Which version of W3TC is stable and safe to use with WordPress 3.5.1?

On the front page on the far right side column you’ll find a compatibility tool matching wordpress version with plug-in version, and it shows the number of people who found each combination functioning and broken. That’s about as good an indicator as any. I’d personally stick to 0.9.2.4 or 0.9.2.5 until the issues with the latest versions have been corrected. 0.9.2.5 was released in December I believe, when most users began having widespread issues. Before that I used 0.9.2.4 with no problems.

The compatibility tool is quite inaccurate as most people that find the plugin broken will come and cast their vote while the other millions that downloaded it may not. So are you suggesting that 0.9.2.4 is the safest version to go with on WP 3.5.1?

It is certainly a shame that developers are experiencing these type of issues with the new versions as there are many of us that want to use this plugin (which used to have a great reputation of being flawless) and pay for it if it works as claimed.

They must be losing some valuable clients at the moment.

I wish that there were more information as to what particularly is causing these issues and how we could avoid them, rather than taking the chance of installing it and there may be the possibility that the whole site goes down.

There is no definite answer to your question. 0.9.2.5 seems to work very well for a lot of users, 0.9.2.8 has some issues with some setups. It is very difficult to predict which version works best for you, as there are so many different configurations in the wild.

After all, in my opinion you will have to try out. I am personally still using 0.9.2.5 in a modified version from forum user wmiles. I am on shared hosting and it works extremely reliable, and I do have reasons to believe it might also be a good choice for other people here, but obviously, you will have to try out yourself to know for certain.

I have no idea what kind of server and environment you have. If you have just basic, with Apache and no memcached or APC or eaccelarator

I advise get W3TC Latest version 0.9.2.8

Go to the >Performance -> General Setting enable those

1. Page Caching -> Enable (Disk: Enhanced)
2. Object Caching -> Enable (Disk)
3. Browser Caching -> Enable

Save all setting, depending on your file permission you could see some error, but you should be able to click auto-install and make those changes to .htaccess and other file from plugin setting page.

Note: This is a very basic setup, without memcached, APC and eaccelarator using W3TC seems big miss. But still you will get great improvement.

I did not suggested Minify as it generally breaks design, but minification will bring great improvement in page load. So, you could use try and error method or instead of using auto minification use manual method and select theme file and .css manually and always clear cache and check site in logged off mode.

And for media and graphics heavy site CDN will work great, in my blog I have a guide how to use CDN with W3TC, and I will link to those guide below.

If you want, you could check my presentation about WordPress caching at WordCamp Orlando 2012. I have also explained two basic error with W3TC in recent version and their solution at my blog here and here.

@wp-fan Thank you for that link, however we plan to invest in this plugin and its future updates, so configuring our site with that mod temporarily may not be a good long term plan.

@rahman Thank you for the information.

@everyone Is there a more comprehensive guide that details using this plugin and all of its features?

https://webloggerz.com/w3-total-cache-settings-configure-optimize/

I followed mainly this guide and it went well. I just checked a few others (hard to find some recent enough to be sure you’re dealing with updated information) to compare and understand sometimes a little more about some features. Even decided not to use some like database cache and object cache. Database cache is said to possibly slow down page loadings (I suppose especially if you are on a shared host) and I couldn’t really understand what object cache was doing.