W3 Total Cache

December 26, 2009 – 5:29 PM

I’m trying out a new caching plugin for WordPress called W3 Total Cache and so far I am very impressed.  PC Sympathy is now running it and using Amazon Cloudfront as the CDN.  I see a tremendous improvement over the other caching plugins.  Here’s some bullet points for W3 Total Cache from their website:

Benefits:

  • At least 10x improvement in site performance (when fully configured: Grade A in YSlow or great Google Page Speed Improvements)
  • “Instant” second page views (browser caching after first page view)
  • Reduced page load time: increased visitor time on site (visitors view more pages)
  • Optimized progressive render (pages appear to load instantly)
  • Improved web server performance (easily sustain high traffic spikes)
  • Up to 80% Bandwidth savings via Minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and RSS feeds

Features:

  • Compatible with shared hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated servers / clusters
  • Transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration with Media Library, theme files and WordPress itself
  • Caching of (minified and compressed) pages and posts in memory or on disk
  • Caching of (minified and compressed) CSS and JavaScript in memory, on disk or on CDN
  • Caching of RSS (comments, page and site) feeds in memory or on disk
  • Caching of search results pages (i.e. URIs with query string variables) in memory or on disk
  • Caching of database objects in memory
  • Minification of posts and pages and RSS feeds
  • Minification (combine and remove comments / white space) of inline, embedded or 3rd party JavaScript (with automated updates)
  • Minification (combine and remove comments / white space) of inline, embedded or 3rd party CSS (with automated updates)
  • Browser caching of CSS, JavaScript and HTML using future expire headers and entity tags (ETag)
  • JavaScript grouping by template (home page, post page etc) with embed location management
  • Non-blocking JavaScript embedding
  • Import post attachments directly into the Media Library (and CDN)

Again, so far so good.  But I would like to give it a full month and then check some server stats.

  1. One Response to “W3 Total Cache”

  2. Ran some quick tests with Pingdom. Here’s the results:

    (loading the homepage only)

    With no caching at all: 5.07 seconds
    With WP-Super Cache: 4.89 seconds
    With W3 Total Cache: 2.48 seconds

    With the two plugins, I made sure the page was already cached before running the test.

    Awesome so far.

    By manunkind on Dec 27, 2009

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