W3TC (W3 Total Cache) WooCommerce recommended settings

I have a Woo Commerce site that is functioning very well with W3TC. However, I don’t have Database or Object Cache enabled. I do have Minify enabled, but the CSS and JS specific to Woo have to be omitted. I tried minifying the Woo CSS and JS, but it broke the site.

I have the Set Expires Header enabled in the Browser Cache settings, but don’t know why that is causing you problems. Perhaps you can provide more information about your theme, child theme, hosting, CDN, etc. I’ll try to help you.

Hello MoonDog,

Thanks for offering your help!

First things first: My site is OK-fast, but I want Google to like it even better (=> higher score in pagespeed). What pagespeed suggests is:
1. enable browser cache
2. minify + defer JS/CSS

2. gave me errors all over the place, so now I am after 1.
However, enabling “Set expires header” renders my shopping cart useless: Added items don’t immediately show up in the cart, but only after I “hard refresh” via Ctrl+F5 or Ctrl+R. Same is for deleting items from the cart. Important here is, you have to test this with a non-logged-in user!

Regarding my environment:

I am running a child theme of “Twenty Thirteen” on shared hosting. No CDN, really just a basic setup. “Set expires header” even causes problems if everything else is deactivated.

Thanks again!
– t

Edit: Spelling

My first suggestion would be to remove all CSS/JS specific to Woo and your child theme from Minify. Try that first and clear the cache. Try adding products to the cart.

Regarding the expires header setting, what is the expires header lifetime for each (CSS/JS, HTML, Media) and what cache control policy are you using for each?

It might be best for you to take a screen shot of your browser settings and upload somewhere I can see it.

Hello MoonDog,

Thanks again and sorry for my slow replies …

My first suggestion would be to remove all CSS/JS specific to Woo and your child theme from Minify. Try that first and clear the cache. Try adding products to the cart.

I can have _everything_ disabled except “Browser cache ? Set expires …” (and have the cache cleared) and it still gives me a messed up cart as described above.

Regarding the expires header setting, what is the expires header lifetime for each (CSS/JS, HTML, Media) and what cache control policy are you using for each?

I have ‘cache with max-age (“public, max-age=EXPIRES_SECONDS”)’ for all and tried multiple values as well. Currently it’s 3600s for “CSS & JS” and “HTML & XML” and 360000 for “Media and Other files”.

It might be best for you to take a screen shot of your browser settings and upload somewhere I can see it.

Do you mean “Browser cache” settings? To verify and test, I just literally switched all options off except “Browser cache ? Set expires headers”! No other caching methods enabled. Only “Set expires …” in all sections of “Browser cache” enabled.

So, to me, that’s either the faulty feature or I have bad values/settings. Everything else seems to be excluded.

Any ideas?

Again, thank you for taking the time!

– t

Did you remove the CSS/JS specific to Woo and your child theme from Minify? If you didn’t do that, it could break your site. That’s the first step.

I’m still not sure about your Browser Cache settings. If I could see them I could offer suggestions. That said, send me an email at [email protected] and I’ll attach screen shots of my settings.

Thank you.

Hello MoonDog,

Did you remove the CSS/JS specific to Woo and your child theme from Minify? If you didn’t do that, it could break your site. That’s the first step.

Everything is disabled. No DB cache. No Object cache. No Page cache. Everything except from Browser cache is disabled. And here only the “Set expires headers” option is enabled, but I still get the messed-up cart.

I will send you a few screenshots to the mail address you provided and then update here, if you can suggest a solution.

Thanks again!
– t

Hi,

Cart Widget on sidebar and on top solution

W3TC’s Browser HTML & XML section
1. Set Last-Modified header – Check/Enable
2. Set expires header – Checke/Enable – 0 (zero) not slowing down page speed.
3. Set cache control header – Check/Enable – Cache with validation (“public”, must -revalidate, proxy-revelidate) not slowing down you page speed.
4. Set entity tag (ETag) – Uncheck/Disable – Useless it will heavy burden you HTML file size (Google mentioned either one is enough).
5. Set W3 Total Cache header – Uncheck/Disable
6. Enable HTTP (gzip) compression – Check/Enable

After this, the cart widget (deleted item & added item) will fine to “non-logged switch to logged-in” and Logged-in switch to non-logged user”

To ensure everything fine:
1. Clear All W3TC Cache & Browser cache;
2. Check every page & post & product & all WooCommerce Page (cached & non-cached – cart/checkout/my-account/wishlist pages).

^.^ to be continue….

Hi all

I came across it while troubleshooting two problems:

1. When I logout I can’t log back in unless I clear browser history

2. When I get to checkout and select Returning Customer option It won’t let me login properly and cycles around it

The only way to buy new product as Returning Customer is login first (sometimes this requires clearing browser history) and them add to cart and go to checkout.

Is this something to do with Page cache / Browser cache / W3TC ?

I am bit worried to change things around as I don’t want to impact any other functionality of the website

address https://peakart.co.uk

thanks

I got a little further with testing – basically looks like I can’t log in properly whenever something is on the cart

1. Clear all browser history + nothing on the cart – can log in ok
2. Clear all browser history + add 1 item to the cart – can’t log in

I get a message “your are logged in as ….” but in fact I am not logged in as I can’t see my account details

Any ideas

thanks

I have now changed the theme and also deactivated all plugins and the issue is still there ??

W3 Total cache support told me its a bug in my Theme (even though I offered to pay the to fix it)

Theme support said they swapped to different Theme and the problem remains.

I am getting desperate because this must be possible to solve somehow?

I used to have W3 and WC configured just right so that AJAX worked great. However I had to uninstall W3 to troubleshoot an issue, and now I also cannot seem to get it running right again after reinstalling. No AJAX functionality works anymore on my site.

@peakart,

Do you follow have follow the recommendation setting from @torstenhauser then @watchteller?

ok, so in the end with the help from W3 Total Cache team it is fixed. The problem was Varnish Server settings on my Bluehost Provider

server sitting between you as a website visitor and your webserver, it is able to cache or modify content too) and it handles https particularly.

Disabling that varnish server solved the problem.

Great

Any thoughts on this guys??

What is best nr 1.) or nr 2.)?

1.) Amazon CloudFront CDN with W3 Total Cache
like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAjF7u_NYP4

2.) Or Using Amazon S3 to store images like the links under, and then configure W3 Total Cache without a CDN???

https://github.com/skoobe/riofs
https://www.affiliatewebdesigners.com/2015/06/02/using-amazon-s3-to-store-your-affiliate-product-images/

With “riofs” it will not upload images to your server only to Amazon S3.
This mean you don’t get an additional WRITE on your server and an additional READ on your server that are not required. Then images is saved directly to Amazon S3 without involving your own server at all.

Or can you do both??