WooCommerce is one of the biggest players in the e-commerce ecosystem, but being built on top of WordPress means that it’s performance can sometimes be underwhelming. One way to increase the performance of WooCommerce is to also run a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache.
W3 Total Cache can be a bit overwhelming to newcomers, and the extra configuration required by W3TC is just another layer of complexity. The good news is that if you have a bit of knowledge, configuring W3 Total Cache for WooCommerce isn’t too hard.
Basic Configuration
The first thing you need to do once you’ve installed W3 Total Cache is enable all the caches. This includes:
- Page Cache
- Opcode Cache
- Database Cache
- Object Cache
- Fragment Cache
Going in to what each of these does is beyond the scope of this article, but go ahead an enable them all. You are unlikely to run in to a situation where these being enable will cause you trouble.
Exceptions
This is the part of the exercise that is specific to WooCommerce. To make W3 Total Cache work with WooCommerce, you need to make sure that the dynamic pages of WooCommerce are added to the exception list. To add pages to the exception list go to: Performance -> Page Cache. After that scroll to “Never Cache the Following Pages” and add:
- cart – This is the page where your customers go to see what’s in their cart. This should remain dynamic and not be cached.
- checkout – This is the page where your customers go to check out. This should also stay dynamic.
Done
That’s all there is to it! You’re WooCommerce site will not perform much better.