Fixed: W3 Total Cache Crashed My WordPress!

In the previous post, I have mentioned briefly about speed up your self-hosted WordPress blog by hard-code some of the PHP queries. Unfortunately as soon as that is done, my little blog start to go crazy: everything was squeezed at the left part of the screen, making the blog so ugly that even I have no intention to look at it any longer.

After a few trials and errors (disable all plugins and re-enable them one by one), I noticed that the issue only occurs when W3 Total Cache was enabled, and as soon as it is disabled, ZAY Blog looks nice and pretty again.

At first I thought it was a CDN issue, so I put ZAY Blog in development mode in Cloudflare (so that it does not cache anything from the website) and also purged the cache from MaxCDN, no luck.

W3 Total Cache is a complicated plugin so I really do not intend to crack open the code and see how it worked. So I had two options: 1. Google around and see if anyone else had the similar issue before or 2. remove the plugin.

Option 2 is out of question since W3 Total Cache is such a beautiful piece of work and in fact is the only plugin that I know that support both MaxCDN and Cloudflare nicely. So I went to option 1 and after half an hour of searching, this post saved me.

Basically, you will need to turn off the automatic minify and run it in manual mode, or essentially disable that functionality.

After I switched to manual mode and re-enabled the plugin, everything started to show nicely and I can use Cloudflare and MaxCDN again!

I guess moral of the story is: 1. Google knows everything, and 2. Sometimes the seemingly complicated problems have the simplest solutions, don’t give up and you will be able to find it.