W3 Total Cache Settings That Worked For Me

In my quest to speed up Organized Themes as much as possible, I’ve been experimenting with the settings of the excellent W3 Total Cache plugin and with my web host. Here’s what is working best for me according to Pingdom’s response times (see graph above).

1. For me, hosting on VPS.net (4 nodes), I get better performance using enhanced disk caching than APC. To be honest this surprised and somewhat disappointed me. But based on my load times, I do best sticking with enhanced disk caching.
2. Using database caching, either disk or APC, slowed the site down.
3. The biggest savings came from switching from basic Amazon S3 storage to using CloudFront. This dropped my average load time by about 50% and it was already quite low. I had to manually change some of my files to be viewable by the “world” when I switched, but other than that, it was easy to do. Plus, now all my files appear to be coming from Organized Themes which is a plus.
4. The css and js minify options are not compatible with my membership plugin. Every time I turn then on, the entire site would say you must be a member to view the page which is not good for sales.

Your settings for caching and minify may be different, but I would strongly encourage using CloudFront vs. the standard S3 environment. If you’re concerned with the speed of your site, I would strongly encourage you to use W3 Total Cache and CloudFront. If you’re using W3 Total Cache, let us know what settings are working best for you in the comments.