Third time is not a charm with W3TC

  • With all due respect to the time involved to develop a plugin with as many features as W3TC, after installing it on 3 different templates, I must confess I am disappointed in the performance.

    Perhaps if I was running a simple two column blog with a few images and widgets things would be fine, but that’s not the case. Msybe my expectations were too high, but nevertheless here are the problems that I have encountered with the current installation: I am using PageLines Platform Pro Framework theme.

    1. W3TC and Google Adsense Text/Image ads don’t get along: the ads have completely disappeared. I was using a widget for this, but even when I put the code into the sidebar manually, nothing shows up.

    2. The caching of static content is miserable, I have page and browser caching enabled, object/database disabled, but 44% of my site content is not being cached.

    3. The overall page loading speed is 8.1 seconds — way too much time. W3TC has had no impact on this at all, in fact the site was loading faster using DB Cache Reloaded Fix.

    4. W3TC apparently conflicts with FeedWordPress.

    The dearth of plugins that work with WordPress 3.1.2 in the critical areas of caching, image management and the other features that make a blog competitive and user friendly is driving me to learn how to develop/upgrade plugins. On average for every plugin that I find that is compatible, there are 10 that are not.

    I personally am about at my wits end with the conflict between the standards of website optimization tests such as webpagetest.org and the performance and configuration of themes and plugins. The time I have spent searching for the methods to resolve the problems generated as a result of this is overwhelming.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • Welcome to the club. I was wondering why webpagetest.org was telling me that I should cache static content when all that caching business was supposed to be up and running. I was also wondering why pingdom results rocketed from a rather normal 2.8 to 3.6 to unbelievable 14 seconds.

    Everything was faster with the previous version of Total Cache. Adding Cloudfront to the pack did not speed up anything at all.

    I just hope, that Frederick finds the time to have a (paid) look at my installation.

    Thread Starter Uma Sumeros

    (@uma-sumeros)

    Well Andreas, it’s good to know I’m not alone in this cache-confusion. After installing and testing the three compatible cache plugins, Quick, Super and W3Total, I have decided that it’s best to find a solution that does not use plugins. One thing that is working for me is https://CloudFlare.com, which caches 200 pages of static content for free and I am trying to see if they will cache all of the static content if I upgrade to a Pro account. They also protect the website in several other ways that have improved performance.

    I don’t know if you are using WP 3.1 or not, but I am and I believe that this is part of the problem, because Super Cache worked well on WP 3.0.5. IMHO it would have been much better if the WP team has simply patched the vulnerability in this version that posed a security risk and continued to develop and test what they call 3.1 before releasing it with all the problems it has generated.

    Since I upgraded to 3.1 there have been many frustrations on top of malfunctions of plugins that are supposed to be compatible to the lack of plugins that work with this version, along with the lack of response to the real world of websites that are using these plugins.

    My websites are highly customized, so at this I have adopted this rule of thumb: if the job can be done manually, like inserting Google Analytics code, forget about using a plugin. While it may seem like the logical way to insert code into a theme, by doing this manually you can avoid at least one instance of plugin conflict.

    A good site to use for page load results is here: https://gtmetrix.com

    Plugin Contributor Frederick Townes

    (@fredericktownes)

    Sorry for the trouble everyone, it’s hard to know what the problems are for people without looking at their sites and knowing their settings. If you want to submit a bug submission form from the support tab of the plugin hopefully I can find the issue that has slowed you down with this release.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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