How did W3 Total Cache improve your speed?

I used it for a while its a decent plugin it helps. I have just changed however to a better plugin that has managed to get my bulky theme and poor coding to 84/100 ( could do better but have to sort out my CSS) its called WEBO site speed up (web optimizer).

You have to play with the settings alittle to get the required result, but worth a look.

With w3 total cache my page speed was around 4 seconds now i think its around the 1.9 mark.

Have a splat and let me know what speed you get.

I managed to get my site from around 40-50 to mid 90s. Obviously I had to optimize my theme etc as well but W3 Total Cache has done most of the work! It’s the best plugin for WordPress bar none!

There are numerous success stories including this site that loads within ~1 second using W3 Total Cache: https://yoast.com/ read about the sites/users here:

https://twitter.com/w3edge/favorites

Some experiences vary, but there is no better plugin that is tightly integrated with WordPress’ actual functionality. Many other plugins cache and optimize pages, but sacrifice functionality for many practical use cases.

This post is also interesting for those that want real performance data: https://cd34.com/blog/scalability/wordpress-cache-plugin-benchmarks/

Yoast.com has a 84/100 score foor page speed and a B from Yslow.

My site already had 79/100 and a B from Yslow. So I guess I was expecting too much from the plugin. I manually turned it into 87/100 ??

I guess it is a great plugin for people who have never done anything to optimize their page speed. Its impressive to see people claim it going from 40 top 90. That is wonderful and I guess those are the target audiences.

Thank you for a great plugin, although I am not going to use it. I do respect the developer for making it.

Well the plugin is not a full release yet, in case that’s not obvious. Anyway, YSlow provides some metrics that go beyond the load speed of a page and don’t necessarily reflect it’s real world performance. In the example provided the point is that the load speed cannot really be faster.

It’s up to every site owner which optimizations they choose to make so it’s actually a large assumption to assume what steps were taken by the owner. For now the plugin has some additional apache directives available in the ini/ directory of the plugin to set the remaining compression and header settings that would satisfy the remaining YSlow requirements provided that you use a properly configured self hosted CDN and configure YSlow appropriately.

There are so many factors to consider and too many options at the disposal of the users it’s important that you actually work with the developer to get the results you need unless you actually read the FAQ and understand the plugin and what it actually does for your WordPress site.

Be careful about YSlow. It’s a great tool, but has often misdetected whether my pages are being served gzipped or not for example. I look at this plugin as icing on the cake… it’s not a bandaid to magically fix a poorly optimized site, but it’s a way to eke out a bit more performance. Personally I use Pingdom’s response time reports to see what the site’s doing…

Good point, W3TC makes WP better behaved from a performance standpoint, but there are so many issues and the tools to measure results are all different as are the sites and servers they are testing. So you have to test several tools (including your browser) if you’re trying to go for the best possible results.

I tried this on a client site – archaeologyrevealed.com. The site had a score of 84 before using the plugin – and 84 after activating it. No change… There are settings I could tweak to do a bit better, (combining css and js files got me up to 85) but initial changes ‘broke’ a news feed and messed with my css settings. I don’t know that wading through it all and optimizing everything is going to improve my score enough to justify the time involved.

I’m thinking the tool is for less-than-efficient theme builders?