WordPress › Support » [Plugin: W3 Total Cache] High hopes, but no effect

jonmrich
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

I had high hopes for this plug in, but it had almost no effect on my site. It went from a 55 in YSlow to a 57. I have every type of caching turned on, but it doesn't appear to be working. Especially frustrating is that the addition of expirations to objects/headers isn't working.

Any ideas where to start? I know there's not much to go on here, but maybe you can give some ideas.

Site is: http://www.doseofdigital.com

Thanks for any advice.

Frederick Townes
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

No plugin does everything automatically (or can). Personally I saw your site load basically instantly even without using a CDN fully. Tips are quite valuable, but I'll give you some free advice since I have a moment:

- A great page speed or yslow score has nothing to do with if your site is actually fast, it just tells you if it's using some common best practices

- You still have objects including your minified files that are not using Cloudfront (don't use S3, it's not a CDN alone)
- You still have lots of scripts, what can W3TC do about ad, stat's etc scripts? Nothing. Regardless you still missed some scripts
- Minify your pages
- You've got lots of unoptimized images, several from third parties
- http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100723_1SHZ/

have a look at your first view and second view load times. That's what matters, how fast can a user start consuming content from your site.
- There's more I could point out... not the least of which is disable the plugin and run that test again and see how your site does so you can see that indeed, there's quite an "effect."

Once you finish tuning (like turn on HTML minify) you can get a high YSlow score if you want. But without seeing your settings, I have no idea what you missed and I can see that several things were missed. If you need to have all those external scripts in your site you cannot get a perfect score unless those services happen to comply with page speed or YSlow policy, which frankly not always practical nor necessary.

jonmrich
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

Thanks for the comprehensive response. I've made some tweaks on the plugin and have it working a bit better. I'd say the impact has been negligible, but I'll keep it going for a while.

One thing I did notice is that some images are missing, but only under certain conditions. For example, the image on this page: http://www.doseofdigital.com/pharma-healthcare-digital-marketing-services/

On Chrome and FF, the images show up as a text link, which if you click you get some error displayed about NoSuchKey. However, in IE7, the image renders just fine. Any ideas what is causing this?

Thanks,
JMR

Frederick Townes
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

It would be nice if you could document some facts as there are numerous testimonials to the contrary. You'd be better off submitting a bug submission form so I can ascertain why your case is special. W3TC is not about just turning on all of the caches. Nor is getting a A or 100% in various tests the end all be all in performance.

djmorrisinc
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

Jonmrich, you have to be patient and find the best settings for your own site. I hired Fred to configure mine and now I am seeing great results. Also I cut my DB queries down from 142 to 68....you have 132.

I have stuck with this plugin and tried everything imaginable and it has been totally worth it....I run an extremely heavy 3rd part real estate plugin, and without it my site speed is cut in half, but it is what drives my business: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100730_23N4/ and http://gtmetrix.com/reports/jupiterflhomes.com/HbWJ7lmA with Yslow points for not configuring my CDN with command prompt.

I can tell by looking at your site results http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100730_23NH/ that you don't have it configured right....it might be worth spending the money to have Fred professionally configure it for you. Don't blame the plugin for it not just making your site fly at flick of switch because you can really make some improvements and set the right settings. This was my site before the plugin and trust me, it was quite a journey to get it to where it is now: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100601_2T4/

Chris Olbekson
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

Your site has over 100 XHTML Validation errors 12 external style sheets and 17 external js files. You don't have expires headers or html minify turned on and your using disk for database and object caching which is not recommended anywhere in the plugin.

Take Fredrick's advice he knows what he is talking about.

djmorrisinc
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

A lot of these issues can be resolved through proper configuration, but it seems like your site relies a lot on third party sites, which is never a good thing. Have you tried using the help wizard in the minify section? Here are some of the issues I personally think you need to address, but wtf do I know :).

