taschenck

Thanks for your work Max.

My answer is the same as whyameye

Thanks @lheintzman for the advice. It’s exactly what I needed to hear. I will say I am now happy with the speed of my site. It’s much better than a couple weeks ago when I started looking for ways to improve performance. It is also a relief to know it is performing well for those visiting the site from distant locals despite what some of the scores were leading me to believe. That was my last major concern.

Thanks @c3mdigital for the recommendation. I’ll hold that in my back pocket in case I find the site becoming less responsive than I’m currently seeing as I surf the site. Also good to realize that webpagetest allows me to test the site from different locations.

Now, it’s time for me to return to writing content and promoting the site. Thank you everyone!

Thank you for the info and links c3mdigital! I’ve implemented your recommendations except for the CDN. There is a new feature since your posting on the Browser Cache page called “Prevent caching of objects after settings change”. I’m wondering if I should leave that unchecked.

Are there any shared hosting providers that you can recommend?

I assume a page speed score of 96 is pretty good. However, the Labs section on Google Webmaster Tools says my site is slower than 65% of sites because it takes 4 sec to load my page. There seems to be a little disconnect. Is it true 65% of sites load in less than 4 sec? I thought I was doing pretty good considering my Page Speed score.

For others looking to speed up their site, I suggest running tools.pingdom.com to see the order and time it takes to load each element on your page. For example, I found my header background and logo were a combined size of 360kb. So I figured out how to combine these into one image of 68kb, which has been a big help.

Hi Documaker. I was giving another stab at searching for some answers to help make W3TC work for me when I came across your new post on the step-by-step process you took to remove W3TC and create your own gzip files. Thank You for taking the time to share the details!

For those that come across this post, you can see his steps and videos here: https://www.justoutsourcing.com/wp/2011/06/w3-total-cache-might-slow-down-wordpress/

Thanks for the insight Ipstenu. I guess the key is to reach the point where I can have a dedicated server.

I leave this thread open a little longer to see if there are any additional suggestions for those of us on shared servers.

Thanks documaker. I may try the same as I too am on GoDaddy.

However, in attempt to make sure I’m using W3TC to the fullest, I’m still tinkering around.

Based on Pingdom tests, I’m now running < 10% slower with the plugin installed after changing minify to manual from automatic on the general tab and then working to move most js files on the minify tab out of the header.

It’s still a bummer to put in all this work with W3TC and have it run slower than with the site un-minified, un-compressed, and un-cached. However, with the tinkering, the difference in speed when browsing the site with and without the plugin is no longer noticeable. I’m holding out hope that future plugin upgrades will help improve speed.

Based on various SEO tests, there are two areas with extremely low scores. If anyone has suggestions, I’d appreciate it.

1. Leverage Browser Caching of Static Assets: Despite using the default expiration date of 1 year for media, js, and css on W3TC, my fail reports list all those items, which are hosted on my site, as having No max age or expires.

2. Use HTML Compression – I have enabled compression in W3TC but most tests say pages do not appear to be compressed. SeoSiteCheckUp provided a more detailed explanation saying that I had ‘page compression’ but not ‘page-size compression’. I haven’t figured out the difference but I can say that on the Pingdom tests, the html load size is big (indicating to me it is not compressed) and causes by far the biggest delay in loading the page.

Thanks for the replies.

Auto minify of html and css seem to work fine for me. When I look at the page source, I can see it has been minified. (BTW, I did try WP-minify before installing W3TC but it rendered pages without any styling. I didn’t take the time to figure out why since I knew it was also a feature in W3TC. I read a number of people who said they preferred to activate WP-minify and deactivate that feature in the W3.)

I’m not using a CDN so that wouldn’t be the reason for my slow down either.

Thanks.

Nice job Max. Thank you for stepping up to make the fix so this great plugin can continue to work.

Go to the configuration page for the plugin. (It is under Settings in WP 2.7.) Scroll down to the section called Sitemap Content and place check marks next to ‘Include Categories’ and ‘Include Tag Pages’. These options are not checked under the default scenario.

Thank you Otto42,

For others who need this in layman’s terms, in Firefox, I went to
Tools/Options/Privacy/Show Cookies. Then I searched for my blog name and deleted that folder.

I was then able to get access to my admin panel via Firefox. I also had no problem re-accessing the admin panel after closing Firefox and rebooting my PC.

If this is any interest to those who want to figure out why the cookies caused problems, I did notice that I had no problem accessing my admin panel via Firefox on a separate PC. My blog’s cookie folder for that PC did not include a utmb nor a utmc cookie. Both of these cookies were in the file I deleted on the computer where I did have problems.

Hi Otto42. Can I help at all?

I have upgraded to WP 2.6. I can login using IE7 but I can’t login using Firefox 2.0. I have not made any fixes or workarounds.

I’m not as tech savvy as you guys but I do know how to change code using dreamweaver and upload it to my hosting account.

Tell me where to look and I’ll tell you what I see. Otherwise, I’ll keep my eyes open for a resolution once you guys are on the same page.

Thanks.