The world is on lockdown – its as simple as that – to that end, we at Elegant Marketplace have been doing our very best to reduce prices, produce bundles and get the very best prices out to everyone. We know things are tough. We also know that our 80,000+ users have always had our back so – now, its payback time.

Over the next few weeks we will be announcing initiatives to help you stay afloat, make your business sustainable and help you, help others get better, faster and therefore, more profitable websites.

We all know as professional web developers (or should), how important web site caching is – but, what do we do about it?

Some hosts offer server-side caching and that is great but – what does it actually do and how do we make sure we have the ‘right’ kind of caching enabled so our visitors experience of our sites is exemplary?

Most hosts allow us to add various caching opportunities and as such we should take complete advantage of this.

Enter: W3 Total Cache.

W3 Total Cache does a lot – is it easy to use? For sure – we asked the Product owner of W3 Total Cache at BoldGrid to take us through the basics.

Take a look at how I knocked 4 seconds off my load time on Sitefixer.co.uk

W3 Total Cache (W3TC) improves the SEO and 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 your WordPress Website AND, it is now owned and supported BOLDGRID – part of InMotion Hosting, one of the largest independent hosting companies around and one we chose to be acquired by too!

Here’s just a few things W3 Total Cache can help with:

BENEFITS of W3 Total Cache

• 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 Page Speed 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
• Optimised 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.
• 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) 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
  

• Advanced Statistics
• Analytics for your WordPress and Server cache that allow you to track the size, time and hit/miss ratio of each type of cache, giving you the information needed to gain maximum performance.
• CDN Full Site Delivery (FSD)
• Provide the best user experience possible by enhancing by hosting HTML pages and RSS feeds with (supported) CDN’s high speed global networks.
• Extensions Support
• Adds advanced accelerated mobile pages (AMP) support. Improve the performance of your Genesis, WPML-powered site, and much more.
• REST API Caching
• Save resources or add scale and performance to the WordPress API with W3TC Pro.
• Fragment Caching
• Unlocking the fragment caching module delivers enhanced performance for plugins and themes that use the WordPress Transient API. StudioPress’ Genesis Framework is up to 60% faster with W3TC Pro.

Have a watch and listen as Harry Jackson and Andrew Palmer have a chat about the benefits of W3 Total Cache Pro.
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​It is literally the sale of the century and one not to be missed! 

Stay tuned via our newsletter to find out more about this fantastic offer and even more things that W3 Total Cache can offer you as a Web Developer to make your client sites fly even higher!