[Radu]

Awesome, it worked 🙂 Thanks!

[Radu]

hello @costin, I sent you an email about 2 days ago.

cheers!

[Radu]

Hey @ukieblack, take a look here
I wrote a quick tutorial on how to set up w3 total cache. I don’t know if it will solve your problem with minify, because the reasons can be many! But it worths a shot.

[Radu]

Hello ladies and gentlemen,
Let me give you some piece of USEFUL information on how to improve your page speed.
First of all you will need:
A. W3 Total Cache;
B. Better WordPress Minify
C. Plugin Organizer;
D. Ewww Optimizer.

A. In W3 Total Cache I suggest you to enable:
1. Page Cache, method Opcode (any, if there’s one available always use it). Otherwise use disk enhanced.
2. Minify (optional, I will tell you after why!): enable and set modify mode to automatic. If you get errors, change it to manual.
3. Database Cache, method Opcode (same as with Page Cache). Very important, some servers might cause you errors when you enable the Database Cache. So make some tests to be sure is everything ok.
4. Browser Cache
5. CDN: Don’t enable it, yet! Just chose what kind of cdn you want.
I suggest you to use Rackspace Cloud Files. Is cheap and easy to set up. You pay a few dimes a month, based on your traffic. But if you don’t want to pay for a professional CDN, you can use your own server. Just create a subdomain cdn.sitename.com and chose Self-Hosted. In this way you will upload the files to your subdomain via ftp.

1. Page Cache
Enable: cache front page, cache feeds, cache URIs, don’t cache pages for logged in users.
Advanced: Maximum lifetime of cache objects: 86400 (1day)
Never cache the following pages: *.xml (add this so you won’t have problems with your sitemap)

2. Minify (optional). It’s important to tell you, I haven’t used before W3 Total Cache with Better WP minify, so you need to test which combination is better for you. W3 Total Cache with minify function disabled + Better WP Minify, Only W3T Cache with minify function enabled and without Better WP Minify and so on. You will have to test on your own.
But anyway, what I will tell you know is going to work for most of the users:
Enable: Rewrite URL Structure, HTML & XML and set minify settings to enable, enable CSS and start adding manually the files to be minified (you must do this only if the automatic minification is not working well).
Minify is optional because you can also use the plugin Better WP Minify. But if you are going to enable the cdn and host the minified css files on the cdn, only W3T Cache can do that for you. Better WP Minify it will not upload the minified versions of the files to the CDN. Anyway, make some tests and see which solutions is better for you.

3. Database Cache: everything works out of the box

4. Browser Cache
Enable: set last modified header, set expires header, set cache control header, set entity tag, set w3 total cache header, enable http (gzip) compression, Disable cookies for static files, Do not process 404 errors.
404 error exception list: add this for not having problems with sitemap -> sitemap(_index|[0-9]+)?\.xml
CSS & JS, HTML & XML, Media & Other Files: enable everything except prevent caching of objects after settings change.
Set expires header lifetime to 31536000 seconds.

5. CDN.
Tip: In my opinion is better to host only the css and images files (jpg, jpeg, png and gif) to the cdn. let the javascript be hosted on your own server and to be minified by the plugin Better Wp Minify.

You can enable: host attachments, host wp-includes, host theme files, host minified css and js files, host custom files, force over writing of existing files.

You scroll down to the end of the page and wherever you see “file types to upload” you add ONLY *.css;*.gif;*.png;*.jpg and be sure you have canceled *.js for anywhere.

Now you configure it with Rackspace user name and api (or ftp credentials) and you test Cloud Files upload. After that you start uploading the files. Only after all the files are uploaded, you can Enable it from General Settings tab.

B. Better WordPress Minify
You have the tutorial on how to configure it on this site, so read it 🙂

C. Plugin Organizer;
With this plugin you can save a lot of bandwidth and speed!! Because you can choose individually on every page what plugins you will load. For example, if you have the revolution slider only on the homepage, you can enable it only on the home page and disable it on all other pages. And it will not load all the css and js files 🙂
You can also choose the plugin load order.

D. Ewww Optimizer.
Optimizes the images, I used it in the past and it was good. I don’t know if is better or not than Smush.it, but I fully suggest you to use it.

A BIG TIP ABOUT IMAGES:
If you don’t have Adobe Photoshop, download it. You will find cracks allover the internet.
1. When you save an image for web and devices, you can keep a high resolutions but you must reduce the quality. I change it to 55-60%, depends on the image.
2. Use only jpegs when you don’t need transparent backgrounds.
3. Check Progressive!! google progressive jpegs if you don’t know what it is.

Do you need me to make your WP site uber fast? Contact me for a price quote. I don’t charge much 🙂

[Radu]

Hi there,
let me help you!
You create a regular page with the name Home and url home (so the permalink would be http://sitename.com/home). After that you go to WordPress Settings -> Reading Settings and choose Front page displays: A static page, and from the drop down you can choose the page you want to become the front page (in your case, the new page you created: Home).

And btw, enable the pretty permalinks 🙂

Regards,
Radu

[Radu]

Improve the mega menu (make it look a little more like Ubermenu:) )
– possibility to add custom text, shortcode, custom images.