W3 Cache makes Cornerstone hang - What do you suggest as the right settings?

Support
#1

Hello,

I currently am using W3 Total Cache on my website for caching pages and also use Cloudflare free tier as the CDN.

I spent the past couple of days tweaking settings to minimize the loading speeds till I was satisfied. I barely did any configuration changes today but all of a sudden, the editing pages would not load and the loader animation was stuck in a loop.

Please not that I was not facing any issues in the past 24 hours after all settings were changed.

Currently I have deactivated W3 till I edit the site and launch, but it would not be feasible to deactivate the plugin every time I need to make edits.

Can you please suggest what are the optimal settings for W3 to work with Pro? If you guys have a settings file for W3, and you could share it; that would be great!

Sincerely,
Aamir Abbas

#2

Hi Aamir,

Thanks for reaching out.

Unfortunately, we can’t cover any 3rd party plugins configuration. The maintenance or management of the cache should be users responsibility including cleaning and even disabling for testing.

But, I can recommend these

  1. Make sure not to use multiple but same features at the same time (example, if you’ll use W3 cache then don’t use CF’s cache and vice versa, it’s kind of overkill).

  2. Don’t enable cache for logged in user, this is possible with cache plugin like W3, but not possible with CF. I recommend checking the plugin’s documentation for this feature.

Since it’s not possible with CF, you can just disable optimization for specific section of site, https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200172316-How-do-I-exclude-a-specific-URL-from-Cloudflare-s-caching-. Then you should exclude http://example.com/pro* or http://example.com/x*

  1. Minification could break anything, if not needed then just disable it. Or exclude the files from minification like from here https://theme.co/apex/forum/t/static-files-to-exclude-form-combine-and-or-minify/9823/10. You can check the plugin documentation on how to exclude them. Those files are already minified and shouldn’t be minified, and in CF, there is no exclude function so make sure to disable the minify feature.

But again, this may not solve it as we know, cache is against change and the editing is a change. Which is why recommend to only use optimization when the site is done. If you’re making many editing then I recommend to disable your optimization and just enable it when the time it’s all done.

Thanks!

#3

Hello Rad,

Thank you for the update.

For anyone else stumbling upon this thread, in my case disabling minification for logged in users in the W3 settings helped sort the issue for me.

Sincerely,
Aamir Abbas

#4

Glad to hear that and thanks for sharing the solution with fellow community members. :slight_smile:

#5

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