I made a new website using Wordpress, it’s hosted on HostGator, I’m using W3 Total Cache set up through a step by step tutorial with recommended settings. I also added the CloudFlare CDN plugin, so that should be working now too.
I ran webpagetest to try to speed up my site, compressed some images, etc., but I still get an F on Cache Static Content. I would like to improve this for a faster load.
Any recommendations on how to improve my Cache Static Content grade?
Any other suggestions on speeding up my site?
There are so many requests being made to external services which all have to be resolved before the page load can finish. Those requests are not being cached. I noted 167 requests using the Chrome dev tools → Network tab.
If changing theme isn’t an option, try WP Rocket as W3TC seems to have been abandoned. You can find a comparison of WordPress caching options at 20 Best WordPress Cache Plugins: Benchmarked! (they recommend WP Rocket).
I don’t know much about HostGator’s setup but having a Varnish cache in front of the web server helps a lot. I manage my own servers but also have a few sites on SiteGround and some of their plans have good caching options (I know the Go Geek package has static, dynamic and memcached options).
