Rocket.net is faster

This is a well deserved 5 ?? review because the developer built a flawless integration with the Cloudflare Images API.

For the benefit of those on Rocket.net hosting, as I am, I’ll leave some notes on my experience. In frank confession, I’m no perf expert, so I could absolutely be off base here, and not even realize it.

Rocket had previously announced auto-image resizing via CF Images as a platform feature; but this was subsequently rolled back, and the reasons for the rollback were never given. So, I decided to attempt implementing this myself; and this plugin made the integration seamless.

Here’s what my dev tools network panel tests uncovered:

1. Rocket’s CF configuration does not serve AVIF, only WebP; whereas this integration successfully serves AVIF.
2. Rocket’s CF configuration results in less image compression than what this direct integration achieves.
3. However, even with inferior compression, and no serving of AVIF, Rocket’s CF configuration manages to somehow beat the millisecond load time per image by orders of magnitude. I chatted in with Rocket’s unparalleled tech support to get schooled on why this is, and I’m paraphrasing and adding embellishments, but the reasons for this are twofold:
   • Rocket apparently has a special relationship with Cloudflare Enterprise, so they get über-priority treatment on the network.
   • Then add CF Enterprise full-page caching to the above fact that your visitors are getting served from the edge-of-the-edge network priority afforded by Rocket.

As I said, I’m no perf expert, so I don’t feel the need to back any of this up with screenshots, or any other evidence. Please take this information only as prompting to do your own network panel tests.

In the end, I removed all images from Cloudflare Images API that were offloaded via this plugin, deactivated, and uninstalled; then went with ShortPixel for AVIF. As regards the dynamic auto-resizing that I was after, I’m just gonna have to go over all the markup and manually insert the proper thumbnail (tedious manual work I was hoping to avoid, and what started me down this rabbit hole).

Peace to the dev; and happy hacking to all.