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2.9.4

Fix: Output buffering: Reverted to previous output buffering from 2.9.1
Fix: Cloudflare: Token/Key validation
Fix: Prevent mfunc processing bypss by user-agent

2.9.3

Fix: Output buffering: Discard nested OB contents for non-HTML responses (JSON/AJAX) to prevent HTML prepended to JSON output
Fix: Output buffering: Add wp_die_ajax_handler and wp_die_json_handler filters to properly handle AJAX die paths
Fix: Page cache: REST API responses no longer cached due to output buffering pipeline being skipped for non-HTML responses
Fix: Lazy load: Add debounced MutationObserver so images injected by AJAX plugins (e.g. FacetWP) are processed without requiring per-plugin integration; also fix async_head embed method not updating window.w3tc_lazyload to the live LazyLoad instance after initialization

2.9.2

Fix: Patch broken access control for Image Service AJAX operations
Fix: mfunc dynamic output buffering fatal error causing blank pages
Fix: Patch mfunc security vulnerability

2.9.1

Fix: Image Converter: Reset request when status is 404
Fix: Image Converter: Better handling of separate format requests
Fix: Image Converter: UI/JS changes
Fix: Config caching/saving issue

2.9.0

Feature: Next-Gen AVIF image conversion (Pro)
Feature: Added notices for some billing issues
Fix: Bunny CDN purge section
Fix: New Relic API
Fix: Nginx + Memcached Unix socket compatability
Update: Setup Guide Wizard and test improvements
Update: WebP Converter renamed to Image Converter

2.8.15

Fix: Elementor: Carousel lazy load
Fix: Elementor: Cache clearing issues
Fix: Strip all mfunc/mclude tags from REST, feeds, and comments
Fix: Better validation for file directory cleanup
Fix: Bunny CDN: Settings page purge URL section
Fix: Minify: Auto JS: Handle async and defer attributes with values
Fix: Google PageSpeed: Lighthouse changes
Fix: Cloudflare: Undefined array warning
Fix: Rackspace API: Reponse code handling
Fix: License deactivation messages
Update: ChartJS updated to v4.4.1
Enhancement: Added support links

2.8.14

Fix: Better logic for mfunc/mclude processing
Enhancement: More consistent purge notices

2.8.13

Fix: Sanitize mfunc/mclude content in REST calls
Fix: Resolved plugin check errors
Fix: Discard simplexml errors
Fix: Missing text domains
Fix: Ensure array type for filter “w3tc_footer_comment”
Enhancement: Image Converter: WP_Query optimizations

2.8.12

Fix: Lazy load background-image style handing
Fix: Elementor: Also flush Object Cache after Page Cache is flushed
Fix: Canonicalize Cache read path to avoid variants

2.8.11

Fix: Avoid redundant object cache misses in WP 6.4 – 6.7
Fix: Admin bar: Do not show “Purge All Caches Except Cloudflare” if disabled after it was configured
Fix: Error handling for URL downloads
Fix: Menu items for non-administrators
Update: Lazy load library: 12.2.0 => 19.1.2
Enhancement: Use SimpleXMLElement to parse sitemaps and RSS feeds
Enhancement: Flush Elementor cache when all caches are flushed

2.8.10

Fix: Exception handling on activation
Fix: wp_resource_hint handling for arrays
Enhancement: Added X-W3TC-CDN header

2.8.9

Fix: AWS S3 test
Fix: Gravity Forms submissions
Fix: Windows: Configuration import
Fix: Redis: Fix PHP 8 warning for incrBy value not being an integer
Fix: DbCache Cluster: Check for mysqli_result before using the object
Fix: PHP 8 warnings
Fix: Typos on settings pages

2.8.8

Fix: Usage Statistics JavaScript error
Fix: Regex matching for Cookie Cache Groups
Fix: Image Service: Error when get_current_screen() is run before admin_init
Fix: _load_textdomain_just_in_time timing issue for WP-CLI and the Setup Guide
Fix: “DOMDocument::loadHTML(): ID already defined in Entity” errors
Fix: Cloudflare: Saving settings with a value of 0
Update: Removed StackPath, Limelight, and Highwinds CDNs due to end of service

2.8.7

Fix: Exit survey email field submission
Fix: Setup Guide analytics
Update: Allow deleting plugin data when skipping the exit survey on deactivation
Update: aws/aws-php-sns-message-validator (1.9.0 => 1.9.1)

2.8.6

Fix: Error deactivating when selected to delete plugin data
Fix: WP-CLI: Enable Object Cache depending on settings
Fix: Delete all plugin WordPress Options if selected on deactivation
Enhancement: Automatically disable Object Cache after plugin update if set to Disk and display a notice
Enhancement: WP-CLI: Added settings to enable Object and DB Cache for WP-CLI
Enhancement: Added an email field to the exit survey for requesting help
Enhancement: Added a popup modal to accept the risk when enabling Object Cache using Disk

