Since 2011 Cloudflare, even on their free tier, has offered a very promising, very frustrating feature called Rocket Loader. Rocket Loader promises to greatly accelerate the loading of JavaScript, turbocharging JavaScript-heavy sites like those that use WP.
At the beginning, Rocket Loader was labeled ‘beta’ – meaning buggy – and gained an unfortunate reputation for causing wonky behavior, especially with WP sites. In my case Rocket Loader broke the sliders on my WP sites. So, I patiently waited for the bugs to be eradicated and the ‘beta’ moniker to be banished. The years crawled by. 2012 – still beta, still wonky. 2013 to almost half way through 2018 – still beta, still wonky. I had almost given up. I don’t mean to unduly criticize the good people at Cloudflare – they provide a truly awesome service of which I take full advantage of the free tier. I benefit tremendously and they make not a penny from me. I owe them immense gratitude and they owe me absolutely nothing. Still, I was selfishly irritated waiting years for Rocket Loader to finally work right.
My irritation ended today. Rocket Loader graduated from beta and entered prime time on June 1, 2018 – but I just noticed today. In my admittedly so-far brief testing it works perfectly – it no longer breaks my sliders. And it significantly speeds up my sites. Using my favorite website speed test – GiftOfSpeed.com – on this site before Rocket Loader:
Load time 1.5 seconds, faster than 90% of tested sites. Pretty good. Maybe I don’t need Rocket Loader after all.
With Rocket Loader:
Wow! All metrics are improved. Load is time less than half, at 580 milliseconds – faster than 95% of tested sites. Rocket Loader rocks! Very much worth the wait.
