In this article, we are going to show you how to install the W3 caching plugin on your WordPress site in order to improve its speed. The speed cannot be improved sometimes, because it often depends on your hosting environment.
Ways on How To Install and Configure a W3 Total Cache WordPress Plugin
So, if you are on a shared hosting platform and you happen to be sharing your hosting space with other high-traffic websites then there’s almost no way you can improve your speed significantly because the other websites use so much of the host’s bandwidth.
How To Install & Configure W3 Total Cache WordPress Plugin
But, you can still do much and the W3 caching plugin helps with that. Now if you are concerned that your shared hosting might be slowing you down, you can look at the dedicated hosting servers or even at the different hosts like WP engine because they don’t share hosting and they are optimized for WordPress – the W3 caching plugin will be able to get some website speed improvements and improve your website’s speed.
Well, there’s two reasons primarily – one your visitors like a ‘fast website’, and it’s been proven that the faster a website loads, especially for eCommerce websites, the more money you make. Also, Google has a site speed as one of the main ranking factors. For ranking your website pages, you need to make sure that your website loads faster. This plugin is free, although there’s a paid version, but the free version works just fine.
How to Install W3 Total Cache WordPress Plugin:
Follow these simple steps in order to install the W3 Total Cache WordPress Plugin on your website.
- Login in to your WordPress dashboard
- hover over the plugins on the left
- then click on Add New
- then type in W3 cache in the search bar
- Here, the first one is the required one
If it’s already installed, that’s great but if it’s not installed on your website, there will be a ‘install now’ button, click on that, and then activate the plugin. What it does is – well, that’s the warnings up here on the top. First of all, which we will get rid of it. But, what it does is, it adds a new link at the bottom called ‘performance’. What we need is to hover over that and click on ‘general settings’. The reason we have these warnings is that currently they are checked to be turned on.
But, we don’t have other stuff enabled for them to function. So, we are going to go through each caption right now. In order for you to toggle all the options, click the checkbox.
Setup the W3 Total Cache WordPress Plugin:
It’s what’s called a dynamic website, a ‘database-driven website’, so normally every time someone visits a page, the server requests the database. The database then sends the information back to the website. Also, the resulting page is not stored on the server. So, then the next time, a visitor visits the same page, it can be any visitor, not the same one, anybody who visits that same page, this time that page is already stored on the server and you don’t have to request the copy from the database. Hence there is some speed improvement by doing that, the minify option is basically what that does is it removes whitespace and extraneous characters from your CSS files and Javascript files.
These files are usually requested every time someone acts as ‘access as a page’. So reducing that file size means, there is less bandwidth your site has to use in order to get that data to the visitor. That further results in a faster load time. But really, the only one you have to do is click on ‘enable’ and then click on ‘save all settings’. These get into the quite ‘advanced stuff’, even this ‘page caching method’, it gets fairly advanced in the options. So, just stick with what they have by default because that works in 99% of the cases. So, just enable if you want that option enabled. And, then click on ‘save settings’.
Conclusion:
Don’t worry about the options unless you are an advanced user. Then the next one is a ‘database cache’. The same idea as yours of recently ‘caching queries’. So, like a cache, it’s like a storage area, is sure to find that earlier a cache is like a storage repository for frequently used items. Hence, for the database cache, you are storing queries to the database in a stock. This means they don’t have to be recreated every time. They can just use the stored queries and it will go faster. The object cache goes a little bit further.
Even after reading this in-depth guide related to ‘How To Install & Configure W3 Total Cache WordPress Plugin’, if you face any problems, hire a WordPress Developer. And if you have questions regarding the topic, please make sure to let us know your exact issue in the comment box below.
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