How will running MaxCDN with w3-Total-Cache as a wordpress plugin along with Advanced PHP Cache with VPS hosting…anyone have any experiences with all these together? I found this video very interesting How to optimize browser caching • Yoast . Also, will I still benefit from having PHP Speedy if I do all of the above?
Those 3 should work fine together.
Advanced PHP Cache (APC) will accelerate the actual php code execution. Think of it as a faster version of PHP that doesn’t touch your page code at all.
W3 Total Cache is an application-level accelerator for wordpress that caches content, combines CSS/JS and simplifies configuration for a CDN.
MaxCDN is a CDN (and for wordpress the configuration and use is simplified with W3 Total Cache).
PHP Speedy should be removed if you install W3 Total Cache. It is redundant and handles part of what W3 will do for your site.
Awesome, that is what I was looking to find out…you told me to try PHP Speedy, but then I got MaxCDN up and running and switched to W3-Total-Cache so I started thinking that their might be some conflict because some of the functions did seem redundant…the problem is that when I deactivate PHP Speedy, then my css & js combined score goes down to an “F” :(. If it’s not one thing, then it is another…I might just need to mess with the W3-Total-Cache settings?
I would think so. W3 total cache is supposed to do file combining as well (though I’ve never used it myself).
Awesome, that is what I was looking to find out…you told me to try PHP Speedy, but then I got MaxCDN up and running and switched to W3-Total-Cache so I started thinking that their might be some conflict because some of the functions did seem redundant…the problem is that when I deactivate PHP Speedy, then my css & js combined score goes down to an “F” :(. If it’s not one thing, then it is another…I might just need to mess with the W3-Total-Cache settings?
I ditched 6 plugins that I didn’t really need and now this is the best I have seen and I dropped my start render time by 2 seconds, so I assume it was one of the plugins, but not PHP Speedy because my render time was slow before I added it.
Nice. Yeah, the unfortunate thing with wordpress is that plugins will often add their javascript to all page requests even if the plugin isn’t active for that page so it’s important to keep the plugins installed to the bare minimum.
I am down as low as ever in the plugin department now, but what a journey this has been…this can all be pretty overwhelming for someone that didn’t know much about websites to begin with, but I have persevered and probably asked too many questions. This has been a very cooperative and giving environment though, so I am appreciative of that…it kind of gets addicting though once you see improvement and gain a little knowledge, but where do you draw the line and accept the results so you can move on to things like SEO? 
Lol, yep. I think the thing that probably frustrates me the most is that YOU shouldn’t have to know or care about all of this stuff. Hopefully we’ll get there one day but I’d love for Wordpress (and the other CMS’s and platforms) to just do all of the optimizations automatically so site owners could focus on the actual content.
It’s a battle for sure…I added a WP plugin I found this morning called “footer-javascript”…wow, it really brought my start render time down bigtime WebPageTest Test - Running web page performance and optimization tests... !!!
I’m still battling with combining of JS and CSS though…can I maybe try WP Minify or will it conflict with W3-Total-Cache?
Cool. Hadn’t heard of that one before. Just be a little careful that your site still works. One of the difficulties in moving code to the bottom is that if some inline code on the page itself tries to call a function that hasn’t loaded yet you will get some broken behavior (this can’t happen if the javascript is loaded at the top which is why it’s often there - because it is just easier to do).
For the CSS combining, it looks like you need to explicitly give it a list of files (from the FAQ):
[quote]How do I find the JS and CSS to optimize (minify) them with this plugin?
View your page source in your browser and search for any , or tags that contain external CSS or JS files and one by one add them to the minify settings page. Do not include any CSS in conditional statements (unless you know what you are doing) like:[/quote]