{"id":135,"date":"2018-06-09T20:29:27","date_gmt":"2018-06-09T20:29:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/digitalhub.io\/?p=135"},"modified":"2024-02-27T13:43:16","modified_gmt":"2024-02-27T13:43:16","slug":"w3-total-cache","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fatfrogmedia.com\/w3-total-cache\/","title":{"rendered":"W3 Total Cache Best Settings: WordPress Speed Plugin"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Improving a site's efficiency is often an overlooked practice. A good example of software ripe for some optimization work is WordPress. Out of the box, WordPress is an excellent tool for building a blog or business website but it's rather inefficient unless tweaked a little. Caching<\/strong> for WordPress is a great way of squeezing a few more percentage points of speed from your site. A faster website is a more profitable website. In this article, I'll show you how to set up w3 Total Cache and optimize it using the best settings to speed up your WordPress website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is a Cache and How does it work?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In simple terms, a cache is a time-saving device. As business owners, web administrators, and bloggers we are well aware of the speed limitations of our websites. Reducing file load times<\/strong> is a high priority for most of us but many people are not familiar with web cache software, which can significantly improve download speed on your site. Caching is an important part of WordPress SEO. We'll examine the benefits of using one of the most popular cache tools for WordPress, W3 Total Cache.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Web cache uses temporary storage (or caching) of HTML pages, images, style sheets, JavaScript, and many others to reduce the load on the server. A web cache serves static files instead of slower dynamic files to users and this speeds up the delivery of data considerably. Using caching properly can have the biggest positive effect on the response time of your site<\/strong>. With the increased use of large images and video in websites, it\u2019s becoming more important to conserve bandwidth to deliver faster pages to the ever distracted and impatient consumer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Using caching properly can have the biggest positive effect on the response time of your site<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Caching is used by computers, your ISP, your web server and your browser. It\u2019s a very important technique used for two main purposes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  1. To conserve bandwidth by reducing traffic.<\/strong><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. To reduce latency (delay in transferring data)<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    One question I hear is if caching is bad for sites that continually update data. The answer is it depends on what kind of web pages the site is delivering. Let\u2019s look at an example. Reuters, the news site, no doubt uses caching for their homepage and you might wonder if the content you\u2019re reading is out of date, because it's somehow cached. What happens is that when you look at the Reuters front page for the first time the site's server will deliver all the content including images, video, and text. If you request the page an hour later the caching software checks to see what has changed. If the images remain the same then the original images are displayed again, removing the need to download a second time. Perhaps the content has changed slightly with some updates news. This text is downloaded quickly, as text generally is, and the end-user experiencing a very fast and up to date Reuters front page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    A photographer site, with high-quality images that don\u2019t change very often, would benefit greatly from the bandwidth saving<\/strong> features of caching. It would be a waste of resources to download the images, which will generally be of large file sizes for this type of site, every time the visitor looks at the page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"How <\/picture><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    Your browser uses a cache also and this is like a mini store of web items that the browser keeps on your computer. It\u2019s used in case you decide to return to a site soon after first visiting. (Chrome is notorious for causing developers all kinds of problems by not displaying immediate updates to a site. A developer, or indeed anyone that needs the freshest version of a web page always should use a \u2018clear cache<\/a>\u2019 plugin to refresh the cache at the click of a button).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The goal of caching your site<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    There are many goals but the main one is better site performance which leads to a higher ranking on Google. I\u2019d imagine that nearly every site on the internet would want that. Bear in mind that site speed is one of 200 different ranking factors so it\u2019s pointless to ignore the other factors in favour of your site\u2019s PageSpeed results but we should also consider the visitor experience. A faster site will create a better experience for your visitors, meaning better visitor interaction and conversion, which results in better ranking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    W3 Total Cache<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    Let\u2019s have a look at one of the most used performance optimizer tools available for WordPress, W3 Total Cache.
    \nWith more than 1 million active installs of this plugin, we can safely presume it does what it says on the tin: Increases server performance and a reduces download times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    W3 Total Cache does the job of storing data from previous requests to prevent re-downloading of the same data for further requests. It also compresses elements of your page and creates static files before they are sent to the browser, reducing the overall page size and increasing the speed of WordPress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Before installing and configuring W3 Total Cache you should test your site using GTmetrix page speed tool<\/a> to see what the current performance report for your website indicates. If it scores an A on PageSpeed then the improvements will be incremental but we can still look at other improvements. The Page Load Time<\/em> value is something that can be still reduced significantly if it\u2019s above 5 seconds. Note: this value depends quite a bit on the WordPress theme and also on the hosting provider but I\u2019ve successfully reduced Page Load Times from around 8 seconds to less than 2 seconds on sites that were in the high \u2018B\u2019 and low \u2018A\u2019 PageSpeed score index.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Installation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    To begin, make sure that you're not running any other caching software as this will cause conflicts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Add the plugin as you would add any other plugin on WordPress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    In the Admin backend, hover over the Plugins menu and click Add New.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Search for W3 Total Cache, install and activate it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The plugin will add another menu option to the Admin sidebar called Performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Hovering on this a second menu with your mouse produces a pop up showing several different configuration options for this plugin. W3 Total Cache installs with the basic options available to the plugin so a little bit of configuration is necessary to get the most out of it, but don\u2019t be overwhelmed by all of the options. For most needs, there are just a few key areas that we need to look at.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"w3 <\/picture><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    There are a couple of things to be aware of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n