[Plugin: W3 Total Cache] It works so well… a fast website now seems normal

Thanks for the post.

If you want to say anything about why you decided to switch from a shared host to a VPS that would be great. All of the options in W3TC work for shared hosts, but some shared hosting accounts are simply too under-powered to use more than page caching.

So again, why did you decide to switch to a VPS and was cost much higher?

I think many bloggers start off with shared hosting. It’s cheap and easy to get going. If their site gets popular and busy, that’s when you realise that shared hosting plans usually run out of steam to support large traffic.

Let’s face it wordpress is one of the most creative platforms available, but certainly not the fastest once you have a few plugins and a swelling database of content. I tried the standard cache plugins, super-cache etc, but I never saw any improvements in page load times and in fact some of my dynamic plugins stopped responding.

When I looked into the issue of wordpress performance, it became clear that there were a number of tweaks and settings that could be improved, even on a shared host. Most of the available cacheing plugins did something to improve my websites performance, but nothing integrated all the tricks into an intelligent package.

Then I saw and installed W3 Total Cache and spent some time getting to grips with the best options. My website performance instantly improved cutting the load time to nearly half. I have several JS scripts and CSS files and I think minifying and cacheing with w3TC did a lot to reduce these overheads.

One of my sites was getting very busy and it became clear that my performance problems were server side due to the shared host environment. I was unable to make changes to my ini file, cache allocation, memory size or install extra modules like php accelerators. I went for an upgrade to a VPS and it did cost a bit more, but I think it is worth it when a site is popular.

Now able to set up my VPS server to take advantage of W3TC’s full features, although I still have not installed a CDN as yet. with the help of my host, I increased my memory allowance, installed APC, memcached with memcache PECL php extension as well. Changed a few settings on W3TC options and checked the sites performance. Up to now I’ve always watched the status bar in my browser as it painfully chugged away ‘waiting for data … etc etc.

With my new VPS and W3TC, my status bar hardly registers what’s loading and new pages load in 2-3 seconds or less, when I use the browser back button or revisit a page, it’s almost instantaneous load!

All the functions on my site work perfectly and W3TC gives me warnings if I upgrade a plugin or change something that needs a cache flush and rebuild. My front page is very hungry with over 230 queries uncached. I know there’s lots more I can do to optimise my code but right now, this performance plugin is a life saver. I don’t have to keep fiddling with different setting on a collection of performance plugins either, it just does the job without any fuss.

I have deliberately kept facts and figures out of this, because what matters is a percieved improvement in performance, not just half a second here and there on the graph. For those interested, I can safely say that I’ve gained at least 80% speed increase by using this plugin and changing to a VPS and Traffic spikes are no longer a problem, or worse still a blank page.

Thanks for answering my questions. I hope this will help people by providing some perspective.

W3TC is the only way to squeeze maximum performance out of any hosting account you have. A VPS is a great next step for a growing site, but if your budget isn’t there, page caching + contend delivery network (CDN) is a huge performance improvement for sites on shared hosting. If your host gives you enough power and has fast hard drives, go for disk caching if you can and definitely minify.

Yeah, another point. It’s a real benefit to choose a comprehensive plugin like W3TC and stick to it. Get to know and understand how it works and suck all the benefits out. I spent too much time trying
this and that’ and got nowhere. You have to look at the support quality in software like this and W3 Edge really has it put a lot into this. Just check out how often fredericktownes has replied to support on these threads, and often in great detail. Now that’s worth a lot when you need to resolve configuration issues.

I’m working on making things easier for users, but as a project in beta it takes time to get to the finishing touches.