Optimal Settings / Guide / Step by Step

Hello @kingzley

The optimal W3 Total Cache configuration takes into account a number of factors: your theme, your plugins, and the technologies available on the server Since everyone’s site and traffic and theme are different, there is no one size fits all solution.

This service also takes into account the idiosyncrasies of Web Performance Optimization (WPO) in a WordPress context. What this means is that WPO best practices have to be modified for WordPress because of how the application operates. The number of counter-intuitive realities could fill a small book.
This means that the best configuration for your site might not involve enabling minify, database caching, and other things that you might expect. As a matter of fact, it can actually hurt performance by implementing features for the wrong situation.

For starters, you should enable Page Caching and Browser Cache (You can specify which header you want to enable in Performance>Browser Cache. Set for all in General sub-box or individually depending on a type).
Object Cache is not worth using on shared hosting for the same reason as Database Cache, i.e. database is often not the performance bottleneck, but disk input-output operations.
However, like Database Cache, it can be beneficial to use if you are on VPS or a dedicated server, get a lot of traffic, have a lot of comments. Also, if you know that database is the bottleneck of your website performance, then Object Cache (like Database Cache) is beneficial to use. But in this case, it’s recommended to use Memcached or Redis options.
So step by step is enabling the option,i.e. Page Cache, save all settings and purge the cache, test your website performance 2-3 times and check your website for any issues. If no issues are detected move on to Browser Cache etc.
WHere you need to pay more attention is Minify. You can enable minify on auto, save all settings, and purge the cache. Check your website for any errors or breaking and if you encounter any then you should disable the settings in Performance>minify one by one (HTML minify, JS minify, CSS minify) and see which one might be causing the issue.

Also please make sure to check out our documentation for a more detailed explanation of the settings.

I hope this helps!
Thanks!

• This reply was modified 3 years, 5 months ago by Marko Vasiljevic.