Know if W3 Total Cache is Working

Caching is a mechanism used by webmasters to enhance performance of websites. Caching essentially means storing something locally so that it can be served quickly. It’s like keep important things in buffer and serve them as soon as you get the request. Performance in terms of speed of WordPress and other web applications can be significantly improved if a caching solution is properly deployed. For WordPress, most of the webmasters use either W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache plugins to add a minimal cache mechanism to their websites. I use W3 Total Cache on TechWelkin.

Many times WordPress bloggers feel confused and want to know if W3 Total Cache is working or not. They keep on fiddling with W3 Total Cache settings but don’t find a way to gauge if the plugin is working. Here I will tell you how to detect whether this plugin is functioning as desired. But before that I would like to say that newbie bloggers should not worry much about such things as caching. The main focus should be on good content, consistency, SEO and promotion of your blog. Caching is important but mostly when your blog is receiving fairly large traffic. Your focus should first be on having that kind of traffic.

Learn how to know if W3 Total Cache is functioning as it should.

W3 Total Cache provides page cache, minification, database cache, object cache, browser cache and CDN. You can enable or disable any or all of these facilities. The plugin comes with a debug feature as well. This debug feature does tell you how your plugin is working.

• Log into admin panel of your WP site.
• Go to Performance > General Settings in the sidebar
• Scroll down to the Debug section and check the boxes for caches that you wish to investigate.
• Now go to any of your website’s page and take right click on it. Select View Source to open source code of that page.
• Scroll down the source code. At the bottom of the code, you will see the commented text embedded by W3 Total Cache plugin. This text will give you information on how various caches are configured. If you see this text, your cache is working fine. Text would may look something like:

<!-- W3 Total Cache: Minify debug info:
Engine:             disk
Theme:              19c10
Template:           single

Replaced CSS files:
1. 
...
...
...

Replaced JavaScript files:
1. https://techwelkin.com/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.js?ver=1.11.0
...
...
...
-->

<!-- W3 Total Cache: Page cache debug info:
Engine:             disk: enhanced
Cache key:          dk51sxzfr2dl
Caching:            enabled
Creation Time:      2.293s
-->

NOTE: If you have configured W3 Total Cache so as not to deliver cached pages to the logged in users, and you’re logged in —then you’ll see that cache is disabled. You should log out and then reload your webpage. Now you should see that cache is enabled.