Does your WordPress website take forever to load? Do you want to increase the speed of your website? If you answered yes to either of those questions then you’re in the same boat as most website owners. Read on to find answers to your problem.
Apart from using a solid hosting provider and proper maintenance, there are other things you can do to make your website faster. Using a reliable cache system and a Content Delivery Network (CDN) are two of the most popular options.
Today, I will discuss about how to install and setup W3 Total Cache and MaxCDN on your WordPress website. It’s going to be a long read, so grab your cup of coffee and sit tight. Here we go.
W3 Total Cache
If you don’t know already, W3 Total Cache is one of the most popular performance optimization solutions for WordPress. It reduces the download time for your visitors by caching in every page of your website. Caching is just a fancy word for "saving" a file. Here’s how it works.
Normally, every page visits results in WordPress loading information from the database and displaying it for the visitor. This is a dynamic process. When a page is cached, it means that a static copy of the page is created. Now when a visitor visits that page, WordPress shows the static copy and doesn’t need to query the database. This can save a lot of time and stress on the your server.
Now back to W3 Total Cache.
If you have another caching plugin installed, please uninstall it before using W3 Total Cache.
Next, download and install the plugin. Once you activate it, you will find a new menu titled "Performance" in the dashboard.
Setting up W3 Total Cache
Being a very powerful and robust plugin, W3 Total Cache comes with a long list of options. Since this is just a primer for beginners, I will limit my discussion to the settings that will give you the most bang for your buck. If you are confident enough, you can set other options as well.
General Settings
This is the section where you set the various options for the plugin.
Page Cache
The first section of General Settings is Page Cache. Turning this on will create a cached copy for every page that is loaded on your site. Therefore, the contents of the pages will load much fast from the next time. Enabling this will provide a huge boost to your average site loading time.
As most of you will be using shared hosting plans, the ideal page cache method for you will be Disk: Enhanced, which is the default choice.
The next three sections (Minify, Database Cache and Object Cache) are not supported by all servers. Therefore, we will skip them for the moment and move on.
Browser Cache
Whenever a visitor visits your website, the CSS, JS and image files are saved in a temporary folder to provide a seamless browsing experience throughout the site. Enabling Browser Cache will keep the temporary folder for a longer period of time.
Next, go to Performance > Browser Cache to set up a few more things. Check all the options on that page except 404, object caching and cache header.
CDN
Next, go to Performance > CDN. CDN is the acronym for Content Delivery Network, which uses multiple cloud servers to deliver your site content. W3 Total Cache supports multiple CDN’s including MaxCDN, Amazon Cloud Front, Amazon S3 and more.
In this article we will talk about MaxCDN here. After signing up with MaxCDN, log in and create a Pull Zone. To do that, go to Manage Zones > Create Pull Zone. On the following screen, provide the necessary details. Then, click ‘Create’ and a pull zone will be created for you.
Next, we have to create content zones. This could be done from the MaxCDN dashboard. After the content zones, we will need CNAME records. This will be done in your cPanel dashboard. If you want a step by step guide, MaxCDN has a very detailed setup guide (see here) for you. You can also check out the FAQ section of MaxCDN (here).
Now that we have covered the major section of W3 Total Cache, let us get back to the ones we skipped earlier.
Minify
Minify will help you in reducing the size of your static files. It does that by removing all the white space from CSS, JS and HTML files and combining them where possible.
Be careful with this setting because sometimes the minifying process could actually slow down your site if your server isn’t set up properly and break some WordPress themes.
You’ve been warned.
Database Caching
Enabling this feature will cache the SQL queries, thereby reducing server loads. However, this feature works best for large sites which make a lot of SQL requests. For smaller sites, some hosting companies offer an in-house alternative. Contact with your hosting provider about this feature and find out which option will work best for you.
Object Caching
Object Caching works best for large, dynamic websites. If your website generates large database queries, this will be useful for you. As that is unlikely for most of the beginners, you can safely leave this feature for now.
At the end of the General Settings are the Import/Export Settings. This section will allow you to export your changes and import the settings from another website. There is also a reset button for reverting back to the default settings.
I can go on and on with other available settings and options of W3 Total Cache, but this post is targeted towards beginners only. So, I will stop here and let you experiment with the available options.
If you have any questions about the above discussion, please leave a comment below. I will try my best to help you figure it out!