2.8.5

Fix: CDN: Amazon S3 long hostname for default region
Fix: WP-CLI: Error running “wp w3tc alwayscached_*” commands
Fix: WP-CLI: Remove HTML in output
Enhancement: Simplified license messsaging

2.8.4

Fix: Deactivation modal JS error

2.8.3

Fix: HTTP API calls for checking required files
Fix: script-src-elem and style-src-attr security headers
Fix: Handle multiple line srcset attributes for CDN URL replacement
Fix: Fragment Cache: Fixed logic for navigation links
Fix: Check for modified advanced-cache.php dropin/addin file
Fix: Log directory name is made unique
Enhancement: Added an exit survey with option to delete plugin data on deactivation
Enhancement: Fragment Cache: Added notices for configuration
Enhancement: Use admin-ajax for settings help tab content links
Update: Handle XML MIME types in cache by default
Update: Added “immutable” options for cache-control headers
Update: Added WP-CLI command descriptions
Update: CDN widget notices for BunnyCDN
Update: Image Converter widget notice

2.8.2

Fix: Added additional user capability checks
Fix: Ensure Object Cache garbage collection (disk) WP Cron event is scheduled
Fix: Added additional checks when loading the Object Cache dropin
Fix: Disable Database, Object, and Fragment Cache when using WP-CLI
Fix: Object Cache debug logging
Fix: FAQ help tabs
Update: Coding standards

= 2.8.1=
\n* Fix: Ensure WP Cron events get scheduled when using the Setup Guide wizard and on upgrade
\n* Fix: Undefined variable when the Object Cache purge debug log is enabled
\n* Update: Added warnings in the Setup Guide and the General Settings page when using Disk for Database and Object Caches
\n* Update: Skip Database and Object caches when using WP-CLI

2.8.0

Feature: Always Cached extension
Feature: Purge caches on WP-Cron schedules
Fix: Cloudflare: Some settings were not saved correctly
Fix: Check and update file mode/permissions for cache files
Fix: Issue prompting for credentials for some non-direct filesystem types
Enhancement: Added an admin notice if WP-Cron is not functioning correctly
Enhancement: Added Browser Cache filters
Update: Upgraded JSMin library to 2.4.3
Update: Added Premium Services tabs

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plugins"},"activity":{"url":"https://profiles.wordpress.org/elanasparkle/#content-activity","alt":"Elana Davis's activity"},"translations":{"url":"https://profiles.wordpress.org/elanasparkle/#content-translations","alt":"Elana Davis's translations"}}},{"slug":"avonville1","name":"avonville1","count":3,"is_owner":false,"links":{"profile":{"url":"https://profiles.wordpress.org/avonville1/","alt":"avonville1's profile"},"plugins":{"url":"https://profiles.wordpress.org/avonville1/#content-plugins","alt":"avonville1's plugins"},"activity":{"url":"https://profiles.wordpress.org/avonville1/#content-activity","alt":"avonville1's activity"},"translations":{"url":"https://profiles.wordpress.org/avonville1/#content-translations","alt":"avonville1's translations"}}},{"slug":"jacobd91","name":"Jacob Dunn","count":2,"is_owner":false,"links":{"profile":{"url":"https://profiles.wordpress.org/jacobd91/","alt":"Jacob Dunn's 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Jackson","count":1,"is_owner":false,"links":{"profile":{"url":"https://profiles.wordpress.org/harryjackson1221/","alt":"Harry Jackson's profile"},"plugins":{"url":"https://profiles.wordpress.org/harryjackson1221/#content-plugins","alt":"Harry Jackson's plugins"},"activity":{"url":"https://profiles.wordpress.org/harryjackson1221/#content-activity","alt":"Harry Jackson's activity"},"translations":{"url":"https://profiles.wordpress.org/harryjackson1221/#content-translations","alt":"Harry Jackson's translations"}}},{"slug":"bwmarkle","name":"Brad Markle","count":1,"is_owner":false,"links":{"profile":{"url":"https://profiles.wordpress.org/bwmarkle/","alt":"Brad Markle's profile"},"plugins":{"url":"https://profiles.wordpress.org/bwmarkle/#content-plugins","alt":"Brad Markle's plugins"},"activity":{"url":"https://profiles.wordpress.org/bwmarkle/#content-activity","alt":"Brad Markle's activity"},"translations":{"url":"https://profiles.wordpress.org/bwmarkle/#content-translations","alt":"Brad Markle's translations"}}},{"slug":"maxicusc","name":"maxicusc","count":1,"is_owner":false,"links":{"profile":{"url":"https://profiles.wordpress.org/maxicusc/","alt":"maxicusc's profile"},"plugins":{"url":"https://profiles.wordpress.org/maxicusc/#content-plugins","alt":"maxicusc's plugins"},"activity":{"url":"https://profiles.wordpress.org/maxicusc/#content-activity","alt":"maxicusc's activity"},"translations":{"url":"https://profiles.wordpress.org/maxicusc/#content-translations","alt":"maxicusc's translations"}}},{"slug":"fredericktownes","name":"Frederick Townes","count":1,"is_owner":false,"links":{"profile":{"url":"https://profiles.wordpress.org/fredericktownes/","alt":"Frederick Townes's profile"},"plugins":{"url":"https://profiles.wordpress.org/fredericktownes/#content-plugins","alt":"Frederick Townes's plugins"},"activity":{"url":"https://profiles.wordpress.org/fredericktownes/#content-activity","alt":"Frederick Townes's 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W3 Total Cache (W3TC) improves the SEO, Core Web Vitals and overall user experience of your site by increasing website performance and reducing load times by leveraging features like content delivery network (CDN) integration and the latest best practices.

