Not compatible with WP Engine. Worse plugin ever.

It is very rare that I rate a plugin with such a low rating, but this one really deserve nothing but 0 star!

The only reason I came to know this plugin is because I am not allowed to use the “W3 Total Cache” plugin which is much better, much more stable has years of development behind it. Nevertheless the reason why I can’t use the W3TC plugin is because my client chose to host his website on WP Engine, which recently decided to blacklist a huge number of plugins, including the W3TC plugin. When I looked for an alternative I didn’t find one. I started to develop a custom plugin to minify, merge, cache, gzip, defer CSS and Javascript files. This is quite a big work, especially if we’re gonna support @import images path rewriting etc. this is a complex job I realize. Anyone so I decided to give this plugin a try and after spending 2 days trying to make it work and hours with the WP Engine support, we decided to drop it altogether.

First of all, why some settings are configurable via the admin, and some only via functions.php? Like the cache directory…

We were not able to make the caching to work, so the site became EXTREMELY slow (on WP Engine) with timeouts error, because it has to re-process the minifying each time we loaded the resulting CSS… because it would not cache the resulting minified/merged CSS/JS.

We got a warning in the backend:

“Warning: Cache directory does not exist or is not writable. Please try CHMOD your cache directory to 755. If you still see this warning, CHMOD to 777.”

I personally spent 3 hours on the phone with the WP Engine support with no luck solving the files permissions issue. Also WP Engine doesn’t allow to CHMOD files to 777. Even CHMOD 755 would trigger a permission denied in Filezilla client…

Seems like this plugins is not using default WordPress Filesystem to write to files, therefore it is not working on some web hosting…

A HUGE WASTE OF TIME
AVOID YOU ALL THE HASSLES AND DON’T EVEN TRY IT
JUST CHANGE FROM WP ENGINE HOSTING TO ANY OTHER WEB HOSTING COMPANY AND GET YOURSELF THE LUXURY OF INSTALLING W3 TOTAL CACHE WHICH IS SOOOO MUUUCHH BETTER AND CAN MINIFY/MERGE CSS AND JS FILES THAT ARE NOT ENQUEUED!!! HUGE LIMITATION OF THIS PLUGIN THAT YOU CAN ONLY MINIFY/MERGE ENQUEUED CSS/JS BUT MANY THEMES/PLUGINS HARDCODE THE CSS/JS FILES WITHOUT ENQUEUING THEM SO YOU’RE STUCK AND NEED TO EDIT THEMES/PLUGINS FILES TO REMOVE THE HARDCODING AND TO ENQUEUE THE CSS/JS INSTEAD BUT THEN YOUR CHANGES GET OVERRIDEN ON THE NEXT UPDATE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SO STUPID JUST AVOID THIS STUPID PLUGIN WHICH IS BASED ON THE DREAM FALSE REALITY THAT ALL THEMES AND PLUGINS PROPERLY ENQUEUE CSS AND JS WHICH NOBODY DO CORRECTLY UNFORTUNATELY SO INSTEAD OF DREAMING JUST GET W3 TOTAL CACHE FOR A REAL-LIFE SOLUTION!

FCK YOU FOR WASTING MY TIME.