EE + WP Rocket

Hello,

Esp to rtCamp personnel. Quite a few of us have asked about EE + WP Rocket. I’ve put in a feature request on their side for tighter integration, either direct or per your roadmap for packages.

They’ve generously offered to donate a license to rtCamp if it helps things on your end. I can pass on the email / info etc

But for quite a few of us, EE + Rocket with better integration could be huge win.

I love both tools / products and a lot of others do, so please consider communicating / working with them for tighter integration. I’m happy to bridge the initial communications. You can see a lot of internet reviews these days raving about Rocket so it could help with the uptake of EE which would be great to help build both communities.

Thank you for your consideration of this.

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Hello, There is no reason to use WP Rocket with EasyEngine. WP-Rocket is a powerful caching plugin but it’s a software caching solution. EasyEngine offer several caching solution such as Redis, Memcached or Nginx-FastCGI and each of them will make your WordPress faster than any other plugin.

@virtubox, thanks for explaining once again.

I don’t have the guts anymore to explain people why they should use wp-redis or any other instead of a software plugin.

But if they want WP-Rocket, I’ll let them want it still.

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@portofacil :grin: I will add a macro on my keyboard to make this answer :wink:

All of this I understand, but Rocket gives some of us EASY (remember the part of Easy in Easy Engine) integration to CloudFlare, CDN, cache pre-load, dns preload, etc, etc.

EE does NOT do any of that. So either the EE team replicates that, or they partner.

Given the uptake of Rocket, and their willingness to partner and the fact they have in mem caching on their road map it makes a perfect match. Rocket is going gangbusters on the internet, EE supporting and being a partner means more EE users which means more rtCamp users which means bigger and better things for us.

This isn’t about a specific feature per se; this is about adopting a partner and working with them to bring EE more mainstream.

Search the internet and you’ll find recommendation after recommendation for Rocket. Not so with EE. But with partnering it could be that way. Well there is a lot of talk about EE but it is for us Techy Types.

The Rocket team when I talked to them was MORE than happy to work with rtCamp. By being purists and saying dude, use --redis you are limiting EE’s reach and penetration. By working with Rocket you can breach a segment of the community untouched.

@davidedwards EasyEngine provide a solution to setup easily WordPress with an optimized LEMP stack and a caching system. WP-Rocket is a wordpress plugin which can install on any web hosting. There is no comparison between them because WP-Rocket can’t provide a fully optimized solution to make WordPress faster compatible with any hosting platform. I agree WP-Rocket is probably the best plugin to speed up WordPress but only if you can’t setup yourself a VPS

For the WP-Rocket features :

Integration of Cloudflare : You can do it yourself, including the SSL with Cloudflare origin certificates, which reduce the ssl handshake and is not available with WP-Rocket CDN : if you have your domain on Cloudflare, you have already a CDN cache pre-load : With Redis object caching, no need to pre-load anything, it make wordpress loading under 1sec all the time

Whatever.

EE Team is working on a new version, from ground up, written in PHP. I think they are already advised about the huge interest of people on WP-Rocket.

What I can say by myself is I would never pay for a “generic” plugin or theme for WordPress due to licensing: everything done on top of WP should be released as GPL, because WP itself is GPL. But that’s another discussion, I guess.

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@davidedwards Have you checked out Rocket NGINX along with your WP-Rocket plugin? This should solve any issues you’re having.

If you’re having other issues can you elaborate on what they are?

Thanks!

@davidedwards sorry for looking into this late.

There are some areas where EE currently does not offer any solution out of the box such as CDN, CSS/js minify, object-cache. In some cases, we reply 3rd party plugins.

I will be happy to give wp-rocket a try but the process of adding anything in EE is bit lengthy. It roughly looks like below:

  1. Use something on a test site.
  2. If works on test sites, use on own sites. At this stage document what we need to get it working with EE.
  3. If works on own sites, use on our client sites. Improve documents based on ongoing work.
  4. If works on client sites, add that feature in EE. May be marked as experiemental such as current --wp-redis cache option.

Above can take 1-3 months. But we will likely have a document which at least users can use on their end.

One more thing, I would like to add is - all new features going ahead will be added in EEv4.

And most likely wp-rocket will be added as an EE package. In fact, in future, the community can build own EE packages and use them.

Please note that by accepting to test wp-rocket or any plugin/service for that matter, we can’t promise to add it in core. But when EEv4 comes out, even if we decide against working on a 3rd party plugin/service, we would be happy to work with concerned people to help them build an EE package.

