPress. WP Rocket's documentation and online support are excellent, saving users a great deal of time when configuring the plugin. Documentation specifically spells out which caching features are duplicated by the plugin and specific cloud hosting services so that users know which features to disable within the plugin. WP Rocket is a must-have caching plugin for large websites that need to be fast. --Allan McNabb, Image Building Media |
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My website PageSpeed results were terrible. When I started looking into improving this, I started with an image optimization plugin called ShortPixel. Despite it reducing image sizes by 50-70%, my speed score did not go up. I also tried different configurations in Elementor to try and optimize Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, etc. None of it made much difference. I then tried Siteground’s SG Optimizer, mainly because it comes for free with Siteground hosting. I contacted them to see if upgrading to a different hosting plan would increase initial server response. They said all was configured correctly and there was nothing else they could do. I’ll take my "best whole-house generators" article as an example. Before I did anything, the desktop score for this article was 38 and the mobile score 17. That’s really terrible. After ShortPixel, this did not change. Once I’d installed SG Optimizer, it went up a little bit to 19 for mobile and 42 for desktop. This is when I installed WP Rocket, mainly because it was recommended in an Authority Hacker course I did. It’s simple enough to set up, but it also cost me $49. Setup was very easy although it can be a bit tricky to configure it correctly. After installing WP Rocket, I ran into lots of problems with compatibility. It was clashing with ShortPixel and the Optimizer so I deactivated the Optimizer and attempted to configure ShortPixel so it worked with WP Rocket. I got better scores with WP Rocket, but I wasn’t as impressed as I hoped I’d be. My article now rated 72 on desktop and 38 on mobile. I ran this setup for about a month, before deciding to try Nitro instead. Best thing I’ve done. I say skip WP Rocket and go straight for Nitro. Yes, you have to pay every month but my article now scores 98 on desktop and 86. I’m happy with that! --Elle Meager, Outdoor Happens |
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Here are the two main reasons why I feel WP Rocket is worth the money: 1) Improves your website speed drastically and ultimately your SEO - Before I purchased and installed WP Rocket, my website speed was pretty slow because my settings were not optimized. When I installed WP Rocket, the plugin automatically tweaked my website settings to automatically make the website run faster. As we all know, website speed is crucial for SEO. Google punishes your website for loading slow, especially for mobile devices. Using WP Rocket dramatically improved my website's mobile experience and I've noticed some of my pages are ranking better on Google now. I attribute this to WP Rocket. 2) Saves you time - You could technically tweak your website settings and plugins on your own using free plugins such as W3 Total Cache and Autoptimize. However, these take time to learn how to use properly. You could be spending hours finding the right settings, whereas if you just pay the $80, all you literally have to do is click a button and your website is instantly sped up. --Roger Senpai, The Senpai Blog |
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I think I tried most cache and optimization plugins out there and I can honestly say that WP Rocket is taking the lead by a large margin. It works very well with any CDN you use (I use Cloudflare, but will most likely switch to their RocketCDN soon, since it’s one of the fastest in the market) and it has a few extra features that you will never find in free plugins.. It is one of the 2 plugins that can auto-generate critical path CSS, which can make your website significantly faster and improve your PageSpeed Insights score by getting rid of that “Remove unused CSS” error (the other plugin that can do this is Autoptimize). Another cool feature it has is hosting Google Analytics scripts locally, which I did not see on any other plugin and is something many Wordpress users want for their sites since it will reduce the number of requests, thus speeding up the website a little. I believe these features alone are worth the money, but it is also worth saying that the team behind the plugin seems very involved and willingly to help with any problem you encounter. They also did a very good job with the documentation, which will probably solve 99% of the issues you can have with their plugin. --Dan Serbanescu, Leather Depot |