WARNING: Do NOT use W3TC with membership sites!

  • Just wanted to call attention to a critical issue with W3TC when used on membership sites.

    The issue is with the interaction between server-side page caching and client-side browser caching. Which, when combined, will prevent your users from logging in and making purchases.

    Page caching allows a setting to “prevent caching for logged in users.” Which is great! Unfortunately, if a user comes to a page, and then logs in to purchase/see hidden content, the browser cache prevents them from logging in.

    The breakdown is this:

    The user comes to the page, and sees the logged out version.
    The browser caches that page.
    The user logs in and goes back to the page.
    The browser serves up the cached “logged out” version of the page without calling the server.
    The user thinks that they didn’t log in properly and tries again.
    The browser serves up the cached “logged out” version of the page again.
    The user gives up and leaves.

    So essentially, W3TC prevents the user from logging in. Or, at least, that’s the user’s experience. (They ARE actually logged in, but they can’t tell that. And they will leave without purchasing before figuring it out.)

    The critical feature that is needed is the ability to specify NOCACHE tags for certain pages. To prevent the browser from storing logged out versions of those pages.

    It’s possible that just disabling browser caching will help. But that isn’t a good solution either, as you’re still relying on hope that the browser won’t cache the page on its own.

    If someone has a solution to this issue, please chime in! I’ll also send a message to W3 Edge directly.

    But in the meantime, it’s probably best to not use W3TC on membership sites. It might improve performance… But the whole point of improving performance is to not frustrate and lose customers! But there’s nothing more frustrating than NOT being able to log in to a site, or buy a product you’re trying to buy.

    So it appears that W3TC is kind of a “decapitation to cure a headache” solution!

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  • Thank you for bringing this to everyone’s attention!

    When you deactivate and/or delete the plugin, does it solve the problem? Or is the browser still caching the page on its own? We are currently trying to fix this issue on our membership site.

    Thread Starter zherbert

    (@zherbert)

    I haven’t tried that yet. I added a bit of code to the login that alters the redirect url by appending a query string variable after the user logs in.

    This prevents the browser caching for that specific scenario. But there are other scenarios where it’s still an issue. (eg. using the password reminder and then returning to the original link.)

    I was just doing a quick 3 day promotion on my site. So the registration is down now. Unfortunately, as best as I can tell, W3TC prevented about 95% of the attempted orders from going through. :/

    Thread Starter zherbert

    (@zherbert)

    Just a quick update: W3 Total edge never did respond to my email. And obviously, they didn’t respond here either. So it doesn’t appear that any fix is forthcoming.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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