WP-Rocket Review – Is It Better than Super Cache or W3 Total Cache?

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WP Rocket is a popular plugin to improve WordPress performance.

However, it’s a paid plugin that cost about $49 and the website is nicely done (Visit here)

The question is?

  • Is it better than WP Super Cache or W3 Total cache?
  • Is WP Rocket pricing justified?

We will find answers to all these questions in this detailed WP Rocket review.

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Before that, we all know that a fast loading website not only gives a great user experience, it also helps in better ranking.

For WordPress, there are many plugins that you can use to make your blog load faster and one of the most common types of plugins is the cache plugin. This cache plugin creates a cache of the static file of your blog posts, and when a user accesses the post it serves it directly from the cache folder.

This saves a ton of resources in terms of running all PHP queries and accessing your database to regenerate and server the same post. Moreover, serving a post from cache will make the post load way faster than without the cache.

I would not get into more technical aspects of WordPress caching and what you should know here is:

Having a cache plugin on your WordPress blog is essential. It helps you to make WordPress load way faster and reduces the load on the server. The below infographic will help you understand how typically WordPress handles a page request

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Now there are various cache plugins out there (Free and paid) and picking the right one is important, as it will save you from the headache of configuration, it will make your WordPress blog highly optimized for speed and performance.

Unlike in the old days, now WordPress is a big commercial market and all plugin developers are in a race to convert their free plugins into a product.

For example, one of the most popular cache plugins W3Total cache started offering Pro features/support which unlocks many advanced features, and another paid cache plugin called WP Rocket entered the market and this was probably the first WordPress cache plugin in the market to be released as a premium plugin.

When it comes to WordPress cache plugins, there are many free options out there such as:

  • W3 Total cache
  • WP Super cache
  • WP Fastest cache
  • Auto optimize

The Survival of a paid plugin becomes difficult when there is a humungous amount of similar free stuff in the market. It becomes really difficult for a paid plugin to create its niche in the market. I have always been an ardent user of W3Total cache and WP Super cache plugin.

From the past few months, I have been hearing good reviews about the WP Rocket plugin and I decided to give it a try myself and see how effective it is. I contacted the WP Rocket team to ask for a review license so that I could do a neck-to-neck battle between W3 Total cache and WP Rocket plugin, and find out if this premium cache plugin is really worth your money or not.

Preparing for W3 Total Cache Vs. WP Rocket plugin:

ShoutMeLoud is already highly optimized and the loading time is even less than a sec. I don’t see much point in doing this test on ShoutMeLoud. For this, I picked one of my blogs which is poorly optimised and takes a little time to load. One of our blogs in the network is “Letstalkrelations.com” which is quite outdated in terms of theme, optimization and we were using W3 total cache plugin.

To start the comparison between these two plugins, I first tested the loading time of Letstalkrelations.com on GTMetrix and tools.pingdom.com, and here is the result with the W3 Total Cache plugin:

W3 total cache performance
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W3tc on Gtmetrix
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As you can see from the above results:

Page size was more than 1.31+ MB and overall performance is not that great. This is exactly why I needed to test WP Rocket else it won’t be a decent comparison.

After testing the load time of the site, I uninstalled the W3 Total cache completely. ( Guide to uninstall W3 Total cache plugin)

  • Deleted cache
  • Disabled all cache option.
  • Disabled and uninstalled plugin
  • Remove W3 Total config files via FTP
  • Removed entries from .htaccess file
  • Also used Advanced database cleaner to delete orphan tables created by W3 total cache
remove W3tc options from Db
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The idea was to remove all files related to W3 Total cache and test the site performance with WP Rocket cache plugin.

Configuring the WP Rocket plugin:

After using WordPress cache plugins like W3 Total cache and WP super cache for years, I thought configuring the WP Rocket plugin will take time but I was taken aback, as WP Rocket is probably the simplest WordPress cache plugin for anyone to configure. If you are someone without any tech skills you can configure the plugin within seconds of time. You will be accessing the configuration dashboard via settings> WP Rocket

The very first screen is the basic setup and I ignored the minification and concatenation option for this test.

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The only options which I enabled from the above screen was enabled Lazy loading images, mobile caching, and increased the clear cache lifespan to 96 hours. As soon as you activate the WP Rocket plugin it takes care of most of the optimization and caching options.

Here are the Pingdom and GTmetrix results after enabling the basic settings. Just to make sure pages are cached, I opened the site in another browser and browsed 10-12 pages to ensure caching of the pages.

Wp Rocket Pingdom loading test
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Wp Rocket Gtmetrix result
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So far the result was satisfactory and I decided to enable the files optimization feature to see how it improves my loading time. I just enabled all three options for files optimization:

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And this time the performance report was even better than the last time and I could see a considerable amount of difference in terms of loading time and total number of requests. Here is the final loading time of the site:

after file minification pingdom
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File minification performance improvement
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Note: I have not yet touched the advanced settings which offer a few features such as “prefetch DNS requests” “CDN” and a few others. One thing which I find very interesting after comparing both the plugin is, that WP Rocket fixed most of the performance grade issues which a cache plugin is supposed to take care of.

