How to check if WP Rocket is caching your pages?
WP Rocket by default delivers cached pages for visitors who are not logged-in WordPress users. When you’re checking if caching works as expected, make sure one of the following conditions is true:
- Either: You’re logged out, so you’re just an anonymous visitor to your WordPress site.
- Or: You’ve enabled User Cache on the Cache tab, so WP Rocket will create a dedicated cache for logged-in users on your site.
If you are on a Managed WordPress host, page caching may be disabled by design. Please check our hosting doc for host-specific notes. Steps 1, 2 and 3 below will still be relevant.
Now that we’ve made sure you’re visiting a page that indeed is expected to be served from cache, here’s how you can identify it really is cached:
1. Caching footprint
Open the browser’s source view of the page and scroll to the bottom. At the very end you should see an entry like this:
In some scenarios, where WP Rocket's page caching is disabled but other optimizations are still applied, the footprint will be present but without the timestamp.
This will happen when caching is disabled as part of hosting compatibility, or if you are using a specific helper plugin to do this.
Not seeing a footprint at all? Are you perhaps using Cloudflare? Cloudflare’s HTML minification would remove the footprint.
2. Minified or combined files
This methodology works if you have Minify for CSS files, Minify JavaScript files or Combine JavaScript files on the File Optimization tab enabled.
Open the browser’s source view of the page and look at the <head> section. Most of the URLs that end in .css, or .js should include this part:
/wp-content/cache/min/
Minified files
Combined files
This means that WP Rocket’s file optimization is working; usually, the page would also be cached.
3. Wappalyzer
Wappalyzer is a free service that lets you identify technology on websites. You’d just install one of their browser extensions that will show you if WP Rocket is running on a website.
Go to Wappalyzer to install browser extension
4. Cache folder on the server
Using either (S)FTP, or your web host’s file manager panel, you can visit the cache folder in your WordPress install directly, and make sure that cache files are generated correctly.
- Make sure you’re logged out, then visit several pages on your site, so they get cached.
- Access your WordPress file system and navigate to:
{your-wordpress-root-folder}
┗ wp-content
┗ cache
┗ wp-rocket
Inside of that folder, you should see a folder named like your domain. This is the folder where you should find cached .html and/or .html_gzip files, along with folders for each page on your site. These are the cache files.
It should look something like this (with www.wordpress.dev being our example site URL):
Caching doesn’t work, now what?
After using all these methods, if you determine that WP Rocket is NOT caching your site, here’s how to troubleshoot: