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It’s May, so we’re in the throes of spring with new life bursting forth all around! And the labs of WP Rocket are no different. We have hatched a new baby, and that baby is WP Rocket 2.8, A.K.A “Ilum”.

The development of WP Rocket is a team effort, but special mention goes to Rocket scientist Remy, who has been working particularly hard on this major new release and deserves many props!

Let’s have a look at the mouth-watering new features of 2.8:

Database Optimization

While most WP Rocket features, like page caching and minification,  focus on front end optimizations, a bloated database on the backend will also have an impact on your overall site speed.

Now you can trim the fat from your database right within WP Rocket. If you’ve been using the plugin WP -Optimize, you can now use this instead. Look for the new “Database” tab:

WP Rocket 2.8 - Database Optimization

Sitemap Preload

This is huge!

We’ve implemented a brand new way you can warm your cache, with greater control and less impact on your server. The normal preload for new content, and the homepage crawl are still available, but if you have an XML sitemap on your site, WP Rocket can now preload all those URLs for you. We will automatically detect the most popular SEO plugins – Yoast SEO and All In One SEO Pack, but if you’re using something different, just enter the url of your sitemap.

You can also control the crawl interval to avoid server overload. For the developers amongst you, we have a new filter to add custom intervals.
We’re extremely proud of this new feature and we think you’ll find it more comprehensive and reliable.

WP Rocket 2.8 - Sitemap Preload

An example in video:

Disable Preload

We still have our usual preload available, although for some under-resourced servers, it can cause unwanted CPU spikes. In those cases, previously it was necessary to add a small plugin or line of code to disable the preload bot. But now you can do that directly from inside WP Rocket:

WP Rocket 2.8 - Disable Preload

Other enhancements

  • We fixed an important bug that resulted from WordPress 4.5, where if your homepage was set to Latest Posts, the whole cache would be cleared when a post was updated. This is now fixed, so that only the post that you update and its related content will be cleared on update.
  • We’ve added a “Clear CloudFlare Cache” link to the admin toolbar, for your convenience.
  • You can exclude a page from the cache using the Cache Options metabox on the post/page edit screen
  • Improvements to the White Label feature
  • Compatibility with the TwentyTwenty script and JW Player

We’ve also made a host of other bug fixes, enhancements and tweaks – read the full changelog here.

We look to our public roadmap to decide on what features should be added next, so to make your voice heard, check it out, vote for features you’d like to see, and if you have an idea for something not already listed, let us know.

So, go ahead and update to 2.8, and if you have questions or issues, send us a ticket!


Comments (21)

Does that mean I can stop using Warm Cache plugin? :)

great going guys. your plugin is indeed very good.

LOVE the database optimization feature. So simple to use, and it just works. Quality stuff. Thanks guys!

These features look fantastic. Keep up the good work.

Very good new features, definitely a great plugin to enhance the speed of our sites.

Does it work as long as there's a sitemap.xml file in the main folder? Or does it have to be one of the 2 mentioned plugins? We use All-in-One SEO (Pro on most sites). Will it work with that?

Having 400ms total loadtime on a WordPress site. Its amazing.

With this plugin has greatly improved loading speed of my web.
Thank you very much.
Amazing plugin.

The new features are fantastic - we really love it. We've used WP-Rocket for many years now and we do recommend it for all our customers who are using WordPress. It's simple and easy to use, which is important.
Thank you guys - we appreciate your good work.

Hi - when my site has more than 250 visitors at once, I get a database connection error (on a vps) - my hosting provider says my site is trying to make too many connections.... will this plugin help with that?

The best plugin for WP, I have tried thousands of cache plugins, and without doubt this is the one that gave me the best result, I recommend it

This plugin has increased the speed of my web 50% without doing anything else. Incredible, highly recommended.

Nice plugin, when I used this, my Google page speed increases 62 % to 84%. That so cool ... But says if I use XML sitemap peload what is the benefits....

WP-Rocket is the fantastic tool to increase speed of a WordPress blog. I am using this plugin on all my WordPress site. I recommended this plugin to all of my blog visitors.

This pluguin is superb, it's the best doing it's job!! Increases speed +70%

plugin has increased the speed of my web 50% without doing anything else. Incredible, highly recommended.

Really nice article............. I love wp-rocket

Thanks for super charging my website speed. I had used many plugins but this the best I have ever used. Now TTFB time is less than 1 second after installing and configuring properly.

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