Here is a test result by the WP-Seer team, where they compared WP Rocket with WP Super cache, and here is the result difference in loading time:

WP-Rocket-Vs-Super-cache
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Conclusion: Is WP Rocket worth it?

When I started doing this test, I was not hoping to see such a huge difference as the W3 Total cache plugin is loaded with excellent features, but the results of the test proved me completely wrong.

In my testing I find WP Rocket performance to be better than W3 Total cache and what I liked most about WP-Rocket is it’s easy to setup. In fact, it’s better than the WP super cache and Auto-Optimize plugin.

Overall, WP Rocket is worth paying for.

WP Rocket Price:

WP Rocket plugin personal license costs only $49 and you can set it up within 3-4 minutes.

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You will also be getting support from their team and most important the loading time of your WordPress blog will be faster.

In the latest version of WP Rocket, they have added features to optimize your database. This is a smart move as a bloated database can slow down your WordPress blog.

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Last but not the least, you can always get a refund within 30 days if you are not satisfied with the plugin.

I also made a video recently where I optimized the same site (after a long time) and the result was astonishing.

Subscribe on YouTube

How to update WP Rocket?

Whenever a new version is released, you will get an option inside the WordPress dashboard to update the WP rocket plugin.

Is there a free version of WP Rocket?

WP Rocket is a premium cache plugin, and they don’t offer any free version. However, they do offer a 14-day money-back guarantee, and in case if you are not happy with the plugin, you can get a refund.

What about the Nulled WP Rocket?

There are nulled WP-rocket plugins offered by some websites. Do not use it, as it contains malware, and you may lose access to your website in the future. These websites download the premium plugin and offer it for free so that tomorrow they could add backlinks or redirect your website for their own profit. Avoid nulled version of WP rocket at any cost.

To end with, I would like to know which cache plugin you are using on your blog?

At the same time, I would suggest you get a single site license of WP Rocket plugin and try it on your blog and notice the difference.

Do test your site loading time with tools.pingdom.com with the current configuration and later follow my procedure and notice the difference with WP Rocket.

If you don’t like it, you still have 30 days to claim your refund. Anyhow, it’s a win-win situation for you. 

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Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

61 thoughts on “WP-Rocket Review – Is It Better than Super Cache or W3 Total Cache?”

  1. s2tm

    i tried wp optimize and the db+cache worked great. But switching to image it totally crapped out on the 6th image. Froze my site with a db connection error. In fairness, i tried imagify and same issue with image optimization. . . what gives. Ok so then I switched to wp rocket. Voila. db+cache all worked beautifully. But their recommended partnership with imagify failed for me. I gtmetrixed it and found a whole letter grade improvement (from an embarrassing F to a D…ok so it’s still bad, but at least its moving the correct direction). So i uninstalled imagify and now am trying smush by wmu or whatever and so far so good. Sometimes one size does not fit all. and you have to sadly mix and match. Gtmetrix post smush did not seem to make much of a difference. I saved 0.1sec of load time, everything else was about the same. hmm… I may have to keep looking at image solutions. CDN freaks me out, in theory it looks good, but so much room for errors.

  2. Sunny Chawla

    Nice article about the comparison of Rocket and Super Catch. I had tried both the plugins for my website but for me, Super Catch was better than Rocket because in the super catch the processing of the catch memory is faster than the rocket plugin.

    1. @Sunny
      Do try the advanced features of WP-rocket. Especially image and video lazy loading. It made a considerable amount of difference for us.

  3. Charles Jenks

    Hi All – I use WP-Rocket with MaxCDN on all my sites (commercial clients) and have been very pleased with the results. I renewed my license for unlimited sites at heavy discount. All my client sites are quick – and better yet much quicker than their competition.

  4. Vikramjeet

    I have been using WP-Rocket for quite some time now and It’s the best WordPress cache available! Trust me, your WP website will fly!

  5. Ted

    WP Rocket used to be the #1. I used to be a fan. Honestly, it was the best,
    But no anymore.
    Their new release is a disaster. It’s not compatible with Genesis Framework. It breaks your site if you minify CSS & JS. eg. the mobile menu looks weird, And it even uninstalled one of my plugin everday. Weird, isn’t it?
    I don’t know what is happening, I think they are experimenting something new to try to beat the competition. But their new “tech” is no solution.
    As for the rest, W3Total etc are all 2nd class when it comes to speed. Super Cache is particualrly useless (totally does n =work with Genesis). Even the new boys like WP Fastest Cache is way better.
    I am still looking for a solution. So far no luck yet … I still like WP Rocket style. I think I wait till they can find a proper solution.

  6. Mudassar

    Nice comparison Harsh. I think they have changed the refund period from 30 days to 14 days, this is what their site says. I think you would like to change it too.

  7. ian

    It ruined my website performance.
    lost customers and had to pay 20 times more than cost of WProcket to hire some one to see if he can fix it….