Details:

Enable browser caching of static assets:

Cache score : 37

Use one CDN for all static assets:

12 CDN's used:
http://www.google.com
w.sharethis.com
http://www.google-analytics.com
http://www.feedburner.com
feeds.feedburner.com
connect.facebook.net
static.woopra.com
static.ak.fbcdn.net
s.ytimg.com
i1.ytimg.com
profile.ak.fbcdn.net
http://www.googleadservices.com

CDN score (static objects) : 41
CDN score (one CDN) : 0

Combine static CSS and JS files:

Combine score : 0

GZIP encode all appropriate text assets (text responses > 1400 bytes):

GZIP score : 68
399.0 KB total in compressible text, target size = 271.7 KB - potential savings = 127.3 KB

Compress Images:

Image Compression score : 61
387.8 KB total in images, target size = 238.6 KB - potential savings = 149.2 KB

Frederick Townes
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

@jonmrich have you moved forward with configuring your settings properly?

jonmrich
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

Hello all. Thanks for all the advice. Just to be clear...two things: first, I know my site is far from ideally coded, so a lot of this rests on me to fix at a higher level. Second, I think the plugin is great, but perhaps I expected too much (and I know I didn't use it right in the beginning).

First, thanks @djmorrisinc, I never saw the help wizard in the minify section. Again...user error. Just tried it out and on Yslow went from a 55 to 70 with that one tweak!

I still have an issue with having no expires on a lot of content (mainly images). I've set expirations for everything in the browser cache section, but that doesn't seem to do anything. Should I be doing something different?

Last, I was using Cloudfront for nearly everything, but mostly images, but had to turn it off. I found that in IE every image was fine, but in Chrome and Safari some images were missing. There was a box outline where the image should be and when you click on it, the correct image opens in a new tab (so the URL is correct), but for some reason these browsers don't render the image. I'd say it happens with 1 in 20 images and I can't figure out any pattern. Some are old images that I had in place before the plugin and some are new that I've added since. Again, everything is correctly on the cloudfront CDN and so are URLs, but it's not rendering correctly in those two browsers. Any thoughts?

Thanks to everyone for their help. Still a lot more work for me to do, but this plugin and all of your help have done a ton.

JMR

jonmrich
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

Okay, a bit more on the issue with images. Turns out that this is a problem in Chrome and FF. I figured out that this could be fixed by resaving the post with the missing image. In other words, all I did to correct was go to the post where the picture was missing, hit "update" and then the page was fine. What's causing this? Any way to avoid in the future?

Thanks.

Frederick Townes
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

It seems like thumbnails are not uploaded to the CDN? So go to CDN settings tab and add that path to the custom file paths field, save settings then export to CDN again. If those are created often you can enable auto-upload option to push those to the CDN frequently.

jonmrich
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

I'll give that a try. I had auto-upload option on. I'll try to upload everything else again.

Also...

I still have an issue with having no expires on a lot of content (mainly images). I've set expirations for everything in the browser cache section, but that doesn't seem to do anything. Should I be doing something different?

EDIT: Upon further inspection, now it looks like the ones that aren't expiring are theme files (images). Does this plug in add expires to these too?

And...(sorry)...

Can the plugin to gzip for plugin files (css)? Seems like some aren't.

Thanks for all your help.

efikim
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

The current released version of W3TC sets the expiry as an offset from the last modified date, rather than from the accessed date, so if the images are 'old' then the expiry time may have already expired. (Thsi has been discussed in a couple of other posts - one being http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-w3-total-cache-expiry-header-set-incorrectly - Frederick plans to make the choice between modified and accessed dates an option in a future version

Frederick Townes
Member
Posted 1 year ago #

@efikim is correct.

Can the plugin to gzip for plugin files (css)? Seems like some aren't

Only if you minify them and have compression enabled in browser cache settings tab.

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W3 Total Cache High hopes, but no effect (14 posts)

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W3 Total Cache
High hopes, but no effect (14 posts)