[Plugin: W3 Total Cache] Is it OK to just use "out of the box"

Hi Joy–

It really depends on any plugins or special functionality you have cooked in to your theme. For most wordpress configurations, W3 should work just fine out of the box. If anything goes wrong you can always delete or deactivate the plugin.

You do want to configure the main options as most of the caching features are turned off by default. I recommend turning on minify, database, object and browser caches for a basic wordpress site.

Good luck!

If you are on a shared hosting, I do not recommend turning on Database and Object cache, they can slow down your system.

I would recommend turning on only Browser and Page Cache.

Then turn on minify, auto minify, and enable CSS and HTML minify. To save you the aggravation of problems caused by minifying JS, do not enable JS minify.

Instead, get the plugin Better WordPress Minify to minify your JS. It’s even safe to minify CSS again in Better WordPress Minify. I found BWP Minify to be more compatible with other plugins when it does its minify js job.

Just these, and you should have cached pages load in the blink of an eye, unless you have some really heavy-loading plugin like those ecommerce ones.

Thanks for your help. Much appreciated. (Sorry for late reply – partner got taken into hospital, so chaos has descended!)

astrasuite, how have you come to conclude enabling database and object cache slow down shared hosting accounts? I haven’t experienced this and would be curious to hear your experience. Thanks!

There’s good advice above.