[Plugin: W3 Total Cache] W3TC CDN = Wrecking my CSS

Hi,

A little more details: You’re saying you’ve tried deselecting “minify”, but are still using the CDN when you do that?

In other words, even without minifying, the CDN is not serving your CSS files correctly? Or?

What I would do is look at the source code and find the css that’s being used, load it, and see if the styling is present but just not catching.

What are your settings for CSS in the minify section when you try this?

After looking at my settings and source code I’m finding that W3TC is not minifying my css and when it does, it’s not being picked up by the CDN.

In your “General” settings if you have minify set to Auto, it says it won’t use the CDN.

I set it to manual, then in the Minify tab I imported the CSS file to minify.

This breaks my css and does not load on the page, resulting in a page with no css styling.

So, I went into the CDN section and manually added the w3tc CSS file(s) to the custom file list, just in case, like this:

wp-content/w3tc/min/*
wp-content/w3tc/min/a3338/*
wp-content/w3tc/min/a3338/*.css
wp-content/w3tc/min/a3338/default.include.*.css
wp-content/w3tc/min/a3338/default.include.cded27.css

Still NO luck! I’m going to troubleshoot some more and will update if I find a solution…

I’m happy to take a look if you want to drop us a note. Sounds like you might need to purge the pull zone.

Service can be ordered here if you don’t feel like fooling with it yourself.

@willie,

When I look at my source code, the minify link works perfectly when it’s not pointing to my CDN. When it is pointing to my CDN, I get a “W3TC error” page when opening the minified css up.

It tells me to enable debugging, so I do. But, there’s no error information in the source code and there’s no logs located in the minify or log folder…

Understood, the current minify error message isn’t too terribly helpful. You’d need to check your error logs to further diagnose the issue.

I’d like to do that however I’m unable to locate any error logs browsing the directories in FileZilla. Where exactly would the error log be?

Thank you

You’d need to ask your host, it depends on how your server is set up.

Ah you mean those logs. I thought you meant w3tc logs.

W3TC doesn’t have logs ??

That makes sense now! I was reading a bunch of outdated comments from Frederick citing “The error log lives in: wp-content/w3tc/log/minify.log” so was wondering why it wasn’t there… Thanks for letting me know

If Frederick said it lived there then it did and I misspoke, this might have been an old release of W3TC that predates my involvement or there could be a misunderstanding.

Regardless, I would check your Apache logs for errors.

Jennifer2010:

A little more details: You’re saying you’ve tried deselecting “minify”, but are still using the CDN when you do that?

In other words, even without minifying, the CDN is not serving your CSS files correctly? Or?

Yes, I de-selected minify per my theme developer’s suggestion. Then I used the CDN – even though MaxCDN says to select manual minification in their instructions…

When I do that, my navigation menu changes won’t save (my theme allows you to customize a lot of the styling). That’s <b>the only thing</b> that doesn’t load properly – everything else style-wise seems fine.

What I would do is look at the source code and find the css that’s being used, load it, and see if the styling is present but just not catching.

I know how to look at the source code – but how do you “load” CSS? I’m not sure I follow you here.

What are your settings for CSS in the minify section when you try this?

I’m not sure what you mean here, either – when I try to “load” the CSS? I don’t know what you mean by loading the CSS or how to even attempt that.

Willie Jackson –

I’ll drop you all a note. In the mean time I’m double-checking settings per the CDN and see if there’s something I missed…

OK, so I took Willie Jackson’s advice and emailed the W3TC team. He got back to me and suggested again I try to purge my CDN’s pull zone, and it worked fine!

I also wound up paring-down my options, like not minifying JS/CSS, not using Object and Database cache (apparently I had these all turned on, my hosting service says NOT to enable those things…whoops!).

My page speed is not as high as before, but it’s still a noticeable improvement using 3rd party page speed checking tools. So all told, this is case closed, I’m still happily using W3TC. Thanks for the help!

James: Thanks for the details. It sounds like MaxCDN serving your old CSS file. When you update your CSS file, you have to “purge” the old version from MaxCDN’s cache. Otherwise, they’ll continue serving the old CSS and you won’t see your changes.

To do this, you’ll need to login to MaxCDN, your site’s pull zone > cache > then enter the location of the file you want to purge and purge it.

However, I seem to have a problem with purging my own CSS. For whatever reason even though I purge it, it’s still caching my old CSS file without any changes. I’ve sent them a support request and am waiting to hear back. It may be unique to me so I’d give it a try on your end anyways.

I know how to look at the source code – but how do you “load” CSS? I’m not sure I follow you here.

If you know the location of your CSS file by heart then just type it in the address bar and “load” the page. Otherwise, I just view my source code then click on the link to my CSS file.

So what I’m saying is you can compare the CSS file on your server to the one being cached by MaxCDN. More than likely the one on MaxCDN doesn’t contain the changes you want. I use a CName with MaxCDN so that cdn.mywebsite.com points to the zone on MaxCDN. If I wanted to compare the css I’d look at mywebsite.com/wp-content/themes/theme/style.css then look at cdn.mywebsite.com/wp-content/themes/theme/style.css

Ah, glad you got it figured out!