W3TC is the only web host agnostic Web Performance Optimization (WPO) framework for WordPress trusted by millions of publishers, web developers, and web hosts worldwide for more than a decade. It is the total performance solution for optimizing WordPress Websites.

BENEFITS

Improvements in search engine result page rankings, especially for mobile-friendly websites and sites that use SSL
At least 10x improvement in overall site performance (Grade A in WebPagetest or significant Google PageSpeed improvements) when fully configured
Improved conversion rates and “site performance” which affect your site’s rank on Google.com
“Instant” repeat page views: browser caching
Optimized progressive render: pages start rendering quickly and can be interacted with more quickly
Reduced page load time: increased visitor time on site; visitors view more pages
Improved web server performance; sustain high traffic periods
Up to 80% bandwidth savings when you minify HTML, minify CSS and minify JS files.

KEY FEATURES

Compatible with shared hosting, virtual private / dedicated servers and dedicated servers / clusters
Transparent content delivery network (CDN) management with Media Library, theme files and WordPress itself
Mobile support: respective caching of pages by referrer or groups of user agents including theme switching for groups of referrers or user agents
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) support
Secure Socket Layer (SSL/TLS) support
Caching of (minified and compressed) pages and posts in memory or on disk or on (FSD) CDN (by user agent group)
Caching of (minified and compressed) CSS and JavaScript in memory, on disk or on CDN
Caching of feeds (site, categories, tags, comments, search results) in memory or on disk or on CDN
Caching of search results pages (i.e. URIs with query string variables) in memory or on disk
Caching of database objects in memory or on disk
Caching of objects in memory or on disk
Caching of fragments in memory or on disk
Caching methods include local Disk, Redis, Memcached, APC, APCu, eAccelerator, XCache, and WinCache
Minify CSS, Minify JavaScript and Minify HTML with granular control
Minification of posts and pages and RSS feeds
Minification of inline, embedded or 3rd party JavaScript with automated updates to assets
Minification of inline, embedded or 3rd party CSS with automated updates to assets
Defer non critical CSS and Javascript for rendering pages faster than ever before
Defer offscreen images using Lazy Load to improve the user experience
Browser caching using cache-control, future expire headers and entity tags (ETag) with “cache-busting”
JavaScript grouping by template (home page, post page etc) with embed location control
Non-blocking JavaScript embedding
Import post attachments directly into the Media Library (and CDN)
Leverage our multiple CDN integrations to optimize images
WP-CLI support for cache purging, query string updating and more
Various security features to help ensure website safety
Caching statistics for performance insights of any enabled feature
Extension framework for customization or extensibility for Cloudflare, WPML and much more
Reverse proxy integration via Nginx or Varnish
Image Converter extension provides modern image format conversion (e.g., WebP, AVIF) from common image formats (on upload and on demand)

W3 Total Cache Pro Features

With over a million active installs, W3 Total Cache is the most comprehensive WordPress caching plugin available and has robust premium features that help deliver an exceptional user experience.

Full Site Delivery: Serve your entire site from a Content Delivery Network (CDN), ensuring faster load times worldwide.
Fragment Cache: Optimize the caching of dynamic content while still improving performance.
REST API Caching: Speed up your headless WordPress site by caching REST API calls.
Eliminate Render-Blocking CSS: Ensure your CSS doesn’t hold up page loading, providing faster initial paint.
Delay Scripts: Improve performance by delaying the loading of non-essential scripts until they are needed.
Preload Requests: Boost page performance by preloading critical resources before they’re requested.
Remove CSS/JS: Clean up unnecessary CSS and JavaScript files that slow down your pages.
Lazy Load Google Maps: Load Google Maps only when it’s visible, reducing unnecessary requests.
WPML Extension: Optimize performance on multilingual sites powered by WPML.
Caching Statistics: Get detailed insights on cache usage and performance improvements.
Purge Logs: Keep your site clean by automatically purging unnecessary cache logs.

