Using a caching plugin is the fastest way to improve the performance of your website. Caching plugins improve the user experience by increasing server performance and reducing download times.
There are a lot of caching plugins for WordPress however, not all of them will be compatible with the servers of certain hosting companies and some might not even be compatible with your website.
Here at WPX Hosting, we have tested just about every released plugin on our servers – both free and premium.
And with those results, we recommend W3 Total Cache:
W3 Total Cache improves website performance dramatically by increasing server speed, reducing download times and page weight, and its easy-install process. Improve your readers’ user experience without having to change WordPress, your theme, your plugins, or how you produce your content.
Out of the many plugins that we have tested and compared, W3 Total Cache stood out from the crowd for having the best performance with our pre-configured settings and our server’s configuration.
If you install WordPress from the WPX control panel, you can include W3 Total Cache in the installation with our settings automatically.
WPX pre-configured settings for W3 Total Cache.
You can download these pre-configured (recommended) settings for W3TC from our website. You must be logged in to your WPX account to access the download.
If you still want to use another caching plugin such as WP Rocket or Litespeed Cache plugin, you can also find our pre-configured settings on the download page.
We also have a step-by-step tutorial, with screenshots, for installing and setting up W3 Total Cache with our pre-configured settings. You can follow our guide here.
If you would prefer us to install W3 Total Cache for you, we can do that.
Better yet, if you do not have any caching plugins installed and would like our help, our optimization team can install and configure W3TC for you, making your website run much faster.
Additional settings and tweaks.
Page Cache.
This is one of the most important features of W3TC.
When a visitor arrives on your page, the content is generated and saved as full static HTML pages. These visitors access this HTML file without going through all the PHP processing and MySQL queries needed to generate the content.
Accessing this file decreases load time and makes your site faster for your visitors. It also saves our server a lot of calculating, speeding up the server even more.
The Page Cache is enabled by default with our recommended settings.
Minify
This removes the extra lines and empty spaces from your CSS and Javascript files and combines them into one file! It effectively ‘shrinks’ your site, causing it to load faster by reducing the number of requests for loading a page. The downside is that, if changes are made to your site too often, the Minify file will be updating constantly, slowing down the website overall. We usually do not recommend enabling this option.
If you want to use minify, you can directly download the settings that are configured with the minify option enabled.
Database Cache.
This option caches the SQL queries specifically however, the Database cache option doesn’t work properly for not only this plugin but many others and should always be DISABLED.
Object Cache.
Never use this option on your website, it does not work properly. Disable this option.
Both Database and Object cache are disabled by default with our settings, so you don’t have to adjust that.
Browser Cache.
When a visitor opens your website, the web browser (Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, etc) caches some of the content in a temporary folder to speed uploading it a second time. The Browser Cache option here sets a time limit for the cached files, after which time they are downloaded again. We recommend having this option enabled.
The Browser Cache is enabled by default with our recommended settings.
CDN.
A Content Delivery Network is essentially a server that is located in a more geographically convenient location to benefit your website’s visitors.
Using a CDN makes it easier (and faster) for your visitors to load your website by connecting to the closest local server – our custom CDN is included free for all WPX customers.
Apart from our own, W3 Total Cache can also work with multiple CDN services, like Amazon CloudFront, MaxCDN, Amazon S3, and Rackspace Cloud too. This option is only intended for websites that use a CDN.
If you are using our CDN, you don’t have to set up anything because it works using DNS records that are not set in the caching plugin.
W3 Total Cache may conflict with certain other plugins. If you do experience any trouble with W3TC, please disable the plugin or contact our Support Team.
If you get stuck with anything discussed on this page, please get in touch with WPX Support Team via live chat (use the bottom right-hand widget) and they will respond and help within 30 seconds or less.