In my recent question of looking for best ways to optimize my wordpress blog, as well as other wordpress based websites, I’m managing I’ve come across a great plugin called W3 Total Cache or W3TC as it’s widely known among wordpress geeks.
The full caching wordpress solution in face of W3TC is already actively deployed among many major wordpress powered websites, to name a few:
stevesouders.com, mattcutts.com, mashable.com
I gave a try W3 Total Cache and was amazed about the rich caching functionality it provides. Having the W3TC plugin installed adds a whole menu on the left wordpress admin panel reading Performance , clicking on it shows a menu with thorough choices on numerous things which deal with the running of wordpress on the server.
Here is a screenshot on the menus W3 Total Cache provides:
The plugin has support for html caching, sql caching, CDN, CSS and Javascript compress & minify etc.
To test the plugin adequately I disabled HyperCache and Db Cache . My observations is that with W3TC wordpress renders php and the overall user experience and download times in wordpress are better. Therefore I’ll probably use only W3 Total Cache as a cacher for wordpress installs.
Besides that I had some issues on some wordpress based websites with the Db Cache SQL caching.
On these websites after enabling Db Cache, suddenly page edditing of the created existing pages started returning empty pages. This could be due to the fact that these wordpress based websites was customly tailered and many code was wiped out, however it could also be a Db Cache bug. So to conclude W3TC is the perfect solution for wordpress caching 😉