I like many things about people behind wp-rocket but as I haven’t used it once before, I can’t promise anything.

Please let me know if above works.

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@brianjking yeah, I’ve seen that. I’m really asking for tighter integration and I think @rahul286 understands where I’m coming from.

@rahul286 I understand will likely be a package; if it happens. Would you still like the code they gave me for you guys?

Would you still like the code they gave me for you guys?

I am not sure which code you are talking about. If you mean this - https://github.com/maximejobin/rocket-nginx/blob/master/rocket-nginx.conf then it looks nice.

My main reason to avoid most caching plugin is that they generate cached entries using code written in PHP. So this is extra work done by WordPress. While this makes cache generation process more WordPress-aware, I haven’t seen any loss of functionality when using cache-generation on Nginx end (--fastcgi or --wpredis options).

Once a page is in the cache, as long as it served via Nginx directly, the site will scale more. Above config does that.

I am mainly interested in testing:

  1. Object Cache implementation (currently using wp-redis or redis-cache)
  2. CDN Support (currently using nginx subs_filter module or CDN-enabler wp plugin)
  3. CSS/JS combine/minify (currently using wp plugin autoptimize)

Regarding caching, I would be mainly checking:

  1. What are purge options provided?
  2. Does it support cache variation? This is needed when the same URL produces different output based on context such as mobile v/s desktop, country, locale, etc. In such cases, caching each variation is critical. Also critical is to purge all variations when main page/URL gets modified. Both --fastcgi or --wpredis options support caching different variations. --wpredis support purging all variations also.
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@rahul286,

Sorry for the delay in response. Been very busy.

The Rocket team has on their road map in memory caching, so I believe there could be some good synergy with EE.

CDN is a must at least for our stuff, and Rocket does some really nice things like DNS prefetch. Object Cache, Plus all the usual stuff including minification, image lazy load, etc. What’s nice is the UI is clean and Rocket is easy to use so by working with them you could eliminate multiple plugins down to one. I understand being paid plugin is a bit contrary to rtCamp.

They gave me a code you can enter at ‘purchase’ time so you can get a license for free and explore the code and integration.

We oft have trouble when hosting more than one site on the same machine with --wpredis one or more of the sites will actually cache / serve a completely different site’s cache

Rocket uptake within the WP community seems to be increasing and increasing and therefore I think teaming with them is a win-win for everyone. I have looked at rocket-nginx.conf; but, believe tighter integration with EE itself if a big deal. rtCamp’s experience with in memory and Rocket’s excellent and easy to use feature set really gel well together esp

Their purge works at a single url level or whole site level. When a page / post is updated rocketbot crawls it and causes a rebuild. Same at whole site level - however for large sits I’d imagine the rocketbot full crawl could / would likely cause evictions when redis or memcached has low memory settings.

Anyway, I think this is an area where it could be great to have two good teams in the community working together,

Just to clarify - rtCamp sells premium themes and plugins itself. We also use & endorse’s many paid plugins such as Gravity Forms & AffiliateWP which do not have a free version.

So this is really not about some prejudice against paid plugins.

From EasyEngine perspective, as a project lead, I just want to make sure that even if we integrate something paid, we will maintain atleast one completely free full-page caching.

It would be great if you can email me the code at [email protected]. I will try to test WP Rocket on some test sites and my personal sites on this weekend.

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Thanks rahul286, like almost all EasyEngine users (I think), I’m really happy to have a powerful caching solution with wp-redis and redis-object-cache without having to pay $200/yr But for me, using WP-Rocket with EasyEngine doesn’t really make sense. Someone able to setup wordpress with easyengine, will probably be able to setup Cloudflare CDN and to minify some css/js code.

Or Autoptimize, a free plugin that does a great job on minifying and concatenating css/js files.

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Hi @rahul286,

Apologies again for later response. I will send you the code, I verified with Rocket team it is still valid and they responded that it is indeed still valid.

BTW, a agree fully with rtCamp / EE always keeping an (or more than one) free caching schemes.

Cheers, and thank you for looking into it.

I’ve forwarded the code, again thank you for looking into it :slight_smile:

Thanks for code. I will start testing soon.

I read something on this the other day. I think only PHP and JS has to be GPL if using WordPress. Correct me if I am wrong.

But I agree it should all be GPL.

I found this actually slowed down my site when using HTTP/2. Something to look out for.

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