30-Day Money-Back Guarantee

Try W3 Total Cache Pro risk-free with our 30-day money-back guarantee. If you’re not satisfied, we will refund your purchase.

PAGESPEED SCORE IMPROVEMENTS

To help you understand the impact of individual features on your website’s performance, we’ve tested each feature separately to see its effect on Google PageSpeed scores. While optimal results come from configuring several different caching tools together, the following individual features also show significant improvements on their own:

Remove Unused CSS/JS

This feature removes CSS and JavaScript files that are not needed for the current page, reducing the load time.

Added over 27 points to the Google PageSpeed score (Before: 57.2 / After: 86.7)
Reduced the Potential Savings From Unused JavaScript from 127.5 KiB to 84 KiB
View the test results

Full Site Delivery

Full Site Delivery optimizes the delivery of your entire site, enhancing the server response time.

Added a 99% performance enhancement to the Average Server Response Time (Before: 3413 ms / After: 34 ms)
View the test results

Eliminate Render Blocking CSS

This feature eliminates CSS that blocks the rendering of your page, speeding up the initial load time.

Added over 17 points to the Google PageSpeed score (Before: 53.75 / After: 71)
Reduced the Potential Savings From Render-Blocking Resources by over 94% (Before: 2432.5 ms / After: 125 ms)
Improved the Largest Contentful Paint time by over 56% (Before: 7s / After: 3.04s)
View the test results

Delay Scripts

Delay Scripts postpones the loading of certain scripts until they are needed, reducing initial load times.

Added 14 points to the Google PageSpeed Performance score (Before: 54.25 / After: 68.5)
Reduced the Time Third-Party Code Blocked The Main Thread For by 62% (Before: 825 ms / After: 197.5 ms)
View the test results

Rest API Caching

This feature caches API responses, reducing server load and speeding up API interactions.

Reduced the Average Server Load by 40% (Before: 0.62 / After: 0.37)
Sped up API Responses by 84.5% (Before: 968ms / After: 150ms)
Reduced the Average Server Load by 24% under during a major traffic spike (Before: 34.55 / After: 26.19)
View the test results

Modern Image Formats

Converts images to modern formats like WebP or AVIF, which are more efficient and faster to load.

Added over 9 points to the Google PageSpeed score (Before: 84.67 / After: 93.83)
View the test results

Lazy Load Google Maps

Delays the loading of Google Maps until the user interacts with them, reducing initial load time.

Added 10 points to the Google PageSpeed score (Before: 66 / After: 76)
Reduced the Total Blocking Time Performance score by 72% (Before: 287.5 ms / After: 80 ms)
View the test results

Speed up your site tremendously, improve core web vitals and the overall user experience for your visitors without having to change your WordPress host, theme, plugins or your content production workflow.

What users have to say:

Read testimonials from W3TC users.

Who do I thank for all of this?

It’s quite difficult to recall all of the innovators that have shared their thoughts, code and experiences in the blogosphere over the years, but here are some names to get you started:

Steve Souders
Steve Clay
Ryan Grove
Nicholas Zakas
Ryan Dean
Andrei Zmievski
George Schlossnagle
Daniel Cowgill
Rasmus Lerdorf
Gopal Vijayaraghavan
Bart Vanbraban
mOo
[villu164] (https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/researchers/villu164)

Please reach out to all of these people and support their projects if you’re so inclined.

\n","downloaded":63247897,"faq":"\n

\nWhy does speed matter?\n\n

Search engines like Google, measure and factor in the speed of web sites in their ranking algorithm. When they recommend a site they want to make sure users find what they’re looking for quickly. So in effect you and Google should have the same objective.

Speed is among the most significant success factors web sites face. In fact, your site’s speed directly affects your income (revenue) — it’s a fact. Some high traffic sites conducted research and uncovered the following:

Google.com: +500 ms (speed decrease) -> -20% traffic loss [1]
Yahoo.com: +400 ms (speed decrease) -> -5-9% full-page traffic loss (visitor left before the page finished loading) [2]
Amazon.com: +100 ms (speed decrease) -> -1% sales loss [1]

A thousandth of a second is not a long time, yet the impact is quite significant. Even if you’re not a large company (or just hope to become one), a loss is still a loss. W3 Total Cache is your solution for faster websites, happier visitors and better results.

