Did you guys make any comparison between minify in w3tc vs pagespeed? Also i am curious to know how pagespeed works in terms of combine and minfiy of js/css
– does it create a file when the first request is made and serves it until expiry – how does it handle when the content of the css is changed?
thanks
We haven’t done benchmarking. Sorry to say that I am not fond of benchmarks.
I usually choose something over other by visible difference in performance and ease of use/maintenance.
w3tc gives you fine grain control so that you can choose which files to add to minify/combine. It gives you way too many options to control every aspect of process.
I started with pagespeed recently so can’t talk about internal much. It seemed easy to use and maintain. It has less “options” for minify/combine but many more other “features” like CDN, image resize, lazyload. The list is really long - https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/filters
– does it create a file when the first request is made and serves it until expiry
I think W3TC and pagespeed creates minified files on first request, if it doesn’t exist.
– how does it handle when the content of the css is changed?
In case of W3TC, cache need to purged manually. I guess pagespeed relies on “Last modified” timestamp so it can detect css/js file changes.
I will recommend using whatever works for you. Goal is to reduce pagesize and number of overall requests.
In future, we will add a command to enable/disable pagespeed easily in EE so that you can try that easily. So far pagespeed is working good on all sites on which we have added it so we hope to add support for it in EE main release soon.
@rahul286 thanks for the info. I tried w3tc, bwp-minify and pagespeed albeit independently. I did not do any benchmark but compared them against number of requests and capacity to combine and minify.
w3tc - cache + minify - broke my website at first. But after a lot of attempts configuring w3tc it came down to 3 CSS files and 2 JS files. I initially had 8-9 CSS files and 13 JS files
w3tc for cache and bwp-minify: no hassle easy setup. 2 CSS and 2 JS files. faster page load compared to w3tc minify.
Pagespeed + w3tc cache: 6CSS files + 9JS files. The combine filter was turned on but did not work as expected. not sure about the load time but i felt w3tc + bwp-minify to be faster.
May be my pagepseed config was not right.
2 years ago, I had same issue with pagespeed. Combine filter did not work. While I couldn’t fully debug it then, I came across sites where W3TC minify failed completely.
That is one reason I always stress to use whatever works for you. 
If “w3tc for cache and bwp-minify” combo is working, just use it.
Next time when you change theme, give pagespeed or other options a try and see if they work then.
Ok fair point! What would you recommend for w3tc: page cache, browser cache, object cache and database cache?
When i turn on object and database cache the backend admin slows down dramatically? what am i doing wrong?
thanks
For WordPress websites we recommend used NGINX FastCGI cache (–wpfc) with W3TC for database and object caching using Memcached. Refer: https://rtcamp.com/easyengine/docs/commands/site/ee-site-create/standard-wordpress-sites/#wordpress--fastcgi-cache
We faced same issue for some of our clients, That’s why we are testing PageSpeed.
Refer: https://rtcamp.com/tutorials/nginx/using-pagespeed/
We enabled following rules for rtcamp.com
# HTTPS Support
pagespeed FetchHttps enable;
# PageSpeed Filters
# CSS
pagespeed EnableFilters combine_css,rewrite_css;
# JS
pagespeed EnableFilters combine_javascript,rewrite_javascript;
# Images
#pagespeed EnableFilters lazyload_images;
pagespeed EnableFilters rewrite_images;
pagespeed EnableFilters convert_jpeg_to_progressive,convert_png_to_jpeg,convert_jpeg_to_webp,convert_to_webp_lossless;
# CDN
pagespeed MapRewriteDomain "https://cdn.example.com" "https://rtcamp.com";Hello @umamakesh
It’s been a long time, and we haven’t heard from you. It looks like your issue is resolved.
I am closing this support topic for now. Feel free to create a new support topic if you have any queries further. 