WordPress and CloudFlare
If you have decided to use W3 Total Cache as your caching mechanism, the next logical step is to use CloudFlare as an accelerator.
Think of CloudFlare as your website accelerator (in simple terms it’s a distributed hosted nginx server). Enabling CloudFlare (the basic plan is free) on your WordPress installation with W3 Total Cache is really simple:
- Go to W3 Total Cache’s General Settings and click on the CloudFlare signup link.
- Signup with the Free CloudFlare plan
- Review your CloudFlare zone file (you will probably not have to change anything)
- Change your blog’s domain name-server records
- Configure W3 Total Cache to use CloudFlare by configuring your API key and security settings.
I noticed a dramatic speed improvement with CloudFlare compared to just running W3 Total Cache.
Warning: Since CloudFlare acts as a caching proxy server, any subsequent theme or plugin changes will take some time to replicate. The easiest way to force a refresh is to obviously minify your files in W3 Total Cache and then changing your CloudFlare settings at CloudFlare to development. This will bypass the caching proxy for four hours, avoiding any style-sheet or JS issues.
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