Just ran the website through google web speed checker tool. It is giving two major issues and they are the reson beind low speed. One is server response time and other is browser caching.
How to leverage browser caching in wordpress? I am using w3total cache with my wordpress. What should be done to leverage caching now?
How to increase server response time? My website is hosted with hostgator and the bandwidth is well allocated to the account, so there is no problem with bandwidth allocation. Do I need to speak with hosting provider? I am not facing this issue with other websites hosted on same server.
I don’t use W3 Total Cache, because several hosts have had issues with it. But on hostgator I’ve used WP Super Cache (which is developed by Automattic) without any issues.
Anyhow, first of all you should make sure to configure it correctly, that it is in fact doing the caching.
For the second, a good way to minimize the size and speed is to minify the whole site. There are a couple of plugins that do that, but if you are working on your own theme/development you should push to production the minified/compressed versions of that.
Another thing you can do is set up a CDN (there are a couple that are free and pretty cool) and check if your cache plugin is compatible (some have built-in features to use both properly).
As usual, check that you don’t have useless plugins or out-of date stuff. For instance, use P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) to see if there’s something that’s leaking your memory, I had a plugin for pricing tables that increased the loading site by almost 1.5s. So I switched it, and huge increase.
For now, I started using Cloudflare CDN which does support W3 Total Cache, but it says that I should either use the minify setting of the plugin or of Cloudflare. I was already using minify setting of w3 cache, so kept it unchanged.
I am using a theme to create the website. After running it through site load checkers, they are still suggesting to start using cache. I don’t know why, but maybe W3 Total Cache is not working properly. I don’t know how to check if it is working fine. But, I will install that P3 plugin which you suggested because the average load time is 7-8 seconds which is very bad.