[Plugin: W3 Total Cache] Help with Compression!

  • Good afternoon everyone.

    So I have a CentOS VPS running Nginx and WordPress 3.6. Nginx is my web server, and is NOT just a front end proxy for Apache, which is common it seems.

    Everything works great with my site, but I have recently come back to using W3 Total Cache. My goal is to improve my sites PageSpeed performance (Google), and there are currently three big things throwing red exclamation marks.

    1.) Enable Compression
    PageSpeed Insights is showing about 30 files (looks to be mostly JS and some CSS) that can be compressed to for a 71% reduction. The estimated reduction is 567Kb.

    2.) Leverage Browser Caching
    There are about 30 pages/files that have either no expiration or a very short expiration.

    There is a third red mark, but I am not concerned with it just yet. So I have W3 Total Cache in place, using Page Cache (Disk Enhanced), Minify (Manual – Disk), Database Cache (Disk), Browser Cache, and I’m also using CloudFlare (CloudFlare is only being used for managing DNS currently, as it is not acting as a CDN).

    In regards to compression, I have the following:
    –Browser Cache settings–
    -General – Enable HTTP (gzip) compression, enabled
    -CSS & JS – Enable HTTP (gzip) compression, enabled
    -HTML & XML – Enable HTTP (gzip) compression, enabled
    -Media & Other Files – Enable HTTP (gzip) compression, enabled

    What other settings should I be looking for? Also in the Browser Cache settings, the Expires header lifetime for all of them is set to 31536000 seconds, so why does PageSpeed see several pages/files with no expiration?? Is this because of using Nginx and not Apache?

    Thanks.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • Thread Starter tycoonbob

    (@tycoonbob)

    Well, I got it working.

    I had:
    gzip on

    Set in my Nginx.conf file, but I didn’t have any MIME-types specified, so it was only doing gzip for text files, and not CSS or JS. I added this line:
    gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

    Right below gzip on and PageSpeed is much happier.

    In regards to issue number two about Browser caching, that is also something I resolved in my nginx server config with this line:
    location ~* .(ogg|ogv|svg|svgz|eot|otf|woff|mp4|ttf|css|rss|atom|js|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|ppt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf)$ {
    expires max; log_not_found off; access_log off;

    Easy fixes, outside of W3TC.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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