The first thing you’ll want to do once you’ve activated W3Speedster is:
Run an ON/OFF test with W3Speedster’s default settings, and see how much faster your site has become already!
You’ll be able to see the improvement in loading time W3Speedster has achieved just by running in its default configuration. If you have advanced knowledge about how the rendering of a website works in the browser, you can start to further optimize your setup based on recommendations from performance testing tools like GTmetrix, Pingdom Tools, or Google Developers PageSpeed Insights. If you find that your results vary with these tools then it is best to use one tool, consecutively test your website 3 times and take the average of the results.
Are there any recommended settings for W3Speedster?
There isn’t one recommended configuration of W3Speedster that can be used on every site. Themes, plugins, and hosting environments can vary greatly. Therefore, some settings will work differently on different websites.
There are even settings like File optimization that will work perfectly fine on one website, but won’t work at all on another. So sometimes leaving a setting entirely disabled can be your best bet! On the other hand, a number of key features—like CSS Minification, JS Minification, and WebP support are completely automated; you just have to check them and they’ll quietly work their magic under the hood and make your site faster without you having to move a finger.
Automated features
The following features are fully automated in W3Speedster:
- HTML Caching
- Enabling WebP support
- Image Quality control
- Lazy Loading
- CSS Minification
- JS Minification
- Combining of inline and 3rd party scripts
- Combining Google Fonts
Settings panes
Looking for a specific setting? Here’s a quick overview of where’s what in W3Speedster:
HTML Cache
- HTML caching
- Minify HTML
- Cache Preload
- URL Exclusion
‘General’ Tab
- License Key
- CDN URL
- CDN Exclusion
- Leverage Browsing Cache
- Gzip Compression
- Query parameter
- INP Issues
- Cache Path
‘CSS’ Tab
- CSS Minification
- Combine Google Fonts
- Critical Css
- CLS Fixes
‘JavaScript’ Tab
- JavaScript Minification
- Combine (concatenate) JavaScript
- Load URL
‘Exclusion’ Tab
- JavaScript Minification
- Preload Resources
- Exclude Image
- Exclude Pages
- Exclude CSS
- Lazy Load
- Exclude JS
Custom Code
- Custom Css and JS Code
‘Cache’ tab
- HTML Cache
- CSS/JS Cache
- Critical CSS Cache
Image Settings
- Image Optimization
- Image Size Adjustment
- Lazy Loading
- WebP Support
- Image Quality Control
‘Hooks’ Tab
- Predefined PHP function
‘Web Vitals Log’ Tab
- Core Web Vitals Log