Google is starting to focus more and more on page loading and site speed in order to create a better experience for thier search users and why not? Slow loading sites that take several seconds to load each page is unproductive and a waste of time considering there’s many easy ways to supercharge your site speed.
After thouroughly testing W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache on my own sites i was a little disappointed with W3 Total Cache considering some of the big boys like Mashable, Chris Pearson (Creator of Thesis) and Copyblogger (he says VPS makes his site fast) to name just a few, use this free plugin.
This caching plugin has far more configurations options that not only include page caching but others methods to increase performance of a wordpress sites speed.
I tested the speed several times on each and WP Super Cache loads at about the same speed as W3 Total Cache. However, there’s more configurations to make with W3 total cache unlike super cache which is just a matter of activating and enabling to experience a massive reduction in page loading times instantly after you click on pre load.
The first time i installed this caching plugin i thought it was ajax after finding out my pages where taking 9 seconds to load beforehand. So whichever plugin you decide to go for really doesn’t matter a great deal as they both should make a huge impact if your site was anything like mine to start with. Your visitors and the Google Bot should be impressed.
Site Speed and Page Loading Times Using W3 Total Cache
| # | Domain name | Size | Load Time | Average Speed per KB |
| 1 | wordpresssites.net | 44.5 KB | 0.65 seconds | 0.01 seconds |
I did notice thats there’s about 300,000 downloads of the w3 caching plugin compared to over 2 million for super cache and i guess the reason for this is that w3 is more for advanced users. Be careful if your not an experienced user of this plugin as you could do some damage if you start playing around with any of the advanced settings that w3 offers.
Here’s a video from the Team at Google Who work on making Google Faster
