W3 Total Cache Review & Ultimate Guide

Review of: W3 Total Cache
WordPress Plugin:
W3 Edge
Version:
0.9.2.5
Price:
FREE

Reviewed by:
Rating:
5
On January 29, 2013
Last modified:January 29, 2013

Summary:

This is the best plugin for making your site faster by cache method. Many settings to choose from to optimize your site for faster load speeds. Here, Tharun explaining about his experiences with W3 Total Cache Plugin as well as giving an in-depth guide of configuring the plugin for getting the best load speeds that you can get.

W3 Total Cache, An Intro

W3 Total Cache by W3 EDGE®, is the popular plugin that most of the WordPress uses to make their site load faster & reduce the site load. Frankly even I use W3 Total Cache, and I have to say that this plugin made my blog loading from 8 seconds (when not using this plugin) to 2.5 seconds! Yes, I too have lots of visitors and this runs on a shared hosting provider, so I don’t want to make a huge load to their servers and getting suspended as well as I want my blog to load the fastest as possible. After lots of researching, I found out the best settings depending upon the theme you use.

Great, Let’s Get Started!

All right, First install W3 Total Cache plugin via Searching it in plugins page or directly uploading it to your server’s plugin folder and extracting it. That’s up to you, it depends how you do it. I just directly search “W3 Total Cache” from the Plugins page itself & Installing it.

Next, Just activate the plugin and deactivate the Preview mode. To deactivate preview mode, just click “Performance” on the left side of your WordPress dashboard and click disable button on the Preview section.

W3 Total Cache

Now the Difficult Part!

Well, Since you got that much, Its time for you to select the appropriate options for W3 Total Cache to optimize your site. The settings I am going to tell is applicable for all sites running with any theme and plugins installed on your WordPress which is running on a shared hosting server.

  • Page Cache : Enable
    Page Cache Method : Disk:Enhanced
  • Minify : Enable
    Minify mode : Auto
    Minify Cache Method : Disk
    HTML minifier : Default
    JS minifier : JSMin (default)
    CSS minifer : Default
  • Browser Cache : Enable

Now, If you have 10,000+ posts or pages in your blog, then enable Object Cache.

Save all the settings and now open the Page Cache option from the top. Edit these options that I am going to say below.

  • Cache home page (Checked)
  • Cache feeds: site, categories, tags, comments (UnChecked)
  • Cache SSL (https) requests (Checked)
  • Cache 404 (not found) pages (UnChecked)
  • Cache requests only for (your domain/site url) hostname (Checked)
  • Don’t cache pages for logged in users (UnChecked)
  • Garbage collection interval: 3600

Great, That’s All for Page Cache, Now save these settings and move on to Minify settings,

  • Rewrite URL structure (Checked)

HTML minify settings:

  • Enable (Checked)
  • Inline CSS minification (If you have Genesis theme or any responsive theme,  Make sure its UnChecked)
  • Inline JS minification (If you have Genesis theme or any responsive theme,  Make sure its UnChecked)
  • Don’t minify feeds (UnChecked)
  • Line break removal (If you have Genesis theme or any responsive theme,  Make sure its UnChecked)

JS minify settings:

  • Enable (Checked)
  • Combine only after <head>(If you have Genesis theme or any responsive theme,  Make sure its UnChecked)
  • Combine only after <body>(If you have Genesis theme or any responsive theme,  Make sure its UnChecked)
  • Combine only before </body>(If you have Genesis theme,  Make sure its Checked)
  • Preserved comment removal (not applied when combine only is active) (If you have Genesis theme or any responsive theme,  Make sure its UnChecked)
  • Line break removal (not safe, not applied when combine only is active) (If you have Genesis theme or any responsive theme,  Make sure its UnChecked)

CSS minify settings:

  • Enable (Checked)
  • Combine only (UnChecked)
  • Preserved comment removal (not applied when combine only is active) (Checked)
  • Line break removal (not applied when combine only is active) (Checked)
  • @import handling: Process

Advanced:

  • Update external files every: 216000
  • Garbage collection interval: 216000

We are done for Minify settings, Now moving to Browser Cache, Set these options:

General:


CSS & JS

HTML & XML


Media & Other Files

Yes, That’s All. I hope you try out these settings and yes depending upon theme you use, it can differ. If your regular theme messes up due to these settings then try to follow Genesis settings that I have specified here in this tutorial. I have tested in this blog itself as well as couple of other blogs too and Its working perfectly.

Pingdom Speed Test Result

Let me know your comments down below!




January 29, 2013
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