WordPress 3.6 on Rackspace Cloud Sites and W3 Total Cache 0.9.3 Plugin

WordPress 3.6 on Rackspace Cloud Sites and W3 Total Cache 0.9.3 Plugin with perfect configuration demands quite good idea on many aspects,here are some for you. Our older guide on W3 Total Cache was officially suggested by the Plugin Developer Frederick Townes on WordPress Official Repository for optimizing WordPress, you can see the reference as text file here. We wrote many articles on .htaccess tricks for Page Speed Optimization, Page Speed tricks before, you can perform a search on this website to get a kind of list. It is quite obvious, with 5K+ articles, its hard to link towards the article possibly you are in need.

Why a New Article cum Guide for WordPress 3.6 on Rackspace Cloud Sites and W3 Total Cache 0.9.3 Plugin?

Many things has been changed since past few years in Page Speed and Optimization scenario and it is important to give an update. So, this guide on WordPress 3.6 on Rackspace Cloud Sites and W3 Total Cache 0.9.3 Plugin will consider the following things as taken or you already know :

1. You are using a good HTML5 WordPress Theme. You know the minimum about HTML5.
2. You know a bit advanced things around WordPress, like WP_eneque script
3. You know about mod pagespeed
4. Have some idea on .htaccess and php flush
5. You know that CyberDuck is a free tool to upload things to Rackspace Cloud Files manually

In other words – this guide on WordPress 3.6 on Rackspace Cloud Sites and W3 Total Cache 0.9.3 Plugin is for updating the knowledge, not really for a noob.

WordPress 3.6 on Rackspace Cloud Sites and W3 Total Cache 0.9.3 Plugin

There are points of compromise depending on number of hits, type of website etceteras. A commercial or service website can use CDN for media attachments. But for a blog, this is a loss of Traffic – its unlikely that Google Image Search will really show the original post image in search to attract the visitors. One image can be discounted for SEO purpose. Within a huge number of static objects, it will not create a burden for a website up to 50K hits per day. But for more busy website, the point of SEO for images becoming a blunder from server side management.

This is quite nicely written topic for the right settings :

Ignore the official statement and comments – both are wrong. Only read Step 1 to 10. You will use only two service to test :

One is Google Page Speed :

Second is Web Page Test :

There are lot of other tools, most known is Pingdom :

For practical purpose, you need to load a blog with ~5 Ads within 4-5 seconds, with a practical on browser feel that it loads faster. This is an average score of Google’s business webpage :

3.5 seconds with 85/100 score. Practically worser or kind of same than ours. Our average is 93/100 with CDN Off. We sometime load from CDN, sometimes from FTP server. So, within 83 – 93 is acceptable and down to earth score. This is based on Web Page Test score, which is the Gold Standard. But, we need to consider Google Page Speed score too. The Cadbury Chocolate (webpage of Google shown in test above) gave 91 score with two Yellow errors :

Your page has 2 blocking script resources and 7 blocking CSS resources. This causes a delay in rendering your page.

Obviously, Google has made the “Rules” which are comfortable for them ! An examiner can never be a candidate of the same examination ! What is understood is –  “2 blocking script resources and 7 blocking CSS resources” do not matter much. 91 score is near insane and not possible to reach with our various Social Media buttons and Ads. Google need not to use Digg, for example.

So, you performed the initial setup, it will give a score of 70 or closer – the biggest issue happens with CSS :

• Minify with only combine option, that will not break your Theme
• May be you can never minify

But, you can serve them from CDN (Rackspace Cloud Files) with WP_eneque script function. What you have to do is for javascript is to add this to de-register any js or any script and serve from CDN or anywhere with defer :

Same is the truth for CSS. Sometimes one combined CSS becomes so big that manual combining in to two parts becomes the ideal method. Containers (that is URL) must be different, non-SSL for non-SSL websites and not more than 4 stuffs should be served from one container for one webpage. This is how our one page loads :

Theoretically it is loading within few seconds, but in practical life it will take more time. Do not cache so much that your server’s CPU catches fire! Indeed, too much caching increases the consumption of compute cycles. As you are using a PaaS, you can add Varnish HTTP Accelerator and Varnish Cache too on separate servers. It is quite complicated setup for high load websites.

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Errata : Originally, we WRONGLY, UNINTENTIONALLY published the article with the Title WordPress 3.6 on Rackspace Cloud Files and W3 Total Cache 0.9.3 Plugin, this has been corected to WordPress 3.6 on Rackspace Cloud Sites and W3 Total Cache 0.9.3 Plugin. If you notice further wrong usage of Rackspace Cloud Files within this article, please comment below.