Insights from Google PageSpeed vs W3 Total Cache

Google Pagespeed Insights is a tool that empowers you to make decisions that increase the performance of your website. Recommendations from Google Pagespeed are based upon current industry best practices for desktop and mobile web performance. Through the addition of advanced data visualization, tagging, filtering, and snapshot technology, Insights from Google PageSpeed provides a comprehensive solution for any webmaster looking to increase their site performance, their search engine ranking, and their visitors browsing experience. Detailed Page Reporting Sort your page reports by their Page Speed Score to prioritize the largest areas of opportunity on your site. Page reports utilize easy to read visualizations that allow you to quickly focus in on the most important data to improve your sites performance. Report Summaries Report Summaries are a powerful and exclusive feature of Insights from Google PageSpeed. Summaries display your average Page Score, largest areas for improvement across ALL reports, as well as best and lowest performing pages. Report summaries can be filtered to narrow results by: Pages, Posts, Categories, Custom URLs, and Custom Post Types. Using Report Summaries allows you to ‘zoom out’ from the page-level and better understand the big picture of your sites performance. Desktop and Mobile Page Reports Best practices for site performance differ greatly between Desktop and Mobile device usage. Configure Insights from Google PageSpeed to generate Desktop reports, Mobile reports, or both! Toggle back and forth between report types to see specific suggestions for improving the performance and experience on each platform. Report Snapshots The Report Snapshot tool builds on the power of Report Summaries, to provide historical “Point In Time” data about your website. Take a snapshot of any Report Summary screen to store that data for future retrieval. Add comments to your snapshots to provide additional meaning, such as “Before Installing W3 Total Cache.” Additionally, filter a Report Summary before taking a Snapshot to save a summary of the filtered data. Snapshot Comparison Tool The Snapshot Comparison Tool is an amazing utility that lets you visualize side-by-side results from any two similar Report Snapshots. Take a Report Snapshot before installing new plugins, or before implementing performance recommendations. Take another snapshot when you are finished and compare your results to measure the effect of your changes. Add/Import Custom URLs Easily add additional URLs for inclusion in Pagespeed Reports. Even add URLs for non-WordPress sites, even if they are not hosted on your server. URLs can be added manually, or upload a properly formatted XML sitemap to add multiple pages at once. Custom URLs can be tagged and filtered in Report Summaries. Take Report Snapshots of your Custom URLs just like you would with any other report type. Scheduled Report Checks Configure Insights from Google PageSpeed to automatically recheck your site on a Daily, Weekly, Bi-Monthly, or Monthly basis. With each scan, any new pages or posts will be discovered, and existing reports will be updated to reflect any changes to your site, as well as any changes in the Pagespeed recommendations. Additional Languages (v1.x translation) Russian Translation provided by: Ivanka from coupofy.com (v1.x translation) Spanish Translation provided by: Ogi Djuraskovic from firstsiteguide.com (v1.x translation) Serbian Translation provided by: Ogi Djuraskovic from firstsiteguide.com Troubleshooting Please find the below list of potential issues that you may encounter, and the recommended next steps. I entered my API Key and saved the Options, but no Reports are showing up in the Report List. Google Pagespeed needs to be able to load each page to create its report. Make sure that your pages are publicly accessible over the internet. Ensure that your API key is entered correctly, and that you have enabled the “PageSpeed Insights API” from the Google API Console. In the Options page, under “Advanced Configuration” there is a checkbox called “Log API Exceptions”. Any API exception that is not caught and handled automatically will be stored for up to 7 days. This log information can be very helpful when diagnosing issues. Page report checks never finish all of the way, I have to press “Start Reporting” again and again to get it to finish checking all of my pages. If the reports seem to always run for a certain length of time before stopping unexpectedly, you may be exceeding your servers Max Execution time. Try increasing the value in Options->Advanced Configuration “Maximum Execution Time”. Some web hosting providers do not allow the Maximum Execution Time to be overridden or increased. In that case you can try setting the Maximum Script Run Time. This will make the script run for the set period of time, then stop and spawn a new script, to get around timeout issues. Start with a low value, and test. Increase the value one step at a time until you find the largest value that allows your scans to finish successfully. An error was reported while trying to check one of my pages, and it has been added to the Ignored Pages section. Navigate to the Ignored Pages tab, find the page, and click “reactivate” to try it again. If the page fails again, ensure that the page is publicly accessible from the internet. Non-public pages cannot be checked. In some rare cases, pages are not able to be scanned by the Pagespeed API. Try checking your page manually here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/. If the page fails to be checked, report the issue to Google so that they can diagnose further. I received a Javascript or PHP error. If the error appeared while Google Pagespeed was checking pages, you may have loaded the page while it was storing data. Refresh the page in a couple seconds to see if the issue has gone away. If issues persist please report the problem with as much information as you can gather, including: What page you were on, the exact text of the error, or a screenshot of the error. In the Options page, under “Advanced Configuration” there is a checkbox called “Log API Exceptions”. Any API exception that is not caught and handled automatically will be logged for up to 7 days. This log information can be very helpful when diagnosing issues My Page Scores seem really low. When I click “Recheck Results” when viewing Report Details, the score jumps up dramatically. Your server may have been responding slowly when the first report was generated. A slow server response time can have a large impact on your Page Speed Score. If these problems happen frequently you may want to talk with your hosting provider about the problem, or look into alternative hosting providers. I want to clear out all of the current page reports and start over. Navigate to the “Options” tab Expand the “Advanced Configuration” section. Find the “Delete Data” Dropdown Select “Delete Reports Only” to remove all Page Reports Or Select “Delete EVERYTHING” to remove all Page Reports, Custom URLs, Snapshots, and Ignored Pages

