What is “W3 Total Cache”
W3 total cache is a web page speed optimization plugin which can improve your visitor’s experience by increasing the speed of your WordPress site. It is among the most famous and widely used cache plugins for WordPress sites. This post covers all aspects related to w3 total cache regarding the importance of cache plugins, alternatives, properly configuring w3 total cache settings for maximum web page optimization. By the end of the post, your site will be much faster than earlier.
Why Do I Need A Cache Plugin & Why Website Speed Is So Important?
You need a cache plugin to increase your website speed. The speed of the website is important for a better experience for visitors and for SERP. Search Engines like Google measure the website’s speed in ranking it in search results. A faster website is more likely to rank above the slow site. Although site speed is not the only factor for the ranking but surely it is among the important ones. Here
What are other alternatives to W3TC?
If you want to try the other cache plugins before using W3TC, here are some good alternatives:
WP Super Cache
Hyper Cache
Quick Cache
See More: How To Test Your New WordPress Theme Without Activating It
Why W3TC is best among all cache plugins?
1). As stated by W3TC team, w3 total cache plugin can increase your site speed up to 10 times.
2). Used by many big companies like mashable.com, makeuseof.com, kiss925.com.
3). Recommended by many hosting companies including Host Gator, Media Temple.
4). Offers so many features in single window like page cache, browser cache, minify which others plugins don’t provide.
5). Most importantly, when I personally used both WP super cache & w3 total cache, my site’s speed was much faster with w3 total cache.
Here is the performance report generated of this site from gtmetrix
Installing W3 Total Cache
(Uninstall other cache plugin if you have one installed earlier)
Install w3 total cache the same way as you install other WordPress plugins. Download the plugin, upload it and activate it. Anyhow if you don’t know, here are the quick steps:
1). Download the plugin
2). Upload it through : Plugins -> Add New -> Upload -> Choose File -> Install.
3). Activate the plugin : Plugins -> Installed Plugins -> Activate (w3 total cache).
Configuring W3 Total Cache Settings?
W3 total cache configuration could be a bit confusing if you are a WordPress beginner or using this plugin for the first time. To make things easier for you, I have included the XML/PHP File containing all the w3 total cache settings.
You can simply import all the settings by uploading the file via Performance -> General Settings -> Import / Export Settings (at the bottom). Still, here are all the settings step by step:
1. W3TC General Settings
Page Cache – Enabled
Page Cache Method – Disk Enhanced
Minify – Enable
Minify Mode – Manual
Minify Cache Method – Disk
Database Cache – Enabled
Database Cache Method- Disk
Object Cache – Enable
Object Cache Method – Disk
Browser Cache – Enable
CDN – Enable if you are using a CDN service else Disable
Varnish – Disable
Network Performance by Cloudfare – Enable if you use Cloudfare else Disable
2. W3TC Page Cache Settings
Page Cache – General
Cache Front page – Check
Cache feeds: site, categories, tags, comments – Check (Blogs running Feedburner – Uncheck)
Cache SSL (https) requests – Check
Cache URIs with query string variables – Uncheck
Cache 404 (not found) pages – Uncheck
Cache requests only for yoursite.com hostname – Check
Don’t cache pages for logged in users – Check
Don’t cache pages for following user roles – As per your choice
Page Cache – Cache Preload
Automatically Prime the Page Cache – Checked
Update Interval – 900
Pages per interval -10
Sitemap URL – URL of your blog’s xml sitemap. E.g. http://example.com/sitemap.xml
Page Cache – Purge Policy
No changes
Page Cache – Advanced
No Changes
3. W3TC Minify Settings
Minify can increase your site speed by removing the unnecessary comments and spaces from your html source files. Please keep in mind that this function may cause crash of your site sometimes. I would recommend you to consult your hosting provider before using this function.
Minify Settings – General, HTML & XML
Rewrite URL structure – Check
Minify Settings – HTML and XML
Enable – Check
Inline CSS minification – Check
Inline JS minification – Check
Don’t minify feeds – Check
Line break removal – Uncheck
Minify Settings – JS & CSS
JS minify settings – Check
Operation in area – Minify
Embed Type – Non-blocking using JS
All other options – Uncheck
CSS minify settings – Enable
Combine only – Disable
Preserved comment removal – Disable
Line break removal – Enable
@import Handling – Process
Minify Settings – Advanced
No change
4. W3TC Database Cache
No changes
5. W3TC Object Cache
No changes
6. W3TC Browser Cache
Browser Cache – General Settings
Set Last-Modified header – Check
Set expires header – Check
Set cache control header – Check
Set entity tag (eTag) – Uncheck
Set W3 Total Cache header – Check
Enable HTTP (gzip) compression – Check
Prevent caching of objects after settings change – Uncheck
Disable cookies for static files – Uncheck
Do not process 404 errors – Uncheck
Browser Cache – CSS & JS
Set Last-Modified header – Check
Set expires header – Check
Expires header lifetime – 31536000 seconds
Set cache control header – Check
Cache Control Policy: cache with max-age
Set entity tag (eTag) – Uncheck
Set W3 Total Cache header – Check
Enable HTTP (gzip) compression – Check
Prevent caching of objects after settings change – Disable
Disable cookies for static files – Check
Browser Cache – HTML and XML
Set Last-Modified header – Check
Set expires header – Check
Expires header lifetime – 3600 seconds
Set cache control header – Check
Cache Control Policy: cache with max-age
Set entity tag (eTag) – Uncheck
Set W3 Total Cache header – Check
Enable HTTP (gzip) compression – Check
Browser Cache – Media and other files
Set Last-Modified header – Check
Set expires header – Enable
Expires header lifetime – 31536000 seconds
Set cache control header – Enable
Cache Control Policy – cache with max-age
Set the entity tag (eTag) – Disable
Set W3 Total Cache header – Enable
Enable HTTP (gzip) compression – Enable
7. W3TC User Agents Group & Referer Groups
No changes
8. W3TC CDN
No changes for non CDN users. After configuring all the settings, Go back to General Settings & Hit Deploy. You will see a new message – “Preview settings deployed”. Click Disable to disable to preview mode and then click Empty all Cache. Finally, you are done and have successfully configured w3 total cache optimal settings on your blog.
Check if the plugin is configured and optimized properly?
If you have followed all the above steps, the plugin would be configured properly. To check if the plugin is working correctly, open the Html source code of any web page of your website (Right Click -> View Source) and look for this line: <!– Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. Learn more: http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/ –> to confirm its proper working. To confirm the speed optimization of your website after installing this plugin; Go to Pingdom Tools and check the speed of your website once again. My website’s speed jumped to 91% from 39% earlier. I am sure that it will be increased for yours too.
What Else
Sometimes a bad host can also contribute towards slow speed of your site. So it is very important that you buy a good hosting. You can find few best hosting providers of 2013 here.
Do let me know what increase you got to your website. If you face any issues, feel free to reach me any time.
The post W3 Total Cache Settings – Configure & Optimize Your Website appeared first on Webloggerz.