Let's Make the website faster

[sathish.k]

W3 Total Cache: Wordpress Web Performance optimization plugin
W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your site by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

Features:
1. Compatible with shared hosting, virtual private / dedicated servers and dedicated servers / clusters
2. Transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration with Media Library, theme files and WordPress itself
3. Mobile support: respective caching of pages by referrer or groups of user agents including theme switching for groups of referrers or user agents
4. Caching of (minified and compressed) pages and posts in memory or on disk or on CDN (mirror only)
5. Caching of (minified and compressed) CSS and JavaScript in memory, on disk or on CDN
6. Caching of feeds (site, categories, tags, comments, search results) in memory or on disk or on CDN (mirror only)
7. Caching of search results pages (i.e. URIs with query string variables) in memory or on disk
8. Caching of database objects in memory or on disk
9. Caching of objects in memory or on disk
10. Minification of posts and pages and feeds
11. Minification of inline, embedded or 3rd party JavaScript (with automated updates)
12. Minification of inline, embedded or 3rd party CSS (with automated updates)
13. Browser caching using cache-control, future expire headers and entity tags (ETag) with "cache-busting"
14. JavaScript grouping by template (home page, post page etc) with embed location control
15. Non-blocking JavaScript embedding
16. Import post attachments directly into the Media Library (and CDN)

Requires: 2.8 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.2.1
Source:

[Mike-R]

Wow - that's a really comprehensive list of features. Sounds like an amazing plugin. I usually use WP Super Cache http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

The compatibility checkers is reporting that W3 Total Cache is mostly working with WP version up to 3.4 despite officially being only supported up to 3.2.1.

We should probably do a site speed audit across all our clients and consider updating to a more robust caching system like this if any are having issues and lacking robust caching.

[sathish.k]

Use Google Libraries : Allows your site to use common javascript libraries from Google's AJAX Libraries , rather than from WordPress's own copies.

A number of the javascript libraries distributed with WordPress are also hosted on Google's AJAX Libraries API. This plugin allows your WordPress site to use the content distribution network side of Google's AJAX Library API, rather than serving these files from your WordPress install directly.

This provides numerous potential performance benefits:

* Increases the chance that a user already has these files cached
* Takes load off your server
* Uses compressed versions of the libraries (where available)
* Google's servers are set up to negotiate HTTP compression with the requesting browser

Supported Libraries and Components
1. Dojo
2. jQuery
3. jQuery UI
4. MooTools
5. Prototype
6. script.aculo.us
7. swfobject

Requires: 2.9.1 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.4.2

Source: