W3 Total Cache Settings

Today I’m going to take you through all of the W3 Total Cache settings for your WordPress site and explain which ones you should use for optimal performance. After you’ve finished reading this, your pages will load a lot faster resulting in a better browsing experience for your visitors.
 

Installing W3 Total Cache

Before I begin to talk about the various W3 Total Cache settings, I’ll quickly take you through the steps required to install the plugin. If you’ve already installed W3TC, you can skip this part.

Once you’re sure the you aren’t using any other caching plugin, such as WP Super Cache, go to the ‘Plugins’ section in the WordPress Dashboard, click ‘Add New’, then type ‘W3 Total Cache’ into the search box. Click ‘Install Now’, then ‘Activate Plugin’. That’s it, you can go ahead with setting it up now.

 

W3 Total Cache Settings

You will see that a ‘Performance’ button has been added to the left-hand panel of your WordPress dashboard, click it and select ‘General Settings’. Now use the following settings:

- Page Cache: Enable
- Page Cache Method: Disk Enhanced (Disk Enhanced is best for shared hosting)
- Minify: Enable
- Minify Cache Method: Disk
- Database Cache: Disable
- Object Cache: Disable (Enabling database or object caching on shared hosting will decrease performance, only use these if you have a VPS or dedicated server)
- Content Delivery Network: Disable (A CDN such as MaxCDN can give your visitors a faster and more consistent browsing experience, you can set this up in W3 Total Cache settings after you have configured the rest of the options)
- Browser Cache: Enable (This is a great feature that tells the visitor’s browser to load static items from their local machine instead of re-downloading from your server)
 

W3TC Page Cache Settings – General

- Cache Home Page: Enable
- Cache Feeds: Enable
- Cache SSL: Disable (You can enable this for better performance if your site uses SSL)
- Cache URIs: Disable
- Cache 404s: Disable
- Don’t Cache Pages For Logged-in Users: Disable (This is a matter of preference and will depend on the type of site you’re running. Disabling it will make sure that Administrators never see cached pages while they’re logged in)
 

W3TC Page Cache Settings – Cache Preload

Cache Preload displays pre-cached pages to all of your visitors. If you have any problems with it you can simply disable it.

- Automatically Prime The Page Cache: Enable
- Update Internal: 900
- PPI: 7
- Sitemap: Your sitemap will be located at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
 

Minify Settings

Minify basically combines multiple files on your site into a single file to reduce HTTP requests.


 

CSS Minify Settings

- Enable: Enable
- Combine Only: Disable
- Comment Removal: Enable
- Line Break Removal: Enable

Note: If you have problems with styling after changing these, disable all of them except the first one.

Now got to the JS Minify Settings and select the same options as you did for CSS. The rest of the Minify settings can be left on their default values.
 

HTML & XML

- Enable: Enable
- Inline CSS: Enable
- Inline JS: Enable
- Line Break Removal: Enable
Note: If you have a poorly coded theme, you will have problem displaying your site correctly with these enabled. You can test these settings and disable them if you experience any problems.

Skip Database Cache, Object Cache and CDN.
 

W3 Total Cache Settings For Browser Cache

Under ‘General’ change the following…
- Set Expires Header: Enable
- Cache Control Header: Enable
- Set Entity Tag: Disable
- Set W3 Total Cache Header: Enable
- HTTP Compression: Enable
- Prevent Caching Of Objects…: Disable (uncheck)
- Do not process 404 errors: Disable (uncheck)

For the CSS, JS, HTML, XML and Media settings, leave everything on the default settings except eTag, disable that for all of them.
That’s it. Those are the best W3 Total Cache settings for WordPress sites on shared hosting. Remember to empty the page cache and you’re good to go!