Using W3 Total Cache on Cloud Sites

Posted on March 2, 2017 by David Singer | Updated: February 19, 2021

Category: Common Fixes | Tags: Browser Caching, Caching, Cloud Sites, WordPress

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Cloud Sites has a unique infrastructure setup that requires specific settings for the page cache to provide the best experience for a given site. Please use these settings when you are configuring W3 Total Cache instead of any other settings. These directions will provide an optimized configuration for W3 Total Cache on the Cloud Sites platform. This article assumes you have already installed the W3 Total Cache plugin.

Once you’ve installed W3 Total Cache, the left navigation menu in your WordPress dashboard will have a new option: Performance. This is where you’ll make changes to your W3 Total Cache setup.

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As you change these settings, make sure to click Save all settings so you don’t lose your configurations!

Configure W3 Total Cache

General Settings

In the General Settings section of W3 Total Cache, make sure your settings follow this plan:

Page Cache

Page Cache: Enable
Page Cache Method: Disk: Basic
Click Save all settings.

Minify

Minify: Enable
Minify mode: Manual
Minify cache method: Disk
Click Save all settings.

Do not enable Database cache or Object cache.

Browser Cache

Browser cache: Enable
Click Save all settings.

Miscellaneous

Select Verify rewrite rules.
Make sure Enable file locking is not selected.

You can leave all other settings at their default values. Click Save all settings.

Page Cache

In the left navigation menu, click on Page Cache.

General

Select Cache front page.
Select Cache feeds.
Select Cache SSL requests.
Select Cache URIs with query string variables.
Do not select Cache 404 (not found) pages.
Select Don’t cache pages for logged in users.
Click Save all settings.

Cache Preload

Select Automatically prime the page cache.
Select an Update interval. Values here affect the time before a page is re-cached. 86400 seconds equals 24 hours, 604800 seconds equals one week, etc.

Leave all other settings at their default values. Click Save all settings.

Minify

In the left navigation menu, click on Minify.

General

Select the Rewrite URL structure.
Click Save all settings.

HTML & XML

In the HTML and XML section, select the following checkboxes:

Enable Inline CSS minification
Inline JS minification
Don’t minify feeds
Click Save all settings.

JS minify settings: Select Enable.

CSS minify settings: Select Enable.

Click Save all settings.

Browser Cache

In the menu, click Browser Cache. Set the following options and then click Save all settings:

General

Select the following checkboxes:

Set Last-Modified header.
Set expires header.
Set cache control header.
Set entity tag (eTag).
Set W3 Total Cache header.
Enable HTTP (gzip) compression.

CSS & JS, HTML & XML, and Media & Other Files

In all three of these sections, select the following checkboxes and options:

Set Last-Modified header.
Set expires header.
Expires header lifetime: Specify 31536000 seconds.
Set cache control header.
Set entity tag (ETag).
Set W3 Total Cache header.
Enable HTTP (gzip) compression.

Pro Tip: Export Your Settings
You can export your settings in W3 Total Cache! This means you can import them to other sites you have to make setup quicker. In the left navigation menu under Performance, click General Settings. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and click Download next to Export configuration.

Once you’ve selected your settings, click on Dashboard in the left navigation menu and select empty all caches. This will cause a new cache to be built. Visit your site to make sure your theme wasn’t affected and that everything else is working as intended. Once you’ve tested, use GTMetrix (or the site you used before) to compare your site’s performance to before you enabled caching.

About the Author: David Singer

I am a g33k, Linux blogger, developer, student, and former Tech Writer for Liquidweb.com. My passion for all things tech drives my hunt for all the coolz. I often need a vacation after I get back from vacation....