Achieve Ultimate WordPress Performance with W3 Total Cache Pro

We may be biased, but here at BoldGrid we believe that W3 Total Cache is the best WordPress caching plugin to speed up WordPress. With plenty of free features like browser caching, page cache and lazy loading, you can get your site performing super fast with just a few tweaks.

W3 Total Cache is unique from other WordPress caching plugins because it has the features needed to grow with your business. Initially, the community, or free version can be enough for smaller sites and options like Page Cache and lazy loading are all you need. As your user base grows, caching your website can become more complex to ensure everything behaves accordingly and you maintain the best user experience. The larger your WordPress website grows, the more meaningful W3TC’s Pro Features will become to you.

This article will cover the Features in the premium version, give an overview of what they are and the benefits your website loading times will see when leveraging them. With W3 Total Cache, you are guaranteed to get superior performance from your WordPress website.

W3 Total Cache Pro Features

Full Site Delivery via CDN

With full site delivery, your visitors will get the fastest possible response times for all your website content including HTML, media, CSS and JavaScript. When hosting both your website and DNS with your provider, every component of your website will be delivered using a worldwide network of servers. This results in better performance, especially when used with other features such as Browser Cache, Minification, Fragment caching, and lazy loading.

The following CDN Types are supported by W3 Total Cache for both Objects and Full Site Delivery:

• Origin Pull / Mirror:
  • Akamai
  • Amazon CloudFront
  • Contendo
  • Generic Mirror
  • Highwinds
  • LimeLight
  • MaxCDN
  • Rackspace CDN
  • StackPath (Recommended)
  • EdgeCast
• Origin Push:
  • Amazon CloudFront Over S3
  • Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
  • S3 Compatible Object Storage
  • Google Drive
  • Microsoft Azure Storage
  • Rackspace Cloud Files
  • Self-hosted / FTP Upload

For any assistance with configuring your Full Site CDN, we offer Pro Support from directly within your WordPress Dashboard. Visit Performance → Support to view our available options.

Fragment Cache

Fragment caching extends the core functionality of WordPress by allowing you to enable caching policies on groups of objects that are cached. The benefit of this approach is not only that capabilities in themes and plugins can be optimized to use caching to save resources and reduce response times, but caching methods like Memcached or Redis can be used to scale. Instructions for use are available in the FAQ under the help menu or you can contact support for premium services to help improve website performance.

Delay Scripts

This feature helps improve your website’s performance by delaying the loading of JavaScript resources, thereby eliminating render-blocking issues and boosting your Google PageSpeed scores.

Preload Requests

This feature helps improve your website’s performance by adding browser “hint” link tags to the HTML head for dns-prefetch, preconnect, and preload.

• DNS prefetching is a technique that resolves domain names (like example.com) into IP addresses before the user clicks a link, speeding up the process of loading a page.
• Preconnecting establishes a connection to a server before a resource is needed, reducing latency when the resource is actually requested.
• Preloading instructs the browser to fetch and cache a resource (like an image or script) in the background, so it’s readily available when needed.

Rest API Caching

If you use WordPress as a backend for integrations, API caching may be for you. Similar to page caching, repeat requests will benefit will have significantly lower response times and consume fewer resources to deliver.

Eliminate Render Blocking CSS

• Render blocking CSS delays a webpage from being visible in a timely manner.
• Every one of your css files delays your page from rendering.
• The bigger your css, the longer the page takes to load.
• The more css files you have, the longer the page takes to load.

Remove CSS/JS

This feature helps improve your website’s performance by removing HTML script/link tags either on the homepage or on specified pages. By doing so, this can be used to eliminate unused CSS/JS anywhere on the site which translates to better Google PageSpeed scores.

Extension Framework

Add accelerated mobile pages (AMP) support. Improve the performance of your Genesis, WPML-powered site, and much more. The following Pro Extensions are available after upgrading.

Genesis Framework by StudioPress Acceleration

• Increase the performance of WordPress websites powered by the Genesis Theme Framework by up to 60%.

WPML Extension

• Improve the caching performance of websites localized by WPML.
• Localization is a type of personalization that makes websites more difficult to scale. This extension reduces the response time of websites localized by WPML.

Caching Statistics

Statistics provide transparency into the behavior of your caching performance. Without statistics, it’s challenging to identify opportunities for improvement or ensure operations are working as expected consistently. Metrics like cache sizes, object lifetimes, hit vs miss ratio, etc across every caching method configured in your settings.

• An at-a-glance version of your statistics is available directly on your Performance Dashboard, however, the comprehensive suite of statistics are available on the Statistics screen. Web server logs created by Nginx or Apache can be analyzed if accessible.
• Use the caching statistics to compare the performance of different configurations like caching methods, object lifetimes and so on.
• Contact support for any help optimizing performance metrics or troubleshooting.

Purge Logs

Purge Logs provide information on when your cache has been purged and what triggered it.

• If you are troubleshooting a complex issue in which you are not sure why your cache is being cleared, Purge Logs can tell you why

Now that you have more information about what is possible with W3 Total Cache Pro, you may want to upgrade now, or view the complete W3 Total Cache Documentation to learn more about the possibilities with both the Community and Pro versions.

Interested in having us help optimize your WordPress website further? Try our Premium Services located in your WordPress Dashboard by visiting Performance → Support. Thanks for reading!