Configuring Wordpress W3 Total Cache

Go to “plugins” then the “add new” subheading

Type “W3 Total Cache” in the “Search Plugins” field and press enter.

Find the correct plugin and install

W3 Total Cache will install, then click activate

Possible Issues• It’s possible that a warning box about wp-content needing to be 777 or 755. In

order to remedy this you must change permissions, which must be done in the cpanel of your server. Our server is bluehost, so here is an example.

Open File Manager

Select the Document Root for Your Site

Right Click wp-content and select change permissions

Change permissions to whatever is required: either 777 or 775. If you must change to 777, then change back to 775 after install is complete.

Go to the Performance menu on the sidebar admin panel

Hover over Performance and go to General Settings

Once in the General Settings make sure Preview Mode is Disabled. This option will typically be at the top of the screen here.

Ensure that the following boxes are checked (enabled): Page Cache, Object Cache, and Browser Cache

Do not worry about the other settings right now

Go to either the sidebar admin panel or the top of the W3 page and go to Page Cache and the General section

Ensure the following options are enabled: “Cache Feeds: site, categories, tags, comments”, “Cache SSL (https) requests”, “Cache requests only for [your sitename] hostname”, and “Don’t cache pages for logged in users”

Next is the Cache Preload section under General. This is for priming or preloading the most important pages.

Check the box to enable then change “Update Interval” to 900 and “Pages Per Interval” to 10. Also add your sitemap which should be, “[your sitename]/sitemap.xml”

Setting the Garbage Collection Interval depends on the amount of traffic to your site. The busier the site the lower the interval. We’re going to use the default 3600

It is important to clear cache or you may run out of disk space. That’s the importance of setting this interval correctly.

Now go to Browser Cache on the sidebar admin panel

Check the following options: ”, “Set Last-Modified Header”, “Set Expires Header”, “Set Cache Control Header”, “Set Entity Tag (eTag)”, “Set W3 Total Cache Header”, “Enable HTTP (gzip) Compression”, “Prevent Caching of Objects After Setting Change”

Set Expires Header at the following: CSS & JS(31536000) which is a year, HTML & XML(3600) which is an hour, Media & Other Files(31536000) which is a year.

Set Cache Control Header. A good default is:“cache with max-age (“max-age=EXPIRES_SECONDS, public, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate”)

Set Cache Control Header for each of the 3 categories: CSS & JS, HTML & XML, and Media & Other Files

This guide didn’t touch on every aspect of W3 Total Cache but these settings will help to greatly increase the speed of your site and pages.