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This is a great free plugin, quite possibly the best free plugin out there for caching. In fact it is so good it prevented an issue that would have caused my site to crash and I did not discover the issue until I disabled the plugin. My hosting provider had given my WordPress site only 256MB of memory, the site ran perfect with the W3TC plugin enabled but crashed when I tried to disable it.
After hours of troubleshooting and feedback from the W3TC developers I figured out what was going on and had the memory limit raised.
The reason for the 4 stars vs 5 is that it did not have all of the features that I needed to optimize my site and the minify feature in particular broke images on my website. Some would load slowly and about half would not load at all unless you refreshed the page. Also I had to run this plugin along with Autoptimize to get the best GTMetrix scores.
In the end I switched to WP Rocket and the performance difference is nothing short of amazing. Yes it’s costly, but for me it is worth it. My GTMetrix score went from 86 to 97 and I don’t need Autoptimize anymore.
If you do not have a site like mine (thousands of images, slideshows, complex theme, videos, optimized mobile and desktop versions, multiple landing pages, etc) W3TC is probably all you need. It also plays well with Autoptimize which is another free plugin. But at least in my case, WP Rocket was a better fit for my site.