Get Your Blog To Load Faster With W3-Total-Cache

Written by Andrew Rondeau in search engine optimization advice | 43 Awesome Comments - Add Yours?

fast blogToday I uninstalled WP-Super-Cache and installed W3-Total-Cache.

Why?

I want my blog to load as fast as possible and I’ve been hearing some great positive comments about W3-Super-Cache.

I don’t want people to close my site because it loads too slowly.

Plus Google are now saying they are using site speed to help determine search rankings. Read more here:

Google incorporating site speed in search rankings

A good blogging friend, Antti, has been writing a series of blog posts to help speed up your WordPress blog.

Some of what Antti detailed I was already doing but I had not installed W3-Total-Cache and today I did.

The results: my blog home page now loads 25% faster.

Not bad, eh?

If you want to speed up your blog, check out Antti’s series. It will take you about one hour to make the changes required:

WordPress Speed Challenge – Make your WordPress blog faster!

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43 Responses to Get Your Blog To Load Faster With W3-Total-Cache
  1. Antti Kokkonen

    Thanks Andrew for the shout out, and I’m happy to hear that you got good results with W3 Total Cache… WP Super Cache has been the “industry standard” for WordPress bloggers when looking for cache solution, so it’s time to start moving to the better option :)

    I checked your blog a bit, and I see a common problem that’s also the hardest to optimize – a lot of stuff to be loaded: This blogs front page has 71 components (using tools.pingdom.com) vs my blogs 4 components. I have chosen minimalistic approach, because it’s the best option for fast loading…

    In many blogs, there’s loads of external scripts (e.g. widgets) and loads of images. It takes a lot of work to load all those, and it’s hard to combine all of them into less files. It can be done, but it’s hard. Cleaning stuff will speed up blog the most, but it’s also the hardest, because no-one can tell you what to remove, you have to know what matters and what doesn’t.
    .-= Antti Kokkonen´s last blog ..Install and Configure W3 Total Cache in 7 Easy Steps =-.

    Reply
  2. AJ from Best Wordpress Themes

    Caching is a must for any WordPress powered blog. Although I think people need to focus first on limiting all the scripts and widgets they add to their site. Thinks like tweetmeme can really slow down your site a lot.

    Reply
    • Andrew from Blogging Advice
      Twitter:

      AJ,

      Your are right but it is getting the balance between making it easier for your visitors to navigate and promote vs them not being ‘allowed’ to do too much!

      Andrew
      .-= Andrew @ Blogging Advice´s last blog ..Get Your Blog To Load Faster With W3-Total-Cache =-.

      Reply
      • AJ from Best Wordpress Themes

        And this is always going to be the fight…Speed vs. User Experience.

        You need a fast site to provide a good user experience. But you also need cool features.

        Like when you are designing your site…do you want an awesome background that will “wow” your visitors or a solid color that will load 1,000x faster.

        But you are right…it always comes down to what is best for the user. :)
        .-= AJ@Best WordPress Themes´s last blog ..Rejuvenate WordPress Theme =-.

        Reply
    • Antti Kokkonen

      There’s a way to implement scripts like Tweetmeme in “asynchronous” way using some clever JavaScripting, but you are right, it’s the bloggers’ love for all cool widgets that slows blogs the most
      .-= Antti Kokkonen´s last blog ..WordPress Speed Challenge – Make your WordPress blog faster! =-.

      Reply
    • Gerlaine Talk

      I just deactivated my tweepmeme. I was not terribly satisfied with it. I also downloaded this w3 total cache at the same time. My blog is loading a lot faster. Going to look at other ways to help people “share” my blogs better.

      Thanx for the tip.
      .-= Gerlaine Talk´s last blog ..I’m Good 30 Day MCC =-.

      Reply
      • AJ from Best Wordpress Themes

        I am not trying to get links here, so i will remove the “http.www.”

        But anyway, Gerlaine, I recently wrote a post with 10 ways to speed up wordpress if you want to check it out…It may help you speed it up a bit more.

        wpexplorer.com/10-ways-to-speed-up-wordpress.html
        .-= AJ@Best WordPress Themes´s last blog ..Morning After WordPress Theme =-.

