My WP site is faster without W3 total cache

Hello @tobbe_l

Thank you for your inquiry and I am happy to assist you with this.
Can you please share your website URL? POssibly it may take some time once the plugin is activated to reduce ttfb. Are you using any other Caching solution, server-side caching, or something similar?
Thank you!

Thanks for replying. We had W3 running for over a year but never really was satisfied with the performance. By advice we uninstalled Jetpack first which improved things dramatically. But we also tried uninstalling all plugins not crucial for the site and when we uninstalled w3 performance improved even more.
So right now we have not w3 installed. And no other caching plugin either.

The site url is: https://www.spwc.se

I dont know if we have any server side things going on. I′m not an experienced web/code/server guy

Hello @tobbe_l

Thank you for the information. I can see that you have wp super cache installed at the moment.
We cannot help you if W3 Total Cache is not installed because we need to check the behavior.
As I can see in the test results, you need to enable compression which can be done in W3 Total Cache Browser Cache settings.
Also, the bottleneck of your website performance is your images, for example, https://spwc.se/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/ettapuff_london19.jpg
which in some cases may take up to 20s to load according to the test results.
What I would advise you to do is to completely remove the other caching plugin, performed test on GtMetrix, and then install W3 Total Cache, enable Page Cache and Browser Cache in General settings and in Performance>Browser Cache enable Set Expires header, Cache-Control header, Etag, and Gzip compression in the General sub-box, save all settings and purge the cache.
Perform another test on Gtmetrix (Please note that just after purging the cache it may take some time so take a couple of tests) and see the improvements.
Thank you!

Thanks! True, I tried to install super cache briefly to see how it works. Will try that for a while and then maybe move back to W3.
What can be made to adress the slow image loading?

Hello @tobbe_l

You are welcome. As for images, Gtmetrix also suggests that you need to optimize images. Lazy loading feature in W3 Total Cache may help with this but if not you should install some Image optimization plugin such as Ewww image optimizer or SmushIt.
Thank you!