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Optimize Multilingual Website Performance Using W3 Total Cache

Dario
Updated
October 18, 2024

W3 Total Cache helps you boost your website performance as it provides page caching, CSS, and JavaScript minification while enabling content delivery network integration. In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to configure W3 Total Cache for your multilingual WordPress website.

Website performance is critical to a successful website. Page loading time affects both user loyalty and whether your website obtains a higher search engine ranking. Before activating and configuring W3 Total Cache on your website, we strongly recommend that you test your website performance using Pingdom Tools or Google’s PageSpeed Insight. After configuring W3 Total Cache, you can check your website’s performance again and compare it with the earlier results.

Here are some reasons why you should consider optimizing the performance of your website:

  1. Decreases page loading time. You can thus provide your visitors with a more convenient experience.
  2. Increases search engine ranking.
  3. Decreases the load on your hosting server.

Getting Started

Please ensure that you complete your website design and have your website translated to your desired languages before activating and configuring W3 Total Cache.

Then, install and activate:

If you’re new to WPML, check out our Getting Started Guide. It quickly walks you through all the translation options you can use.

One of these options is Translate Everything Automatically – the quickest way to translate and the easiest way to keep your content up-to-date. This feature automatically translates pages, posts, custom post types, custom fields, taxonomies, WooCommerce products, and more as you add and edit content.

Configuring W3 Total Cache on Multilingual Websites

Page Caching

Caching plays a major role in boosting the performance of your website, as it reduces server load and the bandwidth used to load the page. This is accomplished by temporarily storing content from previous requests to serve subsequent requests. To enable page caching using W3 Total Cache, follow these steps:

  1. From your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Performance → General Settings and find the Page Cache section. Enable the Page Cache option and for the Page Cache Method, select Disk: Enhanced. Then click on the Save all settings button.
Enabling page caching in the general settings
  1. To tweak the page caching behavior, navigate to Performance → Page Cache. You can see that the page is divided into five main sections.

In the General section, we recommend using the settings shown in the screenshot below. Once you have applied these settings, click on the Save all settings button.

Configuring the general settings for page caching

In the Aliases, Cache Preload, Purge Policy: Page Cache and Advanced sections, we recommend retaining the default settings.

CSS and JavaScript (JS) Minification

A WordPress website includes many CSS and JavaScript files that come from both the active theme and different plugins that you have running on your site. Rather than loading every CSS and JS file separately, minification combines and compresses the size of these files, resulting in faster page loading time.

To enable CSS and JS minification using W3 Total Cache, follow these steps:

  1. From your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Performance → General Settings and find the Minify section. Enable the Minify option, and then set the Minify mode to Auto and the Minify Cache Method to Memcached. Remember to click on the Save all settings button.
Enable minification from the general settings
  1. To tweak the minification settings, navigate to Performance → Minify. You can see that the page is divided into five main sections. We recommend that you retain the default settings in the General section. Then, simply click on the Save all settings button.
Minify – General settings section

Similarly, in the HTML & XML section, we recommend that you don’t make any changes to the default settings.

Minify – HTML & XML settings section

In the JS section, enable the JS minify settings and choose the Combine only option. Click on the Save all settings button.

Minify – JS section settings

In the CSS section, check the following three options:

  • Enable
  • Preserved comment removal (not applied when combine only is active)
  • Line break removal (not applied when combine only is active)

Click on the Save all settings button.

Minify – CSS section settings

We recommend that you retain the default settings in Advanced. You should now receive notification messages from W3 Total Cache to empty the cache. Click on the Empty the page cache and Empty the minify cache buttons.

Empty the caches

Configuring the Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of servers distributed in different locations to deliver the content of your website to your users based on their location. Configuring and running a CDN on your website reduces page loading time and thus enhances your website performance. Specifically, a CDN stores a cached version of your website’s static content in different geographical locations. Then, the nearest server for each user fulfills the requests, thereby reducing the page loading time.

Note that W3 Total Cache does not provide a CDN service. If you wish to set up and run a CDN on your website, you must obtain it from a CDN service provider.

To configure the CDN using W3 Total Cache, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to Performance → General Settings. In the CDN section, Enable the CDN and select the CDN Type you wish to use. Press the Save all settings button.
Enabling the CDN and choosing a CDN Type
  1. Go to Performance → CDN. In the General section, we recommend that you retain all default settings. Click on the Save all settings button.
Configuring the General CDN settings

If you see the notification message that follows, click on the unsuccessful transfer queue button and process the remaining queue.

Click on the unsuccessful transfer queue button and process the remaining queue.
  1. In the Configuration: Objects section, fill in your CDN details. Depending on the CDN Type you use, the options on this page may be different. Please choose the Enabled (always use SSL) option for SSL support. Click Save all settings.
CDN – Configuration: Objects section settings

We recommend that you retain the default settings in the Advanced section.

Known Issues

WPML works fine with this plugin, but sometimes there could be minor issues we're working on. This is expected as both plugins provide frequent updates.

Current unresolved issues:

You can also search all known issues including previously resolved issues for this plugin.

Getting Help – WPML Translation Support Forum

In case you need help using W3 Total Cache with WPML, visit WPML’s support forum.