        Reply
  3. Paul Novak

    While I’m always up for anything that’ll speed up my load times, I’m host disadvantaged. Meaning, my host now officially sucks! I’m willing to give W3-Total-Cache a try though and see if it has any effect. I have a couple good spider simulators that should give a pretty accurate report of load times.
    .-= Paul Novak´s last blog ..Critical Writing- Don’t Believe Everything You Read =-.

    Reply
  4. Vipin from Romantic SMS

    W3-Total-Cache is an ultimate tool to load your pages faster, it saves your money also as you can stay on shared hosting yet also your blog can serve huge amounts of traffic without compromising the performance. :)
    .-= Vipin@Romantic SMS´s last blog ..Romantic SMS 08-07-10 =-.

    Reply
  5. Aaron

    Andrew, congrats on switching to W3TC. I’ve converted all my blogs and my clients blogs to using it.

    Regarding widgets, there are some tricks you can use to keep them from loading until the mouse is moved, which can really help you in regards to initial load time (aka google). Look up jQuery and mousemove and you can figure out how to do it, or find an example somewhere. If you want some tips, just email me and I will show you how I’ve managed to go from 4.2s load time to 1.2s load time according to webmaster tools by using this method.
    .-= Aaron´s last blog ..Free Blogs =-.

    Reply
    • Andrew from Blogging Advice
      Twitter:

      Aaron,

      Sounds great but complicated – is it?

      Andrew
      .-= Andrew @ Blogging Advice´s last blog ..Blogging Advice- Do You Blog For Yourself Or Your Customers =-.

      Reply
      • Aaron

        It involves a little bit of jQuery and Javascript magic, but it’s not too complicated if you know some JS. Here is a simple example:

        ————

        var moved = false;
        function mousemoveJS()
        {
        $(document).mousemove(mousemoveJS_footer);
        }

        function mousemoveJS_footer()
        {
        if (moved == false)
        {
        moved = true;
        $(document).unbind(‘mousemove’, mousemoveJS_footer);
        }

        // load JS here following this example, just change e.src
        (function() {
        var e = document.createElement(‘script’);
        e.type = ‘text/javascript’;
        e.async = true;
        e.src = document.location.protocol + ‘//www.google.com/buzz/api/button.js’;
        var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0];
        s.parentNode.insertBefore(e, s);
        }());

        $(‘#feedbackl’).show(); // show an element that is display:none by default
        }

        $(document).ready(function() {
        try { mousemoveJS(); } catch(e) {}
        });

        ——
        Hope it wasn’t too confusing.. It’s not for everybody, but if you can figure out what was happening in the code above, it may help your load times a lot. You can only use it with scripts that do NOT perform document.write, as those have to be loaded inline and not in the header or footer.
        .-= Aaron´s last blog ..Free Blogs =-.

        Reply
  6. Walter

    This is a valuable information Andrew. I will heed your advice on this and I hope it will work fine on my site. :-)

    Reply
  7. Ching Ya

    Thanks so much for the tip, I have yet to know about W3 Total Cache so your review really struck a warning to me, especially I have lots of images to load on my blog. Will try it, hopefully it’ll compatible with other existing plugins.

    @wchingya
    Social/Blogging Tracker
    .-= Ching Ya´s last blog ..Tweet Branding- Scheduling and Reply Campaigns with MarketMe Tweet V2 =-.

    Reply
  8. Blog Angel a.k.a. Joella

    I’ve had a lot of problems with WP caching plugins not playing nice with others. I had to give up a lot of blog functionality because they crashed my site and resulted more than onece in the white screen of death.

    I did one thing that cut my blog loading time by 50% – I enabled Zlib compression. One line of code in my blog head and poof instant massive improvement.

    Struggled for days with caching plugins. Some lessons you learn the hard way. But now all the plugins I need and want do what they are suppose to without conflict. Win win.
    .-= Blog Angel a.k.a. Joella´s last blog ..iPad Giveaway Contest Win An iPad =-.

