Getting W3 Total cache to work with WordPress Mobile Pack

If your WordPress site has enough traffic you have been considering a cache plugin. Most people download WP Super Cache, plainly said the most popular plugin for WordPress. W3 Total Cache is a different plugin that aims to achieve about the same, but has a number of advantages such as support CDN, minifying CSS and JS and more. From a quick look at the code it looks much lighter and more in general it has a different approach to cache.

While W3 Total Cache is a great plugin and certainly serves a large community, its support for mobile plugins falls short and the main reason is that mobile plugins normally try to change the content of a page dramatically, something W3 Total Cache was not designed for. The plugin comes with a simple “switcher” to redirect mobile devices to a different domain that HAS to be hosted in a different place. This is, of course, not ideal if you want to have your mobile plugin installed on your WordPress blog and want to host your content in one place. I have started the conversation with Frederick on the WordPress support forums and hopefully this will bring to something good.

In the meantime, do not despair, you CAN get W3 Total Cache to work with the WordPress Mobile Pack and with other mobile plugins. If you know about mobile user-agents, the solution is to add keywords to the list of rejected user-agent strings. This will stop the cache to work completely on mobile, but at least it will produce content that is mobile friendly and all your PC visitors will still get the cached content. If you need a step-by-step manual, here is a very good one with images and examples, Blog Building: How to Configure W3 Total Cache to Work with WPtouch for WordPress.

For now, this is the best you can do. Stay tuned for more updates.

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