Last week I wanted to improve the performance of a webshop running WordPress with WooCommerce. So I decided to realize this by using the W3 Total Cache Plugin. I am already familiar with this one and made good experience with it. I thought that there would be some special configuration needed because not every single page of a webshop should be cached. Just think of the shopping cart or checkout. Please make sure to apply these cache settings for your WooCommerce store with W3 Total Cache! Thus you do not encounter any issues during checkout process.
I found the documentation at WooCommerce directly:
https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/configuring-caching-plugins/
They give the following instructions:
1.) Exclude these pages from caching in the Page Cache Settings:
- Cart
- My Account
- Checkout
2.) Ensure you add mfunc to the Ignored comment stems option in the Minify settings:
With this configuration I still encountered problems at the Checkout process. So I also included the shop* page at the exceptions: (keep in mind that this was a German webshop, so the permalinks are a bit different)
In the Database Cache settings, the _wc_session_ was added to the Ignored Query Stems:
Finally, with all these settings I looked up from different sources, everything in the WooCommerce shop is running fine with activated W3 Total Cache plugin and the general speed of the system got improved by different technologies like Page Caching, Minifying and Browser Caching.
