[Plugin: W3 Total Cache] Shared hosting without APC

I’m on a shared hosting without APC/eAccelerator/xcache, can I still be benefited by using W3 Total Cache?

Well, I’m using shared hosting and have switched my blogs over to using W3TC so I reckon yes!

It installs in a default configuration that uses ‘disk enhanced’ caching rather than any of the memory caches and that works well for me. In addition you can still make use of some of the other features including javascript and CSS minification and combining which can give significant further benefits and aren’t provided by other caching plugins that I’ve looked at.

And Frederick (the author) is very active in supporting users!

It’s nice to know we can use this awaresome plugin without APC/eAccelerator/xcache. But my host already Gzip everything, so the feature of JS and CSS minification might not be a great assistance to me.

For a “disk enhanced” caching alone, is it worth loading up an extra plugin?

Yes, Frederick is a very supportive professional. Hope to hear his opinion too.

Regards

Your host already Gzipping everything might possibly be a problem (in the compatibility test built into W3TC there’s a check on this, so there must be some configuration that causes problems) but I don’t know why so you’ll need to wait for Frederick on that. If you tell us who your host is, someone may already know.

Apart from the above, if you don’t already have some cache plugin, then yes it is usually worth adding a cache plugin – its faster to deliver a page from cache than to have WordPress build it from scratch every time!

The JS and CSS minification does a lot more than just gzip, but does take a little time to set up right. Depending on your theme and plugins it can make a big difference to load times by reducing the number of files that need to be downloaded to the browser (and setting up to download a file can take longer than actually downloading the file for some small js and css files). It was for this feature that I switched my blogs over from using one of the other caching plugins.

@efikim is correct.

But my host already Gzip everything, so the feature of JS and CSS minification might not be a great assistance to me.

You can still use these features, you will simply need to disable HTTP compression if your host already does this somehow for the sites they host.

Thanks, efikim & Frederick! I will try it out.

Result?