How To Use W3 Total Cache

[Giuseppina Worster]

W3Total Cache (W3TC) improves the SEO, Core Web Vitals and overall user experience of your site by increasing website performance and reducing load times by leveraging features like content delivery network (CDN) integration and the latest best practices.

W3TC is the only web host agnostic Web Performance Optimization (WPO) framework for WordPress trusted by millions of publishers, web developers, and web hosts worldwide for more than a decade. It is the total performance solution for optimizing WordPress Websites.

Speed up your site tremendously, improve core web vitals and the overall user experience for your visitors without having to change your WordPress host, theme, plugins or your content production workflow.

There are a number of resources that have been documenting the role of performance in success on the web, W3 Total Cache exists to give you a framework to tune your application or site without having to do years of research.

To use all features in the suite, a minimum of version WordPress 5.3 with PHP 7.2.5 is required. Earlier versions will benefit from our Media Library Importer to get them back on the upgrade path and into a CDN of their choosing.

Great question. W3 Total Cache uses several open source tools to attempt to combine and optimize CSS, JavaScript and HTML etc. Unfortunately some trial and error is required on the part of developers is required to make sure that their code can be successfully minified with the various libraries W3 Total Cache supports. Even still, if developers do test their code thoroughly, they cannot be sure that interoperability with other code your site may have. This fault does not lie with any single party here, because there are thousands of plugins and theme combinations that a given site can have, there are millions of possible combinations of CSS, JavaScript etc.

A good rule of thumb is to try auto mode, work with a developer to identify the code that is not compatible and start with combine only mode (the safest optimization) and increase the optimization to the point just before functionality (JavaScript) or user interface / layout (CSS) breaks in your site.

The tool will scan your posts and pages for the cases above and copy them to your media library, update your posts to use the link addresses and produce a .htaccess file containing the list of of permanent redirects, so search engines can find the files in their new location.

Technically no, a CDN is a high performance cache that stores static assets (your theme files, media library etc) in various locations throughout the world in order to provide low latency access to them by readers in those regions. Use Total Cache to accelerate your site by putting your content closer to your users with our many CDN integrations including Cloudflare, StackPath, AWS and more.

The plugin uses WordPress FileSystem functionality to write to files. It checks if the file owner, file owner group of created files match process owner. If this is not the case it cannot write or modify files.

No. The WebP Converter extension converts common image file formats to the modern WebP format using our API services. The conversions occur on our API service, so that resource usage does not impact your website server.

I use manual disk minify. In my situation w3 total combined JavaScript and CSS. Therefore I recommended to use manual minify (disk). Then go to w3 total minify tab and click on the top "Help" button and add all the necessary js and CSS.

Then I disabled all modules of W3 Total Cache but no improvement also not after clearing the cache which was strange. Then I disabled W3 Total Cache and only then it worked again. Then I enabled W3 Total Cache and again the problem was back.

W3 Total Cache is a popular WordPress caching plugin that helps you to improve your website speed and performance. Caching plugins can help retain users and lower bounce rates, which can help SEO and increase conversions.

Now, you will be given the option to Test Database Cache. We recommend choosing None. For most small to medium-sized websites your MySQL server will be able to fetch data more quickly than the Database cache.

We hope this article helped you install and set up W3 Total Cache in WordPress. You may also want to see our complete WordPress security guide for beginners to strengthen your website security, or our expert picks of the best WordPress hosting services to speed up your website even more.

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Hi, As per your recommendation, I have decided to go for MaxCDN, Is there any new update about CDN? Going to the MaxCDN site, there are different service including Content Delivery Network, Edge Delivery and other. Can your recommend me which service I have to select initially? I have new blog with no affiliate link till now and not planning for the next six month. And I am planning to apply Google adsense in the near future.Presently I installed WP Super Cache.

Do I need to switch W3 Total Cache to configure with MaxCDN? if I can configure MaxCDN with WP Super Cache, do you have any guideline?

I am Using W3 Total cache plugin for WordPress. My post has one table which updates every minute/hour. But as I do caching, the server does not serves latest version, instead it displays cached copy to the visitor. How can I purge cache every 30 minutes automatically so that it shows latest version of the post at after every 30 minutes?

I have already tried inserting this code in functions.php file but its not purging cache every 1h, instead it dies 2-3h later.

Thank you so much! I was about to go pay an extra $15 a month for cloud based hosting because my blog had gotten so slow at times it was unbearable! I had setup W3 Total Cache and just enabled everything.

Hi, I have a problem with My yoast sitemaps not rendering. A blank screen appears when I click it. My question is should I include or exclude Sitemap.xsl file in custom file settings in CDN?

Kindly advice.

I recently set up W3 Total Cache with the Rackspace Cloud Files CDN. It all works, but I had expected the media files in the wp-content/uploads folder to only be posted in the CDN rather than on the server. Instead, media uploads now go to both the CDN AND the wp-content/uploads folder. Is this what is supposed to happen? It seemed unnecessarily redundant to me.

Yes, but the images on your server are stored so that you can end using CDN service anytime you want, or move to another service, or to create backup using WordPress backup plugins. However, your visitors will be served images from the closest CDN server instead of your site.

A lot of reasons can show you conflicting results when you are expecting something different. For example, you may have forgotten to save plugin settings, your server is particularly under heavy traffic at that time. Make sure you enable gzip compression as we have shown above, then test.

How are you checking your website speed and performance? We recommend testing with pingdom using different locations. If it is still slow, then try resetting the plugin and follow the setup instructions again.

Helpful note: You may have a downloadable instructions on your site somewhere & I am not see it. But It would be helpful if I could download to print OR this was print friendly. you have have link but I am not seeing it.

Please Inform That if Enable Object Cache is checked may cause very slow or accessible admin panel after some times as happened to me and i have to disable object cache and after that i have no problem with this Great plugin

Hello WPB team,

I have connect MAxCDN by following all the guidlines as suggested in the article. But after some days my 99% images de-indexed in Google. Please is there any tutorial to FIX this? Will be very thankful to you for the help.

I do have one question, when static pages are created for example you have 200 pages and just installed and set up W3 cache. So now when static pages will be created for all those 200 sites.

Do you have to load it manually every site by site in your browser ? I understand that this action takes some time so when exactly those sites are created ( static copies on a disk) ?

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All I can say for now is that I had to disable the Page cache to make the connexion possible.

Did you set the page cache during your tests ?

Here is the ticket I opened on their end in case it could help in future answers (but not yet) : MainWP compatibility WordPress.org

I appreciate W3 because it includes all necessary caching levels and is quite efficient and well recognised for it. The biggest downside is probably its learning curve, while default settings are generally good enough. Minimisation could be improved so I use Autoptimize for that.

If you have any (free) alternative I am always happy to learn performance tricks, but I never saw any plugin that was that complete and free.

For the rest all seems ok, but still this page caching problem is quite annoying and has to be fixed. Changing from plugin to plugin is not a super classy practice while already using most trusted ones.

The media library import tool is for old or messy WordPress installations that have attachments (images etc in posts or pages) scattered about the web server or hot linked to 3rd party sites instead of properly using the media library.

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