This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

WP Roids

Description

Fast AF caching! Optimize your website performance for the best page speed

  • Minifies HTML, JavaScript and CSS files
  • Defers loading of JavaScript
  • Compresses JPEG and PNG images
  • Generates static HTML pages

Try it and see the results for yourself…

Getting Started

No complicated settings to deal with;

  1. Deactivate/delete any current caching or minification plugins
  2. Install WP Roids
  3. Activate WP Roids
  4. Log out
  5. Refresh your home page TWICE

“It broke my site, arrrrrrgh!”

Do the following steps, having your home page open in another browser. Or log out after each setting change if using the same browser. After each step refresh your home page TWICE

  1. Switch your site’s theme to “Twenty Twenty” (or one of the other “Twenty…” Themes). If it then works, you have a moody theme
  2. If still broken, go to the WordPress Plugins page and disable all Plugins (except WP Roids, obviously). If WP Roids starts to work, we have a plugin conflit
  3. Reactivate each plugin one by one and refresh your home page each time time until it breaks
  4. If still broken after the above step, go to the Settings tab and try disabling JS optimisation for the Plugin which triggered an error in the previous step – this is done in the second section “Plugins JavaScript”
  5. Finally, if no improvement has occurred, go to the Settings tab and experiment with toggling options in the first section “Core Settings”
  6. If you have the time, it would help greatly if you can log a support topic on the Support Page and tell me as much as you can about what happened

How Fast Is It?

In testing, WP Roids was FASTER than:

  • WP Super Cache
  • W3 Total Cache
  • WP Fastest Cache
  • Comet Cache
  • Autoptimize
  • WP Speed of Light
  • …and many more!

Where Can I Check Site Speed?

Either of these two sites is good:

Software Requirements

In addition to the WordPress Requirements, WP Roids requires the following:

  • .htaccess file to be writable

    some security plugins disable this, so just turn this protection off for a minute during install/activation

  • PHP version greater than 5.6.0

    It WILL throw errors on activation if not! No damage should occur though

  • PHP cURL extension enabled

    Usually is by default on most decent hosts

License

Copyright: © 2019-Present Philip K. Meadows (coded in Great Britain)

Released under the terms of the GNU General Public License

Credits / Additional Acknowledgments

Installation

NOTE: WP Roids requires the .htaccess file to have permissions set to 644 at time of activation. Some security plugins (quite rightly) change the permissions to disable editing. Please temporarily disable this functionality for a moment whilst activating WP Roids.

The quickest and easiest way to install is via the Plugins > Add New feature within WordPress. But if you must, manual installation instructions follow…

  1. Download and unzip the latest release zip file.
  2. If you use the WordPress plugin uploader to install this plugin skip to step 4.
  3. Upload the entire plugin directory to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
  4. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress Administration.

FAQ

Is WP Roids compatible with iThemes Security?

Yes. But if you have .htaccess protected (Security > Settings > System Tweaks), you will need to disable this when activating WP Roids. You can re-enable it after activation

Is WP Roids compatible with Jetpack?

Yes

Is WP Roids compatible with Yoast SEO?

Yes

Is WP Roids compatible with WooCommerce?

Yes

Is WP Roids compatible with Storefront Theme for WooCommerce?

Yes

Is WP Roids compatible with Storefront Pro (Premium) plugin for WooCommerce?

Yes

Is WP Roids compatible with WPBakery Visual Composer?

Yes

Is WP Roids compatible with Page Builder by SiteOrigin?

Yes

Is WP Roids compatible with Genesis Framework and Themes?

Yes. Though I have only tested with Metro Pro theme

Is WP Roids compatible with the “Instagram Feed” plugin?

Yes, but you must tick the “Are you using an Ajax powered theme?” option to “Yes”

Is WP Roids compatible with the “Disqus Comment System” plugin?

Yes

Is WP Roids compatible with the “Visual Form Builder” plugin?

Yes

Is WP Roids compatible with the “Simple Share Buttons Adder” plugin?

Yes

Is WP Roids compatible with the “Revolution Slider” plugin?

Yes, but you have to disable minification and caching of its JavaScript in the WP Roids Settings

Is WP Roids compatible with the “WordPress Gallery Plugin – NextGEN Gallery” plugin?

No. This plugin intrusively removes queued JavaScript. See this support question

Is WP Roids compatible with Cloudflare?

Yes, but you may want to flush your Cloudflare cache after activating WP Roids. Also disable the minification options at Cloudflare

Does WP Roids work on NGINX servers?

Yes, it uses a fallback for non-Apache configurations

Does WP Roids work on IIS (Windows) servers?

Yes, it uses a fallback for non-Apache configurations

Reviews

Novambor 1, 2021
I installed the plugin as described and to my big surprise, ater 2 times loading, my site was detroyed. Back to my other caching plugin.
Maarec 8, 2021
quite surprising why this plugin has only a few reviews! I never found such an underrated plugin on WordPress! so far it’s definitely outperforming everyone, almost everyone!
Read all 25 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“WP Roids” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

Translate “WP Roids” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

v4.0.2

  • Fixed: Caching already cached files is not clever :/

v4.0.1

  • Rollback: Type-hinting on PHP functions as many folks not yet on PHP 7

v4.0.0

  • Improved: Archive/Category/Tag pages NOW cached
  • Improved: Lots of background activity reduced

v3.2.4

  • Fixed: PHP warning for a foreach loop
  • Improved: Type forcing in PHP functions
  • Tweaked: Donation URL 😉

v3.2.3

  • Improved: Error warning pedantry for PHP DOMDocument

v3.2.1

  • Improved: Logic condition regarding DONOTCACHEPAGE tweaked

v3.2.0

  • Fixed: Logic condition was preventing some storing of HTML files

v3.1.1

  • Fixed: Bug caused by variable named incorrectly

v3.1.0

  • Fixed: Image compression sometimes causing Server Errors

  • Improved: Image compression levels editable in Settings

v3.0.0 MASSIVE NEW RELEASE! MUCH AWESOMENESS!

