The Ultimate Guide to Speeding up your Wordpress Site

Install & configure W3 Total Cache settings

1. W3 Total Cache Install

   To increase our WordPress site speed, we will absolutely want to install W3 Total Cache. W3 Total Cache is by far most comprehensive and effective plug-in you can install to increase your site speed. It's a little tricky to configure the first time around, so we will handle one step at a time.

2. W3 Total Cache Browser Cache

   We now want to configure the browser cache settings. The browser cache tells browsers, like Chrome and Firefox, not to download content and files that they've already downloaded and saved. It can reduce the load on your server, especially for returning visitors and users that click around the site a lot or visit multiple pages, or are returning visitors.

3. W3 Total Cache Page Cache

   Now that we have W3 Total Cache installed and activated, we want to optimize a few settings. From the Performance menu select the "page cache" section.

4. How to clear caches and finish installing

   When you make changes to W3 Total Cache, site-wide settings, or other plugins, you will want to make sure to empty caches. W3 Total Cache will remind you of this with a warning at the top of the page to empty caches when you make relevant changes.

5. Minify

   One of the page speed insights from Google is to Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Partly due to these issues, our little example post has a rather sad site speed score. We definitely want to minify and combine these files wherever possible. Doing so will improve our site speed by allowing visitors to download one smaller file rather than ten or so non-minified files.