Many of the other consequences of poor performance were discovered more than a decade ago:

Lower perceived credibility (Fogg et al. 2001)
Lower perceived quality (Bouch, Kuchinsky, and Bhatti 2000)
Increased user frustration (Ceaparu et al. 2004)
Increased blood pressure (Scheirer et al. 2002)
Reduced flow rates (Novak, Hoffman, and Yung 200)
Reduced conversion rates (Akamai 2007)
Increased exit rates (Nielsen 2000)
Are perceived as less interesting (Ramsay, Barbesi, and Preece 1998)
Are perceived as less attractive (Skadberg and Kimmel 2004)

There are a number of resources that have been documenting the role of performance in success on the web, W3 Total Cache exists to give you a framework to tune your application or site without having to do years of research.

\nWhy is W3 Total Cache better than other caching solutions?\n\n

It’s a complete framework. Most cache plugins available do a great job at achieving a couple of performance gains. Total Cache is different because it remedies numerous performance reducing aspects of any web site. It goes farther than the basics, beyond merely reducing CPU usage (load) or bandwidth consumption for HTML pages. Equally important, the plugin requires no theme modifications, modifications to your .htaccess (mod_rewrite rules) or programming compromises to get started. Most importantly, it’s the only plugin designed to optimize all practical hosting environments small or large. The options are many and setup is easy.

\nI’ve never heard of any of this stuff; my site is fine, no one complains about the speed. Why should I install this?\n\n

Rarely do readers take the time to complain. They typically just stop browsing earlier than you’d prefer and may not return altogether. This is the only plugin specifically designed to make sure that all aspects of your site are as fast as possible. Google is placing more emphasis on the speed of a site as a factor in rankings; this plugin helps with that too.

It’s in every web site owner’s best interest is to make sure that the performance of your site is not hindering its success.

\nWhich WordPress versions are supported?\n\n

To use all features in the suite, a minimum of version WordPress 5.3 with PHP 7.2.5 is required. Earlier versions will benefit from our Media Library Importer to get them back on the upgrade path and into a CDN of their choosing.

\nWhy doesn’t minify work for me?\n\n

Great question. W3 Total Cache uses several open source tools to attempt to combine and optimize CSS, JavaScript and HTML etc. Unfortunately some trial and error is required on the part of developers is required to make sure that their code can be successfully minified with the various libraries W3 Total Cache supports. Even still, if developers do test their code thoroughly, they cannot be sure that interoperability with other code your site may have. This fault does not lie with any single party here, because there are thousands of plugins and theme combinations that a given site can have, there are millions of possible combinations of CSS, JavaScript etc.

A good rule of thumb is to try auto mode, work with a developer to identify the code that is not compatible and start with combine only mode (the safest optimization) and increase the optimization to the point just before functionality (JavaScript) or user interface / layout (CSS) breaks in your site.

We’re always working to make this more simple and straight forward in future releases, but this is not an undertaking we can realize on our own. When you find a plugin, theme or file that is not compatible with minification reach out to the developer and ask them either to provide a minified version with their distribution or otherwise make sure their code is minification-friendly.

\nWhat about comments? Does the plugin slow down the rate at which comments appear?\n\n

On the contrary, as with any other action a user can perform on a site, faster performance will encourage more of it. The cache is so quickly rebuilt in memory that it’s no trouble to show visitors the most current version of a post that’s experiencing Digg, Slashdot, Drudge Report, Yahoo Buzz or Twitter effect.

\nWill the plugin interfere with other plugins or widgets?\n\n

No, on the contrary if you use the minify settings you will improve their performance by several times.

\nDoes this plugin work with WordPress in network mode?\n\n

Indeed it does.

\nDoes this plugin work with BuddyPress (bbPress)?\n\n

Yes.

\nWill this plugin speed up WP Admin?\n\n

Yes, indirectly – if you have a lot of bloggers working with you, you will find that it feels like you have a server dedicated only to WP Admin once this plugin is enabled; the result, increased productivity.

\nWhich web servers do you support?\n\n

We are aware of no incompatibilities with apache 1.3+, nginx 0.7+, IIS 5+ or litespeed 4.0.2+. If there’s a web server you feel we should be actively testing (e.g. lighttpd), we’re interested in hearing.

\nIs this plugin server cluster and load balancer friendly?\n\n

Yes, built from the ground up with scale and current hosting paradigms in mind.

\nWhat is the purpose of the “Media Library Import” tool and how do I use it?\n\n

The media library import tool is for old or “messy” WordPress installations that have attachments (images etc in posts or pages) scattered about the web server or “hot linked” to 3rd party sites instead of properly using the media library.

The tool will scan your posts and pages for the cases above and copy them to your media library, update your posts to use the link addresses and produce a .htaccess file containing the list of of permanent redirects, so search engines can find the files in their new location.

You should backup your database before performing this operation.

\nHow do I find the JS and CSS to optimize (minify) them with this plugin?\n\n

Use the “Help” button available on the Minify settings tab. Once open, the tool will look for and populate the CSS and JS files used in each template of the site for the active theme. To then add a file to the minify settings, click the checkbox next to that file. The embed location of JS files can also be specified to improve page render performance. Minify settings for all installed themes can be managed from the tool as well by selecting the theme from the drop down menu. Once done configuring minify settings, click the apply and close button, then save settings in the Minify settings tab.

