The best WP caching plugin – but needs knowledge for setting up

As of this writing (December 2014) I have a little over one year of experience with W3TC running a small e-commerce website based on WordPress.

In comparison with other caching plugins, W3TC offers the best configuration capabilities (the config panel is huge…) and covers a lot of ground outside the area of caching but still well within the scope of performance improvement (e.g. integration with CDN services, performance monitoring). Considering the amount of work that has gone into writing W3TC and the great results you can achieve with it, it amazes me that this plugin is offered for free.

I think the biggest W3TC benefits will come if you have your own server or VPS and can make changes to the server configuration. Some of the features require adding Apache modules that may not be available or run with limited functionality in a shared host environment (e.g. Memcache, HTML Tidy) and others might not work if the proper file/folder permissions are not set.

There is a great community formed around this plugin. It pleases me to see that the plugin author Frederic Townes is very active in the support forum and there is a big chance your issue has already been solved elsewhere; if not, and if you ask nicely, Frederic will most likely come promptly to the rescue.

If you are looking for a good WP caching plugin, by all means give W3TC a try. The huge configuration panel might look intimidating at first, especially compared to other great caching plugins such as WP Super Cache but as you get accustomed to the wealth of options W3TC offers, you will come to appreciate the level of flexibility you can achieve.

I highly recommend W3 Total Cache (W3TC).