In previous tests, Pingdom.com rated W3 Total Cache rather poorly for combining JavaScript files. Because of this, an effort was made to run W3 Total Cache alongside Autoptimize (the latter was being used to combine & minify JavaScript).
Initial results appeared very encouraging, with page load speeds around 0.5 – 0.6 seconds. However, it was later discovered that these numbers were completely wrong: Autoptimize & W3 Total Cache were interfering with each other and causing a 500 Internal Server Error on Ancient Greek Keyboards.
This 500 error occurred under the following conditions:
- W3 Total Cache (JS Minify enabled) plus Autoptimize (Optimize JavaScript Code enabled)
- W3 Total Cache (JS Minify disabled) plus Autoptimize (Optimize JavaScript Code enabled)
This incompatibility means that Autoptimize cannot be used to optimize JavaScript alongside W3 Total Cache (ie: Autoptimize can only be used to Combine & minify CSS alongside W3 Total Cache).
Other posts in this series:
- Siteground Speed Test (With & Without Static Caching)
- Speed Test of Swift Performance Lite plugin
- Caching Plugin Speed Tests: Swift Performance Lite vs. W3 Total Cache
- Speed Test: W3 Total Cache With Autoptimize
- Speed Test of WP-Rocket plugin (default settings)
- Speed Test of WP-Rocket plugin (additional settings)
- WP Rocket Speed Test (with & without SiteGround Static Caching)