\nI don’t understand what a CDN has to do with caching, that’s completely different, no?\n\n

Technically no, a CDN is a high performance cache that stores static assets (your theme files, media library etc) in various locations throughout the world in order to provide low latency access to them by readers in those regions. Use Total Cache to accelerate your site by putting your content closer to your users with our many CDN integrations including Cloudflare, StackPath, AWS and more.

\nHow do I use an Origin Pull (Mirror) CDN?\n\n

Login to your CDN providers control panel or account management area. Following any set up steps they provide, create a new “pull zone” or “bucket” for your site’s domain name. If there’s a set up wizard or any troubleshooting tips your provider offers, be sure to review them. In the CDN tab of the plugin, enter the hostname your CDN provider provided in the “replace site’s hostname with” field. You should always do a quick check by opening a test file from the CDN hostname, e.g. http://cdn.domain.com/favicon.ico. Troubleshoot with your CDN provider until this test is successful.

Now go to the General tab and click the checkbox and save the settings to enable CDN functionality and empty the cache for the changes to take effect.

\nHow do I configure Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) or Amazon CloudFront as my CDN?\n\n

First create an S3 account (unless using origin pull); it may take several hours for your account credentials to be functional. Next, you need to obtain your “Access key ID” and “Secret key” from the “Access Credentials” section of the “Security Credentials” page of “My Account.” Make sure the status is “active.” Next, make sure that “Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)” is the selected “CDN type” on the “General Settings” tab, then save the changes. Now on the “Content Delivery Network Settings” tab enter your “Access key,” “Secret key” and enter a name (avoid special characters and spaces) for your bucket in the “Create a bucket” field by clicking the button of the same name. If using an existing bucket simply specify the bucket name in the “Bucket” field. Click the “Test S3 Upload” button and make sure that the test is successful, if not check your settings and try again. Save your settings.

Unless you wish to use CloudFront, you’re almost done, skip to the next paragraph if you’re using CloudFront. Go to the “General Settings” tab and click the “Enable” checkbox and save the settings to enable CDN functionality. Empty the cache for the changes to take effect. If preview mode is active you will need to “deploy” your changes for them to take effect.

To use CloudFront, perform all of the steps above, except select the “Amazon CloudFront” “CDN type” in the “Content Delivery Network” section of the “General Settings” tab. When creating a new bucket, the distribution ID will automatically be populated. Otherwise, proceed to the AWS Management Console and create a new distribution: select the S3 Bucket you created earlier as the “Origin,” enter a CNAME if you wish to add one or more to your DNS Zone. Make sure that “Distribution Status” is enabled and “State” is deployed. Now on “Content Delivery Network” tab of the plugin, copy the subdomain found in the AWS Management Console and enter the CNAME used for the distribution in the “CNAME” field.

You may optionally, specify up to 10 hostnames to use rather than the default hostname, doing so will improve the render performance of your site’s pages. Additional hostnames should also be specified in the settings for the distribution you’re using in the AWS Management Console.

Now go to the General tab and click the “Enable” checkbox and save the settings to enable CDN functionality and empty the cache for the changes to take effect. If preview mode is active you will need to “deploy” your changes for them to take effect.

\nHow do I configure Rackspace Cloud Files as my CDN?\n\n

First create an account. Next, in the “Content Delivery Network” section of the “General Settings” tab, select Rackspace Cloud Files as the “CDN Type.” Now, in the “Configuration” section of the “Content Delivery Network” tab, enter the “Username” and “API key” associated with your account (found in the API Access section of the rackspace cloud control panel) in the respective fields. Next enter a name for the container to use (avoid special characters and spaces). If the operation is successful, the container’s ID will automatically appear in the “Replace site’s hostname with” field. You may optionally, specify the container name and container ID of an existing container if you wish. Click the “Test Cloud Files Upload” button and make sure that the test is successful, if not check your settings and try again. Save your settings. You’re now ready to export your media library, theme and any other files to the CDN.

You may optionally, specify up to 10 hostnames to use rather than the default hostname, doing so will improve the render performance of your site’s pages.

\nWhat is the purpose of the “modify attachment URLs” button?\n\n

If the domain name of your site has changed, this tool is useful in updating your posts and pages to use the current addresses. For example, if your site used to be www.domain.com, and you decided to change it to domain.com, the result would either be many “broken” images or many unnecessary redirects (which slow down the visitor’s browsing experience). You can use this tool to correct this and similar cases. Correcting the URLs of your images also allows the plugin to do a better job of determining which images are actually hosted with the CDN.

As always, it never hurts to back up your database first.

