We are constantly improving W3 Total Cache— and listening to your feedback has allowed us to continue offering a top-notch product.

In this latest release, we are proud to introduce some new features and improvements which will help you further increase the speed and performance of your website.

The first new addition that we would like to highlight is Image Lazy Loading, a completely new and highly requested feature to W3 Total Cache that came directly from our users.

Lazy loading images 

Lazy loading images mean that images on websites are loaded asynchronously— after the above-the-fold content is fully loaded all other images are only fetched when they appear in the browser’s viewport. Lazy loading defers the loading of resources on the page until they are actually needed, instead of getting them as soon as the page loads. Loading resources ensures that nothing is gathered until the moment the user actually needs them.

If you’ve used Google Page Speed Insights and examined some opportunities for improvement, you may have seen some suggestions to Defer offscreen Images.

With lazy loading, you are reducing the number of images needed to load the page initially. Fewer resource requests mean fewer bytes to download and reduced competition for the limited network bandwidth available to users.

Lazy loading image has a positive impact on performance by reducing the initial page load time, page weight, and system resource usage.

Improved Statistics

We are also excited to announce the new and improved Statistics page that will help our Pro users get the most out of their caching and locate additional areas of optimization.  The improved Statistics page allows you to check the Hit rates and overall effectiveness of every configuration enabled in your General settings.

You can use Statistics to check the following:

• Page Cache (Disk, Disk-Enhanced, Redis, Memcached)
• Minify
• Object Caching
• Database Caching
• Fragment Cache
• System info (PHP Memory, CPU Info)
• Cache storage size used (Redis, Memcached)

Enabling the Debug mode for each setting In Performance > General Settings > Debug gives you more detailed information by clicking on a link of the desired setting in Statistics Page.

If for example, Object Cache is disabled, it won’t be available in Statistics

In Performance > General Settings > Statistics you can enable Statistics and customize your desired settings:

Please note that this consumes additional resources and is not recommended to be run continuously.

Example of the Statistic Page (Page Cache):

Other Improvements 

We’ve also made some more general improvements in this update to enhance the overall user experience:

• Fixed inserting a new line before injecting to Apache Config
• Fixed HTML minifier removing the quotes around href attribute
• Fixed feeds caching test failing
• Added License Expiration Admin Notices in Dashboard (Pro)
• Implemented correct headers caching for REST API caching under Disk: Enhanced. including a missing test for REST API cache
• Changed some design in W3 Total Cache Dashboard
• Added BoldGrid Backup Dashboard Widget

Community Pull Requests

Merged

• SultanICQ
  • Minify Debug Mode: CSS line numbers debug data problem when source contains comment with url
    • Minification problems on CSS files when URLs are contained in commented lines.
    • URLs were getting truncated creating open comment blocks that invalidated large chunks of CSS.
• njlynch
  • Enable caching for webp MIME type
    • webp was included in the ‘other_compression’ MIME type list.
    • This prevented ETag and Last-Modified header information from getting sent by .htaccess Browser Cache configurations.
• KZeni
  • Fix the CSS scoping of icon on W3TC site admin pages. Remove shadow from icon font.
    • CSS fix for W3TC admin icons using the ‘.wp-menu-image’ class.
    • Icon was getting applied in unintended locations.
    • Also removes icons shadows and makes them more readable.
  • Make menu icon (admin bar & main admin menu) use the menu icon color that’s set in the site admin styling (also implement SVG instead of PNG in the process to support this)
    • Main admin menu and admin bar icons were not reflecting the correct color settings if the user selected a different Admin Color Scheme in their profile settings.
    • Previous icons were .PNG and have been updated to .SVG to make this possible.

Closed but not Merged

• KZeni
  • Improve the rendering of the icon used in the admin menu & admin bar
    • Improves rendering of the Dashboard icon by converting the .SVG into an actual Icon Font.

Committed Pull Requests (Still Open)

• raphael-concil
  • FAQ Link in Dashboard open in new tab
    • FAQ link in Dashboard left sidebar menu now opens in a new tab, implemented with jQuery.
    • FAQ link in top admin bar opens in a new tab using the ‘target’ attribute.
• shanemac10
  • Add rel attribute ‘prefetch’ on style tag builders
    • Enables the use of ‘rel=prefetch’ in  <style> tags.
    • Prefetching styles helps utilize browser downtime to increase performance.
• romainmenke
  • add config to make memcached binary protocol optional
    • W3TC fails to connect to memcached servers while the binary protocol is active.
    • Adds an option to disable the binary protocol for memcached servers.
• seang96
  • Fix Cache Policy with CDN CloudFront and S3
    • Sets ‘CdnEngine_CloudFront’ to function as a subclass of ‘CdnEngine_S3’.
    • This allows ‘cache_config’ to store the entire object and reduces the code needed to correctly handle it via CloudFront.
• jlalvarez18
  • Added option for Purge Key and Custom Purge Header
    • Adds a Purge option for Varnish hosts.

Recent 5 Star Reviews

JordanJCaron (@jordanjcaron)

I’ve been using this on my own website for a couple of years now to improve website load speed. Teamed up with MaxCDN it has increased my page load speed a lot. We install it on all of our client’s websites now!

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/best-cache-plugin-out-there/

jamesja (@jamesja) 

Tried numerous caching plugins. W3 is best, especially for busy sites. Most plugins only cache pages, W3 has so many options. Support is very helpful as well. 5 stars.

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/great-plugin-for-busy-site-and-very-helpful-support/

dave8441 (@dave8441)

This plugin made my web pages load faster than other similar plugins I had tried. When I needed help to exclude my sitemaps from caching, support quickly gave me the help I needed. Thanks!!!

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/great-plugin-and-awesome-support-107/

Wesleeeyyy (@wesleeeyyy)

I already knew what W3TC could do for the performance (speed) of my website, but until today I had no experience with their support for the free version of the plugin.

The amount of support they provided me and how much they helped me is outstanding. And that’s all for free. Really great plugin, would really recommend this one!

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/super-high-speed-website-and-really-amazing-support/

hmnkdmtr (@hmnkdmtr)

A user’s attention covers fewer features than Total Cache has

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/a-functional-choice/

We want to thank you for using W3 Total Cache and for helping us make W3 Total Cache the most complete caching solution for WordPress!

Thank you for using W3 Total Cache! 

With this minor release we addressed an issue with the WordPress 5.3 release:

Warning: Declaration of W3TCDbCache_Wpdb::prepare($query, $args) should be compatible with wpdb::prepare($query, …$args) in /home/xxxxxxx/public_html/wp-content/plugins/w3-total-cache/DbCache_Wpdb.php on line 8

Please note that you need to Purge all caches and to clear your CDN cache if the warning is still showing on your website after updating to v0.10.2

We want to thank all of you who brought this issue to our attention, and hope you continue to support our product!

In our public repository on GitHub, you can review our source code, post issues, and even submit pull requests. You are welcome to join us there, and we really appreciate all users that have contributed, both past and present. In the very near future, we will be adding attribution for all contributors that assist us in making W3 Total Cache the best WordPress Performance Boosting product on the market. 

We are always looking for ways to improve W3 Total Cache with new features, UX and UI improvements, and fixing any outlying problems that may exist. If you like what we are doing, please be sure to take some time and rate our plugin on the WordPress Plugin Repository.

We appreciate all of our partners, supporters and the entire WordPress community, and would like to give special thanks to those who are active in the forums helping end-users.