Most feature complete and superb support

Having tried most of the other free and freemium plugins, this one offers the most features out of the box, for free. The support from the plugin author is superb. The responses are clear, professional and prompt and it’s clear that the author is passionate about their plugin and helping users to get the most out of it. The documentation is also extremely helpful.

With very little effort, I now have full page caching (disk enhanced), automated cache warming, memcached storage for the object cache and CSS and JS combining and minification. There are a plethora of options to tune all of this just how you like. There are other features too, but I have not used those (yet).

I’m using a somewhat non-standard approach by using Roots Bedrock, PHP Deployer and I prefer to disable the .htaccess and control everything in the server Apache configuration. This is all possible with W3 Total Cache (be sure to untick verify rewrite rules). It’s also brilliant that I can make use of the WP-CLI commands to flush caches on deployment.

I read a lot that this plugin is more difficult or complicated to setup than the others, but that’s because it does so much more and gives you the option to configure everything just how you like. I’ll be using it on all of my websites.