  • Fixed: Inline JavaScript was not being loaded correctly – several previous conflicts resolved by this

  • Improved: NEW! Settings page added with several options for configuration, though WP Roids should still work just fine for most users simply by activating it

  • Improved: NEW! Optional image compression (is on by default)

  • Improved: NEW! WP CRON scheduler to clear cache at a choice of intervals (weekly by default)

  • Improved: NEW! Optional caching and minification of CSS and JavaScript loaded from external CDN sources

  • Improved: NEW! Debug logging mode

v2.2.0

  • Improved: Regex for stripping CSS and Javascript comments rewritten and separated

    • The Javascript one, in particular, was treating base64 strings containing two or more // as a comment and deleting them
  • Improved: Fallback serving of cache files via PHP when .htaccess has a hiccup was sometimes pulling single post file on achive pages :/

v2.1.1

  • Fixed: Regex tweak for handling data:image background images in CSS

  • Fixed: Regex tweak where some base64 encoded strings containing two or more / being stripped believing they were comments

v2.1.0

  • Fixed: There is a teeny-tiny glitch in WPBakery’s Visual Composer that was causing massive display errors

  • Improved: Negated the need to deactivate and reactivate to remove v1 .htaccess rules

  • Improved: HTML <!-- WP Roids comments --> with better explanations

  • Improved: Some additional cookie and WooCommerce checks

v2.0.1

  • Minor Fix: Code to remove v1 rules from .htaccess DEACTIVATE AND REACTIVATE WP ROIDS ASAP

v2.0.0 Big Improvements!

  • Fixed: CSS and Javascript minifying and enqueuing had issues with:

    • Some inline items were being missed out or rendered improperly
    • Absolute paths to some assets such as images and fonts loaded via @font-face were sometimes incorrect
    • Some items were queued twice
    • Some items were not queued at all!
  • Fixed: HTML minification was sometimes removing legitimate spaces, for example between two <a> tags

  • Fixed: Caching function was sometimes running twice, adding unecessary overhead

  • Improved: Some .htaccess rules

  • New: Function checking in background .htaccess content is OK, with automatic/silent reboot of plugin if not
  • New: Additional explanatory HTML <-- comments --> added to bottom of cache pages

v1.3.6

  • Fixed: Issue with PHP is_writable() check on .htaccess was causing plugin to not activate at all or silently deactivate upon next login

v1.3.5

  • Fixed: Regex to remove inline JS comments was failing if no space after //
  • Imprevement: Compatability check when activating new plugins. On failure automatically deactivates WP Roids and restores .htaccess file

v1.3.4

  • Fixed: .htaccess rewritebase error, was killing some sites dead AF, sorry

v1.3.3

  • Fixed: .htaccess PHP fallback has conditions checking user not logged in
  • Fixed: WordFence JS conflict fixed

v1.3.1

  • Disabled the debug logging script, you don’t need me filling your server up!

v1.3.0

  • Fixed: Directories and URLs management for assets
  • Fixed: Localized scripts with dependencies now requeued with their data AND new cache script dependency

v1.2.0

  • Fixed: Combining and minifying CSS and Javascript MASSIVELY IMPROVED!
    • For CSS, now deals with conditional stylesheets e.g. <!--[if lt IE 9]>, this was causing a few hiccups
    • For Javascript, now deals with scripts that load data via inline <script> tags containing /* <![CDATA[ */
    • Minification process now does newlines first, then whitespace. Was the other way around, which could cause issues

v1.1.4

  • Fixed: Sorry, I meant site domain !== FALSE. I’m an idiot, going to bed

v1.1.3

  • Fixed: Removed googleapis.com = FALSE check of v1.1.1 and replaced with site domain = TRUE check
  • Fixed: Check for WooCommerce assets made more specific to WC core only, now excludes “helper” WC plugins

v1.1.2

  • Fixed: Version numbering blip

v1.1.1

  • Fixed: Encoding of .htaccess rules template changed from Windows to UNIX as was adding extra line breaks
  • Fixed: Additional check to avoid googleapis.com assets being considered “local”
  • Fixed: Removed lookup of non-existent parameter from “Flush Cache” links

v1.1.0

  • “Flush Cache” links and buttons added
  • Five minutes applied to browser caching (was previously an hour)
  • Whole HTML cache flush on Page/Post create/update/delete, so that home pages/widgets etc. are updated
  • Fixed: PHP Workaround for hosts who struggle with basic .htaccess rewrites :/ #SMH
  • Fixed: Additional checks before editing .htaccess as sometimes lines were being repeated, my bad
  • Fixed: For you poor souls who are hosted with 1&1, a bizarre home directory inconsistency
  • Fixed: Scheduled task to flush HTML cache hourly wasn’t clearing properly on deactivation

v1.0.0

  • Initial release