W3 Total Cache Plug-in Speeds up WordPress Blogs by Caching

I have been using W3 Total Cache for a few days now, and my blog seems slightly more responsive and fast compared using no caching plug-in. W3 Total Cache is a free caching plug-in which works a lot better then WP Super Cache.

W3 Total Cache is more feature rich, and easier to use. The default settings for W3 Total Cache are good enough for most shared hosting users with little traffic to their blog.

However,  you may want to use database caching if your shared hosting blog gets a lot of traffic, or you have (Alternate PHP Cache) APC option on your more expensive dedicated or virtual server web hosting plan.

W3 Total Cache uses a 2.5 MB of RAM according to WP-Memory Usage . 2.5MB of memory can be a lot of RAM if you have over 30 plug-ins installed on WordPress, and each plug-in uses about 0.5 MB – 1MB+ of RAM and your shared web hosting plan just gives you 30MB of RAM to use on WordPress. I recommend uninstalling plug-ins which you never use or rarely use to prevent going over your Web hosting plan’s memory limit.

Once you installed and enabled W3 Total Cache, you notice there will be a section on the bottom of the left sidebar labeled “Performance”. This is the section you use to configure W3 Total Cache, and to get help about W3 Total Cache by clicking the FAQ and Support links.

I read posts that hosts like Host Gator will disable your blog for using too much server resources.

Host Gator recommends costumers use W3 Total Cache with Database Caching enabled if your blog has a lot of traffic per day. W3 Total Cache Database caching can dramatically reduce the amount of MySQL queries when visitors load your WordPress Blog on their web browser.

Source:: forums.hostgator.com/help-reading-log-t86083.html

Althogh, Yoast.com video said that Database caching with disk may slow down your blog in some cases in this video he posted on his blog: yoast.com/w3-total-cache . Yoast.com guide on setting up W3 Total Cache is pretty good. I highly recommend you watch it before you install W3 Total Cache on your WordPress blog.

If your using a shared host and your blog’s traffic is rather low, you can use the default settings since object caching and database caching can slow down your site if your web host’s disk drives are slow. However, if you are expecting a lot of traffic, it would be a good idea to turn on Database cache and Object caching if your site is highly dynamic sites which use the “Object Cache API”.

W3 Total Cache also can help you turn on Gzip compression for your blog which makes your blog load a lot faster. I also read online that Google is using website load speed as a factor to decide search rankings. Plus, it is always best to make sure your blog load faster to prevent annoying your visitors or search engine bots from reading your blog posts.

W3 Total Cache also makes it easy for you to connect your WordPress blog to a content delivery network (CDN) like Amazon CloudFront or S3, MaxCDN, Akamai, and Rackspace. But, CDN can be very expensive for hosting your images, videos, and other files, so for most bloggers, the CDN option won’t be used until their website has a lot of visitors.

W3 Total Cache is a great WordPress Caching Plug-in which can speed up your blogs loading time, and make it use less database queries.

You may have to go into W3 Total Cache’s General Settings to empty your cache by clicking the “Empty all Cache” button to rebuild your cache if you installed, or deactivate a Plug-in, made changes to your blog’s template, added or modified a widget since W3 Total Cache may still be caching your unchanged blog and theme.

Download W3 Total Cache at:  wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache