[Plugin: W3 Total Cache] Better than WP Super Cache?

Errr dangit. I just downloaded it and this is the same thing as WP Super Cache….

The plugin hasn’t seemed to improve anything. Any ideas?

Here is the website I’m testing it out on:

https://www.netbookreviews.com

Any suggestions / can you tell if it’s working? I have WP Super Cache, WP Minify and Gzippy installed but when I run the Page Speed plugin for Firefox I still get errors saying things could be greatly improved.

I already reduced the number of posts that display on the home page from 8 to 5 and I’ve gone through my theme and replaced the php calls with direct URLs to the files. I’ve even gone through and made sure the width and height parameters were set for every image used in the style as well.

They are definitely not the same thing. Perhaps you need to read about it – it seems you’re not using the options. As soon as you install it your site is at least 50x faster. Some additional tweaks are required on a per case basis to do more if you need to.

https://loadimpact.com/blog/wordpress-load-test-part-2-amendment
https://da.clausheinrich.com/w3-total-cache-wordpress/

Or testimonials:

https://twitter.com/w3edge/favorites

Hey Frederick,

Ok I see my mistake (noob move I looked in the wrong file folder). My question though is do I still need to use Gzippy or WP-minify as well? Or is that functionality already built into the site?

Chris

Did you even look at the option? You can gzip and minify html, css and js files.

My site servers 140k pages daily. I out grew WP Super Cache and moved onto W3 Total Cache using memcached for my pages and APC cache for database.

Minified using memcached
Page Caching using memcached
Database Caching 28/35 queries in 0.011 seconds using apc

Thanks @senator94.

Yes @thehalogod, both of those (and much) more is already built in.

Hey Senator,

I didn’t want to activate the plugin while I had everything else running for fear of some sort of problem. I’m deactivating my old plugins now and moving onto this one then ??

If this works as great as everyone says it does (which I suggest it does) you may be getting a nice gift from me.

Update: Ok so the plugin is installed, but I don’t have PHP 5 installed (Doh! didn’t know it was a requirement…)

In any case I have the following settings used:

Page Caching: Enable
Page Caching Method: Disk (enhanced)
HTTP Compression: gzip and deflate (best)

Minifiy: Not enabled (requires PHP 5)

Database Caching: Enable
Database Caching Method: Disk

CDN: Not enabled (don’t have one… yet)

The rest of the settings are all the default ones.

I don’t see a huge improvement though; however, I don’t have PHP 5 I know. (I can work on getting this installed… is there a downside to installing it?)

In fact, I’m still showing about a 12 second load time in Firefox when I hit the refresh button and use the Firebug “net” tab (Could it be because of no PHP 5 though?)

I also tried running the Page Speed Google plugin and it still lists out several things I could improve:

Red:
Leverage Browser Caching
Combine External JavaScript
MinifiyCSS
Optimize the order of styles and scripts

Yellow:
Enable gzip compression
Minimize DNS lookups
Combine External CSS
Specify image dimensions
Minimize redirects
Remove unused CSS
Serve static content from a cookieless domain
Minimize cookie size
Use efficient CSS selectors

Suggestions / ideas beyond getting PHP 5 installed? (Can’t it break some stuff if PHP 4 is what I’m using now and everything works?)

Page caching reduces execution time, i.e. the response time from the server. W3TC compresses that response for a faster download as well. So while W3TC does provide the means to scale WordPress far beyond what any other solution can provide, it cannot resolve all uses cases in a single step; nothing does. PHP 4.3 is 7 years old, upgrading is not really optional. I can’t speak to what could break, I have no idea what is running on your site.

As it stands you’re still not doing any HTML, JS or CSS minification whatsoever.

If you’re like more personalized responses those can be requested by using the support tab in the plugin, which will give me an idea of your server config and other relevant details to your situation.

The feedback you’re getting from Google Page Speed goes far beyond issues that caching solutions provide.

So until I upgrade to PHP 5 I will not have any HTML, JS or CSS minifying? (makes sense).

I basically just run WordPress blogs. I’ll talk to my server management team about upgrading to PHP 5.

To your last point: is that something that your premium service helps out with? The Yellow issues I’m not as concerned about. It’s mainly the Red ones. I do need to increase the speed at which my site loads though as I worry about the influence page load has on search engine rankings and it’s affect on me.

Yes I offer professional services, you can use the support tab in the plugin to reach me.

Just sent a ticket

Ok.