    I believe the Free plugins have much better performance

    I wish someone had warned me before buying this pluin

    1. Jonathan

      Hi Ian, Jonathan from WP Rocket here.

      I’m sorry about your bad experience. As you may know, you have access for free to our support. You can contact us at any time and we will be more than happy to help you and make your website blazing-fast 😇

  8. Kris

    I’m so happy right now, I just finished to replace W3TC with Wp-Rocket, I uninstalled the W3TC followed your guide.

    My W3TC is act weird, like it doesn’t works, and now with WP-Rocket my website is pretty fast, after caching it loads under 1s.

    With W3TC GTmatrix load 20s, Pingdom 8s. Now Gtmatrix 10s, and Pingdom 4s, all score are green (A). I’m using KeyCDN and Cloudflare too.

    I’m really happy with the result even it above 1s to load, because I’m using fancy theme and heavy resource plugin., and my website has heavy graphics.

    W3TC failed to connect to KeyCDN, but Wp-Rocket can connect perfectly under their setting.

    Got many problem with W3TC, and I’m not interested to re-install and re-configure the setting. From now I only trust paid plugin and will never using free version anymore, it’s painful. lol.

    However, Cloudflare slow down my website, if I turn it off, my website load 2s at Pingdom, I’ve Argo active on Cloudflare and the speed even get worst.

    But I like Cloudflare because it blocked many bad visitor everyday. KeyCDN claimed have DDOS protection too, but I don’t know how to check it if it protecting my site or not.

    Sir, do you think it much better to turn off Cloudflare?

    Btw, what security plugin do you recommend? I’m using Bulletproof Security but I didn’t like the interface it’s confusing, but when I tried wordfence, my server reach the limit, it’s very heavy plugin?

    I’m using VPS 4GB 2Core from Linode.

    Thank you 🙂

  9. Smith Pandey

    I have used WP Rocket and I do agree that by far it is the most simple plugin to be configured however one needs to know that minification of CSS and JS can crash the site therefore it is important to run WP DEBUG TOOL to know what CSS and JS URLs to be excluded from advanced options before we enabled minification option

    You may also find one more article on how to configure all the settings of WP Rocket

  10. Pawan Sahani

    WP Rocket is good but don’t have free version. I’m using WP Fastest Cache and is doing good job and very easy to setup. I’m using free version.

  11. Fabian

    Thanks for sharing. I am still using w3 Cache. This article ensured me to switch, too.
    Thanks

  12. Istiak Rayhan

    Thanks for sharing the detailed review.

    Just bought the plugin through your affiliate links 🙂

  13. Teja

    Hi Harsh,
    i’ve a doubt about cache plugins , does cache plugins effect ads? i mean, does cache plugins cache ads also? please clear my doubt..
    Thank you

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      @Teja
      Good Cache plugin ignore ads. They don’t cache them.

  14. Robert

    Wow. With such a high Alexa rank and so many articles, running a page under one second is nut. Personally, I think the license model makes sense, it would be better the updates are not capped at one year though.

  15. Aurélien Debord

    I highly recommend WP Rocket. I am using this extension since 2/3 years on dozens of websites and it’s a real success.
    You can take altough a look at imagify, an other tool made by WP Media.

  16. Maurizio

    WPRocket is really one of the best, if can make a good minified combination with the css and js file reaches amazing results !

  17. Rowan Gonzalez

    I am currently using W3 Total Cache for my blog and heard some good things about WP Rocket, like in this review. The thing is that I am trying to get AMP pages running and it runs into several issues in regards to minifications when using W3 Total Cache. I wonder if WP Rocket would solve such issues, according to WP Media it does.

  18. Peter Roskothen

    I also tested the plugin and am happy about the speed, but the service is a disgrace!

  19. chris

    Hello and greate comparsion ! i use wp rocket nearly 1 yeahr on 53 blogs and i still have a good performance

  20. Joe

    WP Rocket ripped me off. I tested about 10 different caching plugins and WP Rocket came in 3rd place. Their website says “30 Days Satisfied or Refunded” so when I went to get a refund they produce a secret refund policy that in effect says you can’t get a refund. It is companies like WP Rocket that give the internet a bad name.

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      @Joe
      Sad to hear that. What’s their secret refund policy ? Could you add more details here?

    2. Jonathan

      Hi,

      Thank you for your feedback.

      We updated our refund policy few months ago, which is much more flexible. You can have a look at it: http://wp-rocket.me/refund-policy/

      You also have now a link on the pricing page on “30 Day Money Back Guarantee”.

    3. gringo

      I have issues with my refund, too. Fourtanetly I paid with Paypal. Do not trust WP Rocket’s 30 Day Money Back Guarentee!

      1. Jonathan

        Jonathan from WP Rocket here.

        Well, it seems you have been refunded.

        Please note this mention on the refund policy “We will process your refund as soon as we’re able to”.

        It’s not because we don’t reply you it means that we aren’t going to refund you.

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