\nIs this plugin comptatible with TDO Mini Forms?\n\n

Captcha and recaptcha will work fine, however you will need to prevent any pages with forms from being cached. Add the page’s URI to the “Never cache the following pages” box on the Page Cache Settings tab.

\nIs this plugin comptatible with GD Star Rating?\n\n

Yes. Follow these steps:

Enable dynamic loading of ratings by checking GD Star Rating -> Settings -> Features “Cache support option”
If Database cache enabled in W3 Total Cache add wp_gdsr to “Ignored query stems” field in the Database Cache settings tab, otherwise ratings will not updated after voting
Empty all caches

\nI see garbage characters instead of the normal web site, what’s going on here?\n\n

If a theme or it’s files use the call php_flush() or function flush() that will interfere with the plugins normal operation; making the plugin send cached files before essential operations have finished. The flush() call is no longer necessary and should be removed.

\nHow do I cache only the home page?\n\n

Add /.+ to page cache “Never cache the following pages” option on the page cache settings tab.

\nI’m getting blank pages or 500 error codes when trying to upgrade on WordPress in network mode\n\n

First, make sure the plugin is not active (disabled) network-wide. Then make sure it’s deactivated network-wide. Now you should be able to successful upgrade without breaking your site.

\nA notification about file owner appears along with an FTP form, how can I resolve this?\n\n

The plugin uses WordPress FileSystem functionality to write to files. It checks if the file owner, file owner group of created files match process owner. If this is not the case it cannot write or modify files.

Typically, you should tell your web host about the permission issue and they should be able to resolve it.

You can however try adding define(‘FS_METHOD’, ‘direct’); to wp-config.php to circumvent the file and folder checks.

\nDoes the Image Converter extension use a lot of resources to convert images to modern formats like WebP or AVIF?\n\n

No. The Image Converter extension converts common image file formats to modern formats like WebP or AVIF using our API services. The conversions occur on our API service, so that resource usage does not impact your website server.

\nIs image data retained by the Total Cache Image Converter API?\n\n

Image data received by our API is destroyed after a converted image is generated. The converted iamges are destroyed once picked-up/downloaded to your website by the Total Cache plugin.

\nThis is too good to be true, how can I test the results?\n\n

You will be able to see the results instantly on each page load, but for tangible metrics, you should consider using the following tools:

Google PageSpeed
Google Search Console Core Web Vitals Report
WebPagetest
Pingdom
GTmetrix

\nI don’t have time to deal with this, but I know I need it. Will you help me?\n\n

Yes! Please reach out to us and we’ll get you acclimated so you can “set it and forget it.”

Install the plugin to read the full FAQ on the plugins FAQ tab.

\nWhere do I report security bugs found in this plugin?\n\n

Please report security bugs found in the source code of the W3 Total Cache plugin through the Patchstack Vulnerability Disclosure Program. The Patchstack team will assist you with verification, CVE assignment, and notify the developers of this plugin.

\n\n","homepage":"https://www.boldgrid.com/totalcache/","icons":[{"type":"1x","url":"https://ps.w.org/w3-total-cache/assets/icon-128x128.png?rev=1041806"},{"type":"2x","url":"https://ps.w.org/w3-total-cache/assets/icon-256x256.png?rev=1041806"}],"installation":"

