How to Configure W3 Total Cache Settings

Reading time: 3 minutes | Difficulty: Intermediate

Overview

W3 Total Cache is a complex plugin with many settings. This guide covers the settings that work best with WP Simple Pay. For more on W3 Total Cache itself, see their documentation.

Since WP Simple Pay 4.17.5, payment forms load their data from your site as the page opens, so pages with payment forms can be cached. You only need to exclude your payment confirmation pages, plus WP Simple Pay’s scripts if you use minification.

Prerequisites

• WP Simple Pay 4.17.5 or later. On earlier versions, also exclude your payment form pages.
• The W3 Total Cache plugin installed and active

Cache Settings

Go to Performance → Page Cache and scroll to Advanced → Never cache the following pages. Enter the page slug of each payment confirmation page.

For example, if your payment success page is at https://yourwebsite.com/payment-confirmation, add payment-confirmation as shown below:

JavaScript Settings

Minifying and combining scripts can cause issues with more than just your payment forms. We recommend that you do not Combine scripts.

As the W3 Total Cache plugin itself puts it:

In the best case, the usage of minify optimization is a trial and error process, it’s not an “instant on” or “set it and forget it” optimization technique.

There are lots of reasons why minify cannot work for all sites under all circumstances and they have nothing to do with W3 Total Cache: Your site’s content, your server(s), your plugins and your theme are all unique, that means that minify cannot automatically work for everyone.

Scripts to Exclude from Optimization

If you do use JavaScript optimizations, exclude the following scripts in the Performance → Minify → Advanced area:

js.stripe.com/v3/
simpay-public-shared.js
simpay-public-upe.js
accounting.min.js
simpay-public-pro-upe.js

Clear the Cache

After saving your changes, and after updating WP Simple Pay to 4.17.5, empty all W3 Total Cache caches.

What’s Next?

• How to Resolve Issues Caused by Cache and Optimization Plugins – General caching and JavaScript optimization guidance
• How to Set Payment Success and Failure Pages – Find the pages to exclude