WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems and blogging software used by webmasters and website developers thoughout the world. Many of the most popular blogs in different niches use this open source blogging software and a range of plugins have been developed by developers to improve the user experience However, wordpress software uses databases with a number of tables and this can take up server resources, especially if there are a large number of visitors to the website simultaneously. A separate connection will be needed for each user, especially if the wordpress website is interactive, and allows the visitors to post comments without login. Most web hosting companies impose limits on the amount of resources a particular web hosting account can take up, especially if the blog is using a shared web hosting account. These restrictions will ensure that other websites on the same server are also accessible. By using a plugin like W3 total cache, the server resources used by the blog can be minimized.
The W3 Total cache is the only WordPress Performance Optimization software which is widely used to optimize the utilization of server resources by using caching. The user experience is improved as the pages of the website will load quickly, as they are retrieved from the cache. This reduces the server load significantly and reduces the downtime of the server used for hosting the blog. Though W3 total cache is not a default plug in for WordPress blogs, it is widely used by many major web hosting companies like page.ly, Mediatemple, GoDaddy, Dreamhost and HostGator to reduce the server load for blogs with a large number of visitors. Many of these blogs have a number of plugins installed to enhance the user experience.
It is observed that WordPress blogs that have W3 Total Cache, are faster than standard blogs by up to ten times. Since the speed of loading of a website is a parameter to be considered while ranking a website in search engines , installing this plugin could increase the number of visitors. The visitors will be able to view pages of the website quickly, visiting more pages of the website, and improving the conversion rate for the website. The server will be able to handle high traffic without any significant degradation in performance, even for other websites hosted on the same server. The bandwidth costs for websites using W3 total cache will also be greatly reduced.
Though used in W3 total cache is widely used with shared web hosting accounts, it is also compatible with virtual private servers, dedicated servers and clusters. It uses a content delivery network management with media content, themes and wordpress to reduce load time. Minified and compressed pages and posts of the wordpress blog are cached in the memory, disk or content delivery network (CDN). Similarly, CSS, Javascript, feeds (categories, tags, comments) , search results, database objects are cached in the memory, disk or CDN as required. Minifications of posts, pages, CSS , comments, Javascript also reduces the resources needed. The W3 total cache is also compatible with mobile browsers which are widely used by visitors who surf the internet using their mobile phones.