W3 Total Cache (W3TC) improves the SEO, Core Web Vitals and overall 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 WordPress Websites. BENEFITS 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 PageSpeed 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 Optimized 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. KEY FEATURES 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/TLS) 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 Image Converter extension provides modern image format conversion (e.g., WebP, AVIF) from common image formats (on upload and on demand) W3 Total Cache Pro Features With over a million active installs, W3 Total Cache is the most comprehensive WordPress caching plugin available and has robust premium features that help deliver an exceptional user experience. Full Site Delivery: Serve your entire site from a Content Delivery Network (CDN), ensuring faster load times worldwide. Fragment Cache: Optimize the caching of dynamic content while still improving performance. REST API Caching: Speed up your headless WordPress site by caching REST API calls. Eliminate Render-Blocking CSS: Ensure your CSS doesn’t hold up page loading, providing faster initial paint. Delay Scripts: Improve performance by delaying the loading of non-essential scripts until they are needed. Preload Requests: Boost page performance by preloading critical resources before they’re requested. Remove CSS/JS: Clean up unnecessary CSS and JavaScript files that slow down your pages. Lazy Load Google Maps: Load Google Maps only when it’s visible, reducing unnecessary requests. WPML Extension: Optimize performance on multilingual sites powered by WPML. Caching Statistics: Get detailed insights on cache usage and performance improvements. Purge Logs: Keep your site clean by automatically purging unnecessary cache logs. 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee Try W3 Total Cache Pro risk-free with our 30-day money-back guarantee. If you’re not satisfied, we will refund your purchase. PAGESPEED SCORE IMPROVEMENTS To help you understand the impact of individual features on your website’s performance, we’ve tested each feature separately to see its effect on Google PageSpeed scores. While optimal results come from configuring several different caching tools together, the following individual features also show significant improvements on their own: Remove Unused CSS/JS This feature removes CSS and JavaScript files that are not needed for the current page, reducing the load time. Added over 27 points to the Google PageSpeed score (Before: 57.2 / After: 86.7) Reduced the Potential Savings From Unused JavaScript from 127.5 KiB to 84 KiB View the test results Full Site Delivery Full Site Delivery optimizes the delivery of your entire site, enhancing the server response time. Added a 99% performance enhancement to the Average Server Response Time (Before: 3413 ms / After: 34 ms) View the test results Eliminate Render Blocking CSS This feature eliminates CSS that blocks the rendering of your page, speeding up the initial load time. Added over 17 points to the Google PageSpeed score (Before: 53.75 / After: 71) Reduced the Potential Savings From Render-Blocking Resources by over 94% (Before: 2432.5 ms / After: 125 ms) Improved the Largest Contentful Paint time by over 56% (Before: 7s / After: 3.04s) View the test results Delay Scripts Delay Scripts postpones the loading of certain scripts until they are needed, reducing initial load times. Added 14 points to the Google PageSpeed Performance score (Before: 54.25 / After: 68.5) Reduced the Time Third-Party Code Blocked The Main Thread For by 62% (Before: 825 ms / After: 197.5 ms) View the test results Rest API Caching This feature caches API responses, reducing server load and speeding up API interactions. Reduced the Average Server Load by 40% (Before: 0.62 / After: 0.37) Sped up API Responses by 84.5% (Before: 968ms / After: 150ms) Reduced the Average Server Load by 24% under during a major traffic spike (Before: 34.55 / After: 26.19) View the test results Modern Image Formats Converts images to modern formats like WebP or AVIF, which are more efficient and faster to load. Added over 9 points to the Google PageSpeed score (Before: 84.67 / After: 93.83) View the test results Lazy Load Google Maps Delays the loading of Google Maps until the user interacts with them, reducing initial load time. Added 10 points to the Google PageSpeed score (Before: 66 / After: 76) Reduced the Total Blocking Time Performance score by 72% (Before: 287.5 ms / After: 80 ms) View the test results Speed up your site tremendously, improve core web vitals and the overall user experience for your visitors without having to change your WordPress host, theme, plugins or your content production workflow. What users have to say: Read testimonials from W3TC users. Who do I thank for all of this? It’s quite difficult to recall all of the innovators that have shared their thoughts, code and experiences in the blogosphere over the years, but here are some names to get you started: Steve Souders Steve Clay Ryan Grove Nicholas Zakas Ryan Dean Andrei Zmievski George Schlossnagle Daniel Cowgill Rasmus Lerdorf Gopal Vijayaraghavan Bart Vanbraban mOo [villu164] (https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/researchers/villu164) Please reach out to all of these people and support their projects if you’re so inclined.