@joannacraig)
I just want to help the community here. No Ties to W3TC other than as a long-time user and no ties to Elementor other than as a user for a little over a year.
I would very much suggest following the advice of Elementor and using their theme, made just for Elementor.
You did not mention that you’re using Elementor so I’m assuming you are not.
I have been in your shoes before I decided to get off the beat my head against the wall club and listen to Elementor.
“If” you are not using Elementor’s Hello Theme, you are playing against the clock to see when you start struggling (not if but when)
Using a typical Theme with Elementor is possible, permitted, but not suggested.
You talk to all the “expert” users on Elementor’s page and most if not all will say they’re using Hello Theme by Elementor.
Why you might ask?
Because when you use a theme (even or especially a paid one) you’re going to have all sorts of built-in coding that comes with it (especially if it’s a Themify or Divi theme) Most of it is crap and slows down your website.
All that coding is going to crash when you try to cache/minify/combine Java. It also sucks for SEO – I don’t care what their main designer/owners say.
Because those other themes all have their coding built-in like CRAPWARE on a Windows PC, they will fight and struggle behind the scenes with Elementor’s coding and also start having issues with 90%+ of plugins. Unless you’re a professionally trained developer who can constantly develop custom CSS or JS on your own to correct the booboos you’ll go mad and pull your hair out.
However, this is not an issue with the W3TC plugin. It is merely but a victim in this foul play Macbeth.
Now Enters the Hero, Elementor’s “Hello” Theme. It is not even really a theme, you can consider it a mere placeholder that pops into WordPress like a snow-white glove or a blank canvas. Then when you start working with Elementor it works pretty much flawlessly because it does not have excessive code bloat to fight with. Elementor does not even work well inside of other themes because it is pretty much in a straight jacket with all the themes code bloat wrapped around it.
Whether you are using the free version of Elementor or the Pro version it works so much better with the Hello theme for the above reasons.
I would even further suggest Elementor Pro because you could pretty much quickly and easily build your own theme with the “Theme Builder tool.”
I used to be a WEB Network admin before I got back into the Insurance world, and believe me when I say if my customers had used Elementor and Hello theme my job would have been much easier and 8 hours a day instead of 16.
I would strongly suggest the following:
1. Take a deep breath and imbibe some beer
2. saving your images to your computer if you haven’t already
3. Saving your documents to notepad in .txt format to put back into your website
4. Swear a little that you weren’t using Hello Theme in the first place and that you most likely paid for some fancy theme that says it’s compatible with Elementor. Then say a prayer for swearing. (The Beer and praying parts are optional but they work for me)
5. Completely wipe WordPress from your database and in my humble opinion do a fresh WP install on your host.
6. Delete all the WP themes from your file manager ***EXCEPT THE LATEST ONE TO KEEP THE WP CONFIGS –
7. Install Hello Theme (you can download it directly from the Elementor download page if you have pro) by searching WordPress themes.
8. install Elementor and Elementor Pro plugins if you’ve paid the ridiculously cheap price for pro…
Caveat – Take it from experience, don’t save templates to save time starting back up after you switch to hello theme because you would most likely have saved some of the code from the previous theme and it will cause a challenge.
Other than the two Elementor plugins, I would only install a security plugin at this point and I would suggest Smart Pixel image optimizer and use their other plugin as an image CDN and have them lazy load your images, not W3TC.
Get your website totally up and running and complete for the most part before you even install W3TC so you don’t have to constantly clear cache modules.
I have a Vultr VPS server running Plesk and only 1 core and only 2 GB of ram and a total of 3 websites all built on the same principle I explained to you and I’m building up SEO because everything works like it’s supposed to and the sites load quickly. On GTmetrix I get both Performance and Structure scores in the high 90s and fully loaded page times around 1.1 to 1.2 seconds (sometimes faster) with no CDN. I’m just using Apache for Webserver and NGINx for static caching and W3TC for all other caching.
900ms-1.2 seconds with a solid A score in both sections measured on GT Metrix is faster than 90% + of other websites in the world. More importantly, 0% frustration and headaches because you won’t be banging your head on the wall.
Grin and bear it and wipe and switch now before going any further – you’ll thank me for it.
