W3 Total Cache?

[RavenManiac]

One of my clients is using iPage to host their website. When I went to migrate the website from my development server to iPage I noticed that iPage automatically installs several plugins. Most are unnecessary, but one one of them caught my attention. It's called W3 Total Cache. What's the Genesis community consensus on this plugin?

[coralseait]

W3TC is a very powerful, but very misunderstood plugin. You can greatly speed up a site or slow it down depending on what you do with W3TC; most people don't take the time to really understand the intricacies of every setting and what they truly mean. And to gain the most from W3TC you must dive deep into it. It is a good plugin, but difficult for non technical people to understand.

The real answer depends mostly on the specific host and what features they support. Do they offer memcache, apc/opcache, etc and what type of disk infrastructure? These will have the most impact to how well W3TC will function.

We are actually slowly moving away from W3TC; as although we love it, our preferred hosting stack has evolved to nginx with memory base full page cache and HHVM. Soon we'll be using nginx with redis in memory for everything and W3TC will be reserved for those on shared hosting where, because we know the config of W3TC to a tee and can squeeze the most out of limited resources, we'll keep it for those clients that elect shared hosts.

Given a choice we'd rather host on our VPSs with nginx, hhvm / php-fpm fall back and redis (or memcached) leaving caching / performance at the httpd and hhvm/fcgi layer rather than within WordPress. Basically it moves performance optimisation closer to the services than the application and you get far, far more bang for the buck that way.

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Coral Sea IT

[Author]

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