W3 Total Cache – upgrade warning

Update April 2013 – 0.9.2.9 contains an important security fix, and also appears to be working much more smoothly. We now highly recommend updating to the latest version.

The W3 Total Cache plugin is widely regarded as one of the best caching plugins for WordPress, coming with numerous options for optimising performance in large WordPress sites with a lot of traffic.

Within the last week, a new update was released (0.9.2.6) – the first major upgrade to the plugin since August 2011. While this comes with a number of bug fixes and new features, it has also introduced a large number of problems – ranging from minor issues to large ones causing sites to either slow down dramatically or not load at all. There have already been two further updates to fix some of these problems, but there are still a huge number of bugs being reported:

http://wordpress.org/support/plugin/w3-total-cache

Given time, the plugin is sure to return to its high standards, but for now we would advise not upgrading the plugin past version 0.9.2.5.

If you have already upgraded to 0.9.2.6 or higher, and have noticed problems occurring on your site and/or want to downgrade, you can do so as follows:

• If you want to save all of the configuration associated with your current version, back up the wp-content/w3-total-cache-config.php file via FTP or your site’s file manager.
• Deactivate and delete the W3 Total Cache plugin. If you cannot access the backend of your site due to errors caused by the problem, you may need to delete the plugin folder via FTP, as well as the advanced-cache.php, db.php, object-cache.php, w3-total-cache-config.php files and w3tc folder in the wp-content directory.
• Download version 0.9.2.5 under ‘Other Versions’ here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/developers/
• Go to Plugins – Add New, click the ‘Upload’ button and upload the zip you just downloaded.
• Reactivate the plugin, and either update the caching settings, or reupload the backed-up w3-total-cache-config.php file to wp-content to restore previous settings.