WP Rocket is an open-source web performance premium plugin for

WordPress WordPress (WP, or WordPress.org) is a web content management system. It was originally created as a tool to publish blogs but has evolved to support publishing other web content, including more traditional websites, electronic mailing list, ma ...

. The plugin uses caching to accelerate website loading times. Launched in July 2013, the WP Rocket Web site stated in March 2024 that it had nearly four million "Websites in Orbit".

History

WP Rocket is the first product of WP Media, a company created in 2014 that provides software to optimize web performance. WP Media is headquartered in Lyon, France and was founded by Julio Potier, Jonathan Buttigieg and Jean-Baptiste Marchand-Arvier, and has an employee base working remotely in multiple locations throughout the world. In 2016, WP Media launched Imagify, WordPress plugin that makes images lighter. In 2020, WP Media launched RocketCDN, a

content delivery network A content delivery network (CDN) or content distribution network is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance ("speed") by distributing the service spat ...

service. In May 2021, WP Media was acquired by group.ONE. The Cash Out podcast released an episode on May 30, 2023 featuring Jonathan Buttigieg, in which it was reported that the sale of WP Media was valued at between 25 and 75 million euros. Buttigieg neither confirmed nor denied the mentioned amount during the episode.

Usage

The plugin works natively on

Apache The Apache ( ) are several Southern Athabaskan language-speaking peoples of the Southwestern United States, Southwest, the Southern Plains and Northern Mexico. They are linguistically related to the Navajo. They migrated from the Athabascan ho ...

and

Nginx (pronounced "engine x" , stylized as NGINX or nginx) is a web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache. The software was created by Russian developer Igor Sysoev and publicly released in 20 ...

web servers. A customizable configuration for Nginx called Rocket-Nginx (created and maintained by SatelliteWP), dedicated to the WP Rocket and Nginx, allows serving cached files without having to initialize WordPress or make database calls. This enhances the speed and the number of visitors a website can support. The latest version of Rocket-Nginx (version 3.x) enables query string management, file inclusion and custom expiration. As of March 2024, WP Rocket was the third-most-popular WordPress plugin and on 3.38% of the top million sites using WordPress Plugins.

Licensing

WP Rocket is

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

released under

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

version 2. WP Rocket source code is publicly available from its

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

repository.

References

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