So I’m always looking for ways to improve the load time on this blog, and my wife’s blog over at Vibrant Living. While searching Google on the benefits of eliminating whitespace in your HTML, CSS and Javascript files, I stumbled across a WordPress Plugin called W3 Total Cache.

It look interesting so I started reading the info page on it. Now, it made some big claims, and backed them up by listing the whos-whos of big blogs that rely on it to optimize the load time of their pages and posts. I include a snippet below:

The fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. Trusted by many popular blogs like: mashable.com, briansolis.com, pearsonified.com, ilovetypography.com, noupe.com, webdesignerdepot.com, freelanceswitch.com, tutsplus.com, yoast.com, css-tricks.com, css3.info and others — W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

So, I decided to give it a try. I used a website tool called Pingdom Tools to capture a full page load test both before, and after installing and configuring the plugin.

Here’s my before stats for darrylkraemer.com (link to Pingdom archived stats):

And here are my stats after installation and configuration for darrylkraemer.com (link to Pingdom stats), using the default settings for W3 Total Cache:

Big difference. Over 11 seconds load time, to just over 6 seconds load time. The biggest improvement was in the Time To First Byte (TTFB) as shown in the second screenshots for the before and after. The total package delivered to the browser was the same size, but the time it took to get there was considerably quicker.

I tried this on my wife’s blog, and achieved similar results as shown below.

I want to share a neat Firefox plugin with you, that shows you TTFB, Total Load Time, Amount of Data Delivered, and Number of Requests, all in your status bar. This will help you test changes without having to go to Pingdom to see the results. It won’t replace Pingdom’s ability to show you exactly what pictures or scripts may be slowing your page load, which is a great feature if you’ve made some change, or added a plugin that suddenly slowed your load time signifigantly.

Hope these tips help, and if you tried out W3 Total Cache, I’d love to hear your results in the comments below.