Settings to get the most out of W3 Total Cache

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I’m running a dedicated server which hosts one website – our WordPress install.

Currently we’re getting around 400,000 pageviews per month and that will likely rise quickly over the coming month – and hopefully exponentially from there onward 😉

I want to install the W3 Total Cache plugin but after reading a few reviews/support forum posts, I’m concerned that I’ll potentially slow the website down rather than speeding it up.

I’ve installed it, had a quick play, then uninstalled it due to a few minify problems (see #2).

My question, as such, is twofold.

  1. Knowing that my server is a good spec, good network and hosts only this website, are there any options I should consider enabling (or disabling) to get the fastest site-usage possible?
  2. How can I stop the plugin from caching my forums? Simple Press is located at /forums/ and the JS minify breaks a number of features of the forum (TinyMCE editor, profile amendments, etc). I tried adding *forum*\.php to the never cache option, but it killed my site (500 error; had to remove the W3 Cache lines from .htaccess).

Thanks in advance,

3 Answers
3

I’ve seen many more complaints about W3TC than WP Super Cache: WordPress › WP Super Cache « WordPress Plugins. W3TC loads the .htaccess file with many directives and tends to conflict with server side settings.

With Super Cache, try PHP caching and follow the instructions to add an .htaccess file to the cache directory: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/installation/

Disallow /forum caching in WP Super Cache, too.

Minifying js can help with site speed, but not as much as other things, such as server caching and browser caching.

But you also need to work with your dedicated server and correctly configure apache and mysql for high loads. See http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/perf-tuning.html and use mysqltuner to adjust your my.cnf file https://github.com/rackerhacker/MySQLTuner-perl

And clean out your database of post and page revisions (and optimize the database after you do this):

DELETE a,b,c
FROM wp_posts a
LEFT JOIN wp_term_relationships b ON (a.ID = b.object_id)
LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta c ON (a.ID = c.post_id)
WHERE a.post_type="revision"

And then add define ('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 0); to wp-config.php to prevent revisions from being saved again. See http://codex.wordpress.org/Revisions

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