Best caching plugin I could find

Spent the last several weeks testing out every free caching plugin with a decent rating in an attempt to find one that has the best results “out of the box,” and W3 Total Cache takes the cake. It is a little more complex to set up than others, but the level of control you do have – even in the free version – is wonderful. Enabling any minify settings caused me a significant decrease in speed, but the general speed increase without that option has still been substantial. My only real quibble is that once I installed this, the header banner images on each page of my site started loading in with a quick zoom in/out animation. Simple enough to fix with a manual application of a different, less visually obtrusive animation, but still strange and a difficult problem to track down setting-by-setting. But even then after enabling and disabling every available option, the only thing that fixed it was disabling the plugin altogether, but I can live with alternative image animations for now.

All in all, a pretty solid caching plugin. Do take the time to go through each setting while wiping the caches and reloading a test page to figure out which setting work best for you. It’s definitely time-consuming, but totally worth it once you’re dialed-in.