W3 Total Cache

December 26, 2009 – 5:29 PM

I’m trying out a new caching plugin for WordPress called W3 Total Cache and so far I am very impressed.  PC Sympathy is now running it and using Amazon Cloudfront as the CDN.  I see a tremendous improvement over the other caching plugins.  Here’s some bullet points for W3 Total Cache from their website:

Benefits:

• At least 10x improvement in site performance (when fully configured: Grade A in YSlow or great Google Page Speed Improvements)
• “Instant” second page views (browser caching after first page view)
• Reduced page load time: increased visitor time on site (visitors view more pages)
• Optimized progressive render (pages appear to load instantly)
• Improved web server performance (easily sustain high traffic spikes)
• Up to 80% Bandwidth savings via Minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and RSS feeds

Features:

• Compatible with shared hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated servers / clusters
• Transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration with Media Library, theme files and WordPress itself
• Caching of (minified and compressed) pages and posts in memory or on disk
• Caching of (minified and compressed) CSS and JavaScript in memory, on disk or on CDN
• Caching of RSS (comments, page and site) feeds in memory or on disk
• Caching of search results pages (i.e. URIs with query string variables) in memory or on disk
• Caching of database objects in memory
• Minification of posts and pages and RSS feeds
• Minification (combine and remove comments / white space) of inline, embedded or 3rd party JavaScript (with automated updates)
• Minification (combine and remove comments / white space) of inline, embedded or 3rd party CSS (with automated updates)
• Browser caching of CSS, JavaScript and HTML using future expire headers and entity tags (ETag)
• JavaScript grouping by template (home page, post page etc) with embed location management
• Non-blocking JavaScript embedding
• Import post attachments directly into the Media Library (and CDN)

Again, so far so good.  But I would like to give it a full month and then check some server stats.