[Plugin: W3 Total Cache] Status: not cached, but no reason given

I know, that is annoying isn’t it. I have recently made two separate W3TC setups and this happened on both of them. I find the Disk (Enhanced) page caching is bit of black box magic.

Here are some of the things I try.

First, and this could be just my opinion, but I believe it doesn’t work when you have any of the diagnostics set. The way I check to see if it is working is to go to the wp-content/w3tc/pgcache/ directory and see if files have been created.

Also, I use Chromes developers tools network tab to see how fast the page loads. If it takes half a second or more just for the main HTML file to load, most likely it was generated.

Second, one real source of frustration is the blasted preview mode. I never seem to get it to work. Plus, if you don’t hit deploy, things don’t work. I usually start it, hit deploy, then disable it. It doesn’t seem like a necessary step, but you start to gain rituals as you grasp in the dark for answers.

Lastly, I have found that page caching in enhanced mode simply refuses to work if it thinks things aren’t right. The pain with this is that it gives no feedback at all (at least none that I have found) as to what is upsetting it.

In my latest setup, I had copied my website from one server to another. I used all the same software and config files. The same OS, the same database files exactly. There was a different domain name, but I ran the option to change the domain. I purged all caches. After all that, no page caching.

The problem, as far as I can figure it, was that I had messed up on my PHP install and APC didn’t get loaded. Now you might ask, what does that matter to page caching. Well, object caching and database caching on my old server used APC. So, now, while they were caching to the disk okay, page caching had some internal thing telling it that something was wrong.

The moment I got APC loaged, moved them over, purged the caches, and hit deploy + disable on preview mode, presto. Magically it started working. It’s enough to make you want to put your head through a wall, but that’s how things are at the moment.

In fact, I have found that W3TC keeps these preference settings even when you uninstal and reinstall the plugin.

Again, this is mostly my opinion. Things might work differently, and I hope someone would point it out to me if they know what that difference is. But for now, I have two site caching, so I am sticking with what at least appears to work.

Oh, and one more thing. Don’t forget if you are using a proxy that it might be messing you up. Now, I’m not an expert, so take this with a grain of salt.

I use varnish to cache my files, but I haven’t setup W3TC to purge it yet. So, a caching change on the backend might not reflect on the front end due to varnish’s cached version of the file.

If you have any cache’s in front of your web server, don’t forget to purge them.

Sorry for the trouble. This is fixed in the next release. Let me know if you wish to try it out in advance.

That will be nice! Can I try it?

I’m having trouble with this too. Any news?

I fixed this by changing to disk basic mode.