5X WordPress Speed Improvement with W3 Total Cache

[ NOTE: This is an older configuration, and my latest can be found here >. ]

If you are into blogging with WordPress > you might have heard a lot of chatter about a new caching plugin called W3 Total Cache >. I’ve been a loyal WP Super Cache > guy for a long while now, so I’ve been ignoring the hype.

Until now.

W3 Total Cache is fast. Like, stupid fast. But since I hate when people say things like that and then don’t give me numbers, here are some stats from my favorite monitoring site, Pingdom >.

Keep in mind, those relatively high numbers (~800ms) includes all the overseas pingdom servers, e.g. London, Frankfurt, Coppenhagen, Stockholm, etc. The actual stateside numbers are even more impressive.

Here’s another screenshot showing an obvious dip where I made the change:

From my Chartbeat dashboard I am now rendering my homepage in less than half a second, where it was taking nearly four seconds before.

Seriously. If you run a WordPress site and you frequently get hit by Digg, Reddit, Hacker News, or any of the other meritocracy sites–or if you just want to improve your Google ranking >–you should consider switching to W3 Total Cache >.

Next up I’ll be doing a writeup on moving my static content to Amazon’s S3 CDN (which is something that W3 Total Cache also supports natively) and doing real-time performance tuning using Chartbeat >. ::

[ W3 Total Cache Download > ]