Site loading slowly? Give W3 Total Cache a spin.
It was one of those fluke sites that was loading slowly. We switched hosting (to Host Gator) and that helped but there was something we just couldn’t seem to figure out. Everything seemed normal: WOO Canvas theme, no crazy plugins installed, decent shared hosting, no massive images, what was up?
We did the Google Speed tests and also kept on eye on load time with Pingdom and, of course, it recommended we optimize this and tweak that. Well, that’s what the caching plugins do. I’ve used both W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache and have just had better results with W3.
If you’re just looking for what settings to choose to get the plugin up and running, here’s what we did.
We enabled the following sections on the General Settings page:
- Page Cache
- Minify
- Database Cache
- Object Cache
- Browser Cache
That’s it. That’s what we did. Very rough results?
Load times from around 1 second to around 0.5 seconds. I.e. cut in half.
A free plugin, a few checkboxes and load time was cut in half? I’m stopping this review right here.
Cut loading time in half.
[…] W3 Total Cache (Dec 17) […]
I found that W3 Total Cache completely borked my the style of my Canvas theme navigation and header.
I’ve seen other post on this and the only answer I’ve found is manually minifying certain files.
Any idea on what is happening?
No! I actually try not to use caching plugins at all, but this isn’t good news. What does it do? Have you seen any help in the WOO forums? But to answer your question, no, I don’t know what’s going on … or how to fix it.