WP Rocket Read Our Horror Story Before Purchasing

Read this WP Rocket WordPress Cashing Plugin Review Before Purchasing. It’s not as described. Even WP Rocket tech support couldn’t get their product to work as advertised. WP Fastest Cache FREE Plugin outperforms WP Rocket!

We have been running WP Fastest Cache on this blog for several months. Our theme uses Google fonts that are not optimized. This lowers it’s Page Speed Insites score. WP Rocket claims it optimizes Google fonts but does not.

Always looking for more speed, we decided to give WP Rocket a try since it offered a money back 30 day guarantee. Before purchasing and installing we ran Pingdom tools speed test on our home page and a rather large blog post.

Next we uninstalled WP Fastest Cache and deleted it’s leftover cache files. Installed WP Rocket and set the basic plugin configuration. While WP Rocket’s average score was slightly higher, the speed and load times were lower.

Tweaked a few settings but the speed did not match WP Fastest cache. Also our SimplePress forums page did not load, despite excluding it from caching in the config.

It didn’t take long for us to decide WP Rocket was not for us. We contacted support and requested a refund (purchased with PayPal) to our account.

After not receiving a response back, we logged into PayPal and opened up a dispute. Not long afterward we received a response back from Jonathan Buttigieg who offered to configure his plugin.

We usually frown upon allowing anyone administrative access to our blog, but did a full files backup and dumped our WordPress database. Created Buttigieg an admin account and emailed the credentials to him.

Sometime in the early hours Buttigieg logged in to this blog and was unable to make his plugin work satisfactorily. He deleted WP Rocket and emailed me this.

After being unable to find his refund in our PayPal account we escalated the dispute to a claim. In a few days PayPal after being unable to contact WP Rocket decided in our favor.

These guys think they are so slick. They set up their PayPal sellers account as a shipped item. We were instructed by PayPal to ship the item back to the seller to receive our refund.

After calling PayPal and going through automated phone system hell we finally got an agent. We explained this was a digital download, so there’s nothing to ship back.

PayPal switched us to a clams agent who had to escalate the claim to a supervisor. We were told we would get a response by email with their decision.

After waiting several days we made another call to PayPal and said it seems like a lot of jerking around for $39. The item is not as described, and WP Rocket support admitted that. After another hold the agent came back and said our claim was approved. PayPal refunded our $39.

So at this point it appeared all was well. But we couldn’t get that lucky!

After seeing 404 errors in our Google Analytic and Webmaster Tools accounts, we discovered Jonathan Buttigieg had changed our WordPress permalink structure.

Never Ever change a WordPress Permalink Structure on an established website or blog. Doing that will muck up a ton of Critical SEO and Metadata items.

My thoughts and additional info are in this screen video.

What an absolute WP Rocket Nightmare!