Get supercharged with W3TC

mag
March 30, 2022
10:06 am
No Comments

What is W3 Total Cache?

W3 Total Cache is one of the most popular caching plugins available for WordPress users.

It was created as one of the initial caching plugins and was developed around the same time as WP Super Cache.

W3TC is one of the most powerfull caching plugins available, and the one we have automatically prepared your WordPress installation for at GMEngine. However, if you use any other Hosting provider, you can do the setup manually. You can find more information about setting up W3TC here.

The configuration is straight forward, but it have a lot of options, which is why most beginners use WP Fastest Cache or WP Rocket.

Site Speed with and Without W3 Total Cache

There are several important things to know, on how speed of sites can be improved after installing a cache plugin. If you can find that out, you can easily go to ahead and read our W3TC review below.

We gained a 98% effectiveness on both PC and Mobile, without any kind of CDN, Google Ads, without Google Analytics and without all other external scripts enabled.

But here comes the truth – all of us needs these external scripts, not to function our site, but to know what is happening on our site.

So, why are we caching our site?

The Cache is an area of the computer or servers memory that stores the recently used information for later re-use.

When a website is cached, W3TC uses the Memcache (Memory Cache) to store the most recently used information, and if it is served well we cna serve them without reloading the entire scripts from WordPress.

This speeds up the process the recursive request, while the initial request still responds steady.

To put it straight up, the caching of data gives your future requests a decreased load time – which improves you overall website loading time.

Source: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Caching

Everything you need to know about W3TC Caching

First things first, you will need to install the W3TC plugin, and as an extension to our standard guide here, we will below explain some of the features we have found useful and where you can gain extra power out of your W3TC installation.

You shall expect to use the next 10-15 minutes, at least, in the Caching plugin settings, as we walk you through the exact steps you need to follow and at the same time share some insights that can make it more easy for you.

General Settings

Initially we are going through our General settings, as it is our default starting point.

General: You should keep preview mode as disable (which is by default disabled, so don’t enable it)

Page Cache
Page Cache: Enable
Page Cache Method: Memcached

Many guides online suggest using the enhanced disk cache, as it is as standard the only one at shared hosting companies.

We have designed the GMEngine to using the Memcached setup.

If your provider doesn’t support it, we suggest using the Disk Enhanced Caching Method.

While using Minify, we strongly suggest using the Auto mode.

Minify: Enable
Minify Mode: Auto
Minify Cache Method: Memcached
HTML minifier: Default
JS minifier: JSMin
CSS minifier: CSS Tidy

The Database Cache is the most critial one to get set right, as your database often is the source for long load times.

Database Cache

Database Cache: Enable
Database Cache Method: Memcached

As said earlier, our setup supports the Memcached methodology, but if you are using another provider you most certainly will only have the Disk mode.

Object Cache

Object Cache: Enable
Object Cache Method: Memcached

Do not use Disk, unless you are required to do so.

Browser Cache

Browser Cache: Enable

A CDN

If you are running a website with million of monthly visitors, we strongly suggest you to use an CDN. There are multiple options in the market, and we will later review some of them in another blog post.

for running a normal blog, with up to 10K-15K visitors a day, you should not need a CDN.

Varnish

Enable varnish cache purging

What is Varnish

Varnish is pre-installed on all our servers, and one of the central features of the Varnish Cache, is that is works in addittion to the W3TC Caching and is flexible in the configurational language. VCL enables policies on incoming requests and how they should be treated. These policies makes it possible to decide what content to be served, and from where the content should be served – or if the content should be altered before serving.

Detailed settings

You will without any kind of doubt need to go through each tab, to ensure all settings are exactly as you want them.

We suggest the following additional changes:

General

Enable Cache Home Page
Enable Cache Feeds
Enable Cache 404 (not found) pages
Enable Cache requests for your domain Host Name
Enable Don’t Cache pages for logged in users

No need to make any changes at Advanced tab level.

Cache Preload

Update Interval: 900 seconds
Pages per Interval: 10
Sitemap URL: https://www.gmengine.com/sitemap_index.xml

For your domain, you should enter your XML sitemap URL in Sitemap URL section.

Keep the Purge Policy as default.

General

Enable URL structure
Enable Disable Minify for logged in users

HTML & XML
Click Enable
Enable Inline CSS minification
Enable Inline JS minification
Enable Hide Comments

JS
Click Enable
Enable preserved comment removal
Enable Link break removal

CSS
Click Enable
Enable Combine Only
Enable Preserved comment removal
Enable line break removal

Our final findings with W3TC

W3TC is a caching plugin that is extremely easy to use, simple to change and optimize for the full performance options.

We have not yet been able to find another and better website performance plugin for decrease of loading time, and high value on flexibility.

We supercharge you with W3TC