    Reply
    • Andrew from Blogging Guide
      Twitter:

      Blog Angel,

      Yeah – I’ve had a few problems with caching plugins as well.

      Had very few with this one, though.

      I changed one thing at a time and tested each time I made a change – so then I knew exactly what caused the problem and could easily rectify.

      Andrew
      .-= Andrew @ Blogging Guide´s last blog ..A Thank You Goes A Long Way =-.

      Reply
  9. Jason from Affiliate Marketing Forum

    I’ve just started exploring WP a month ago, and I found it really easy to setup, plus I really thought that it’s innate with WP to have faster load time than other CMS. I’m only using wp widget cache at the moment (with my personal blog), though I realized that perhaps I need w3 total cache as well, just in case, even there are no problems with my blog’s load time. I’ve been reading a lot about faster load times recently (from gabe young and udegbunam), but this one is very simple and useful. Thanks for the tip Andrew :)

    Reply
  10. Patrick from Reverse Phone Lookup

    Yeah!I read that post on Matt Cutts blog and I also read his interview with WebProNews in which he said that in the times to come Site speed will be taken into account in Search engine rankings but it will not play a major role.Its will just be a small part of Google’s mammoth Search engine ranking algorithm.So if all other ranking factors are at place then you can do without site speed.The flash based websites were said to suffer the most.

    W3-Total-Cache will help but if you follow other simple tips like packing your Java scripts in .js file,Minimizing Flash Usage,not using large high resolution images in your blog then you can improve your web page loading speed considerably.
    .-= Patrick@Reverse Phone Lookup´s last blog ..How to Trace Mobile Phone number in USA Canada and Caribbean Islands =-.

    Reply
  11. Gerlaine Talk

    This certainly does make my site load a lot faster. Thanks Andrew! You always bring me the best stuff!
    .-= Gerlaine Talk´s last blog ..I’m Good 30 Day MCC =-.

    Reply
  12. Dev | Technshare

    Hey Andrew,

    Nice review man. I’m already using w3 total cache and it’s really an awesome plugin.

    Anyways, Thanks for the review.

    ~Dev
    .-= Dev | Technshare´s last blog ..6 Top Benefits Of Press Release And How It Can Improve Your Internet Business =-.

    Reply
  13. Diego

    W3 total cache is indeed a great plugin, I also use that one. People have a tendency to forget about the importance of loading speed because we as developers usually have a high speed connection. But there are still around 10% of internet users on 56k modems. In the US it’s around 5% but in the rest of the world is higher. So if your site is loading too slow, you can be loosing 10% of your income, that’s quite bad I think.

    Reply
  14. Kok Siong from Cancer Research

    Yes Andrew! The W3 Total Cache is much faster than the WP Super Cache. I’m using it too. However, it is not easy to be set up. If you manage to set up it, you will see your blog load faster than before. Thanks for your sharing Andrew! :)
    .-= Kok Siong @ Cancer Research´s last blog ..Sunday Drama Series- Mom of a Child with Down Syndrome PART 1 =-.

    Reply
  15. Luqman from Domain name registration

    This is the first time am hearing about W3-total-cache, I am going to try it out and see how fast my blog will be with it.

    Reply
  16. Mario

    Thanks for sharing Andrew

    I’m already using this plugin and it’s really awesome

    Reply
  17. jennifer

    Great I will definitely use this for my new self hosted wordpress blog. One more aspect i have to check is as my blog has lots of images and those are too heavy and even many widgets and plugin so finally i have to sort out those plugins and widgets too. Do you know any general widgets and plugins which will not suck your bandwidth and any ideas for too many and too larget images. Although having these heavy images there is one reason of quality so i can’t compensate quality.
    jennifer recently posted..Top Ten Most Famous Cartoon AnimalsMy Profile

    Reply
  18. ThatsBlog.com

    Thanks for your submission to the Eighty Fourth edition of the Blog Carnival: Blogging. Your post has been accepted and its live:

    http://thatsblog.com/blog-carnival-blogging/blog-carnival-blogging-eighty-fourth-edition

    -ThatsBlog.com

    Reply
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