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December is the season of giving, and our gift to you is a shiny new version of WP Rocket. Welcome to the world, WP Rocket 2.9, codename: Iridonia (lovingly named by our brand new Rocketeer, Shelley)!

In addition to the blood, sweat and tears of our lead developer, Remy, Iridonia contains exciting new features as well as significant enhancements to existing features. Thanks to all our Beta testers who provided valuable feedback and helped us work out some bugs. A lot of the features came directly from customer suggestions and voting on our roadmap, so thanks to those of you who participated there.

And now, on to the fun stuff, drum roll please……..

Remove query strings from static resources

A much-requested feature from customers trying to ace their GT Metrix grades, we now have a feature to address the recommendation to “Remove query strings from static resources.” This should also appeal to users of W3 Total Cache who didn’t want to jump ship without this feature being available in WP Rocket.

However, we don’t just remove the query string, since that will cause browser caching issues, we also encode the version number into the URL, to maintain the browser ‘cache-busting’ value, while satisfying GT Metrix. So if you have a filename like this: style.css?ver=1.0, it  will become style-1.0.css, and will update accordingly when the version changes, so your users will always receive the latest version of the file. To understand more about browser caching, see our “plain English” blog post.

Remove query strings on static resources

CDN improvements

Our CDN feature has three main improvements:

  • Inline background-images will now be rewritten with the CDN URL
  • Images with a relative path will use the CDN URL
  • the CDN URL will apply to custom files, like videos and documents, in addition to  images/CSS/JS

Common cache for logged-in users

WP Rocket is unique among caching plugins for providing a separate set of cache files for each user. This allows for better handling of user-specific content. But there are some cases where you don’t need that level of granularity, and the same set of cache files will work for each user. Now you have that option!

Common cache for logged in users

CloudFlare UI improvements

We’ve made some improvements to make integrating with Cloudflare much smoother. Previously we didn’t have any messaging in the interface to let you know if your Cloudflare credentials were correct, for example. Now it’s much more intuitive. For the initial integration , you just need to enter your CloudFlare email and Global API Key, then a drop-down will auto-populate with your available domains. Options that rely on correct credentials will be greyed out until a successful connection is made, and you’ll be notified upon successful or unsuccessful actions:

CloudFlare Correct Credentials

CloudFlare development mode

Other Enhancements

Automatic compatibility with the following plugins/themes:

  • Divi blog module
  • Disqus Comment System plugin
  • WooCommerce MultiLingual (Currency Switcher option)
  • WP-Appkit
  • SecuPress

For the complete list of features, enhancements and bug fixes, please take a look at the changelog. This holiday season, give yourself the gift of enhanced website performance by updating to WP Rocket 2.9! If you have any problems and if you have questions or issues, send us a ticket!


Comments (22)

I'm using MaxCDN with WP-rocket Lucy. Do you think if i use Cloudflare, website will be much faster? or it's same.

Very good improvements!

Thank you for this plugin! This is the best cache wp plugin out there. http://ilovemonkey.nl

Thank for updates, this is a great Christmas present for me <3

Hmm... I distributed CDN over two different services. I use KeyCDN for all files and Amazon CDN for images. (Reason is that KeyCDN supports http/2 and Amazon doesn't yet). That is considerably faster than using one CDN service only.

PS: 2.9 is a beast. I managed to have almost my entire website supported with default html/css/js minification and combining. I checked my site and excluded many .js files because some pages weren't correctly working anymore and I don't have the time to tweak into all details.

Even without tweaking today my GTmetrix went from 90/78 to 95/81 (Pagespeed/Yslow). Amazing!

Merci à l'équipe pour votre travail.

This is great. I've just activated the Remove Query Strings option and got a nice boost in page speed score.

After updating to 2.9 -- Piwik Analytics is reporting that the entry page of many visitors is directly the cache directory.

For example:
https://mydomain[].com/wp-content/cache/wp-rocket/mydomain[].com/post-permalink//index.html_gzip

I hate to spoil the fun, but until this version I had a plugin installed with the name "Remove query strings from static resources" and it does just that. To give some comfort: I removed the plugin and enabled the function in WP Rocket and that actually was an improved towards using yet another plugin, apart from the fact that using less plugins gives you more reliability and stability in the website.

I am most impressed with the improvements which have been made in the areas of html/js/css minifications and combining. As I wrote above, the feature has been improved since I last tested it (that is a few versions back, though) and now it works on almost my entire website with exclusions of only a few pages. Most importantly, my homepage runs with everything enabled which is just excellent for Pagespeed results and Google rating.

Is it safe to use "Common Cache" on WooCommerce sites?

Malheureusement, j'ai dû désactiver l'option "remove query strings" en raison de problèmes de CSS.

With HTTP/2 minification & concatenation doesn't seem necessary anymore. Especially given the amount of hassle enabling these features and diagnosing issues.

@brianjking: Technically you are right, but unfortunately enough Yslow does not seem to acknowledge http/2 yet and many seatch engines still use Yslow for rating. Google Pagespeed does acknowledge http/2 obviously because Google started the development of http/2 when they paunched spdy.
I see big compaints in Yslow analysis reports about too many .js files in my homepage whereas Pagespeed completely ignores them. (Try the Gtmetrix test suite)

About Cloudflare support, I'd like you to add image(or certain file types) only caching.

we are hosted on dreamhost - dreampress managed hosting. they use varnish for caching. will wp rocket work (or is needed) in such a setup ?

We have been using wp-rocket for over a year now. When we first bought it, we got it all configured and the speed of our website https://www.leasedlineandmpls.co.uk flew along! Since the updates, on GTmetrix we have a page speed score of 93 and Yslow score of 91 so both get A grades but our load time is 5.4 seconds! Any ideas much appreciated. Its driving me crazy!

Using the WP Rocket with the Divi theme. This Plugin is sooooo much better than any competitor out there. However there is still room for improvements. Looking forward to that 100% GTMetrix rating :-).
Loading speed is 450ms right now, which is pretty damn impressive. And the new 2.9 version is just great!

WP Rocket is much better than any other caching plugin.
Thanks!

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