Deactivate and uninstall any other caching plugin you may be using. Pay special attention if you have customized the rewrite rules for fancy permalinks, have previously installed a caching plugin or have any browser caching rules as W3TC will automate management of all best practices. Also make sure wp-content/ and wp-content/uploads/ (temporarily) have 777 permissions before proceeding, e.g. in the terminal: # chmod 777 /var/www/vhosts/domain.com/httpdocs/wp-content/ using your web hosting control panel or your FTP / SSH account.
Login as an administrator to your WordPress Admin account. Using the “Add New” menu option under the “Plugins” section of the navigation, you can either search for: w3 total cache or if you’ve downloaded the plugin already, click the “Upload” link, find the .zip file you download and then click “Install Now”. Or you can unzip and FTP upload the plugin to your plugins directory (wp-content/plugins/). In either case, when done wp-content/plugins/w3-total-cache/ should exist.
Locate and activate the plugin on the “Plugins” page. Page caching will automatically be running in basic mode. Set the permissions of wp-content and wp-content/uploads back to 755, e.g. in the terminal: # chmod 755 /var/www/vhosts/domain.com/httpdocs/wp-content/.
Now click the “Settings” link to proceed to the “General Settings” tab; in most cases, “disk enhanced” mode for page cache is a “good” starting point.
The “Compatibility mode” option found in the advanced section of the “Page Cache Settings” tab will enable functionality that optimizes the interoperablity of caching with WordPress, is disabled by default, but highly recommended. Years of testing in hundreds of thousands of installations have helped us learn how to make caching behave well with WordPress. The tradeoff is that disk enhanced page cache performance under load tests will be decreased by ~20% at scale.
Recommended: On the “Minify Settings” tab, all of the recommended settings are preset. If auto mode causes issues with your web site’s layout, switch to manual mode and use the help button to simplify discovery of your CSS and JS files and groups. Pay close attention to the method and location of your JS group embeddings. See the plugin’s FAQ for more information on usage.
Recommended: On the “Browser Cache” tab, HTTP compression is enabled by default. Make sure to enable other options to suit your goals.
Recommended: If you already have a content delivery network (CDN) provider, proceed to the “Content Delivery Network” tab and populate the fields and set your preferences. If you do not use the Media Library, you will need to import your images etc into the default locations. Use the Media Library Import Tool on the “Content Delivery Network” tab to perform this task. If you do not have a CDN provider, you can still improve your site’s performance using the “Self-hosted” method. On your own server, create a subdomain and matching DNS Zone record; e.g. static.domain.com and configure FTP options on the “Content Delivery Network” tab accordingly. Be sure to FTP upload the appropriate files, using the available upload buttons.
Optional: On the “Database Cache” tab, the recommended settings are preset. If using a shared hosting account use the “disk” method with caution, the response time of the disk may not be fast enough, so this option is disabled by default. Try object caching instead for shared hosting.
Optional: On the “Object Cache” tab, all of the recommended settings are preset. If using a shared hosting account use the “disk” method with caution, the response time of the disk may not be fast enough, so this option is disabled by default. Test this option with and without database cache to ensure that it provides a performance increase.
Optional: On the “User Agent Groups” tab, specify any user agents, like mobile phones if a mobile theme is used.

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Choosing between cache solutions, technologies, and option can feel interminable. Incredibly helpful was W3 Total Cache's install guide, that led us to leave off certain cache options we thought we needed. Highly recommended. Support the development of great plugins!\n","rating":0.25,"created":{"timestamp":1674691200,"timezone":"UTC"}},{"reviewer":"Ingo Steinke (openmindculture)","title":"Useful and easy to understand","content":"\nUseful and easy to understand, W3 Total Cache offers a lot of value already in the free version, and there is an optional Pro upgrade with additional features. I have been using W3TC on various personal and small business WordPress websites and managed to increase speed and web performance in general using this plugin.\n","rating":0.25,"created":{"timestamp":1684972800,"timezone":"UTC"}},{"reviewer":"Bob","title":"Great support","content":"\nThe support is very helpful\n","rating":0.25,"created":{"timestamp":1691539200,"timezone":"UTC"}},{"reviewer":"M. Asif Hossain","title":"Best Free Cache Plugin","content":"\nNo doubt this is the best free cache plugin in WordPress. It improved my page load time massively. Kudos to the plugin developer team! \n","rating":0.25,"created":{"timestamp":1711065600,"timezone":"UTC"}},{"reviewer":"jnz31","title":"top","content":"\nhighly customizable and freakin fast. definitely not an easy tool, due to the many options, but when setup correctly, this tool helps with performance 100%. and it comes with support, when you have issues. recommended.\n","rating":0.25,"created":{"timestamp":1733875200,"timezone":"UTC"}},{"reviewer":"Alex Volkov","title":"Bad performance...","content":"\n1.0000 settings inside the plugin, with complex configuration. Weird files generated on the server... Not exactly approves performance. \n\n\n\nNever getting desired results...\n\n\n\nOnce installed WP Rocket, everything works fine.\n","rating":0.1,"created":{"timestamp":1736985600,"timezone":"UTC"}}],"screenshots":null,"short_description":"Search Engine (SEO) & Performance Optimization (WPO) via caching. Integrated caching: CDN, Page, Minify, Object, Fragment, Database support.","support_threads":23,"support_threads_resolved":13,"tags":[{"slug":"seo","label":"seo","count":1992},{"slug":"performance","label":"performance","count":769},{"slug":"cache","label":"cache","count":419},{"slug":"optimize","label":"Optimize","count":203},{"slug":"cdn","label":"cdn","count":167},{"slug":"caching","label":"caching","count":152},{"slug":"pagespeed","label":"pagespeed","count":121}],"tags_count":3823,"languages_count":240805,"age_days":6141.970910770428,"installs_per_rating":166.1436219309581,"downloads_per_rating":11675.816318995754,"installs_per_day":146.53276823922747,"downloads_per_day":10297.654925243922,"reviews_per_day":0.8819644506132168,"activation_rate":0.014229722136057742,"version":"2.9.4","marketplace":"wordpress","marketplace_url":"https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache","price":null,"wordpress_link":{"alt":"WordPress","url":"https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache"}}

CDN Modal Enabler vs W3 Total Cache