Support » Plugin: W3 Total Cache » GWT Site Performance Slower After W3 Total Cache

  • I finally recently started using W3C Total Cache. It installed perfectly, I got all of my settings where I wanted them, and I setup a CDN using RackSpace for the majority of CSS, JS, and image files. After getting everything going, our Google Page Speed score has increased and our YSlow grade has increased. These both seem like solid improvements.

    Before using W3 Total Cache, the Labs->Site Performance area in Google Webmaster Tools was reporting that the average pages on our site take 6.1 seconds to load, which was quite a bit slower than most other sites, it said. Now, after starting to use W3 Total Cache and letting everything settle in, Google Webmaster Tools is reporting the average pages on our site take 6.5 seconds to load.

    Nothing else has changed except that we started using W3 Total Cache. I don’t understand how with all of the improvements we’ve made, the page load time has increased. It seems pointless as I figured we’d greatly increase this number. Any suggestions or thoughts here?

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Thread Starter indieangler

    (@indieangler)

    Now GWT is showing 9.9 seconds, ridiculous. Anyone have any thoughts?

    Did you go “all in” with the settings? Have you tried turning some of them off?

    I found out that the JS/CSS minify+combine didn’t actually speed up a site on my host. The individual small files download quicker, possibly because there’s no PHP hit on them. Google CDN also seems pretty slow on some cases. That might be because of my location in Southern Finland – I’m closer to the original server than whatever Google might currently have.

    (After much digging I found out that the page I was trying to speed up was slow because of a DNS error.)

    Good old Yslow is your friend. If you haven’t already, also try Pingdom’s Page load test and Webpagetest:
    http://tools.pingdom.com/
    http://www.webpagetest.org/

    GWT score is based on google toolbar user data. You should use webpagetest.org to make sure your site is fully tuned and go from there.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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