W3 Total Cache is web performance optimization for WordPress and Buddy Press. Probably the most complete and the easiest plug-in that can speed up your WordPress blog. 
W3 Total Cache works out of the box and doesn’t require much knowledge about web coding or servers. Simply
test your configuration and deploy the settings.
There are many benefits of caching website and I will list few of the most important:
- Few times faster website
- Improved website rankings and most likely lower bounce rate
- "Instant" subsequent page views: browser caching
- Pages render quicker
- Reduced page load time: increased visitor time on site; visitors view more pages
- Improved server performance
- Minify settings and gzip compression save bandwidth
One of the best features is that W3 Total Cache now uses the Page Speed Online API to provide Page Speed suggestions to WordPress users.
Here are some of the features:
- Compatible with shared, VPS and dedicated hosting
- Compatible with apache 1.3+, nginx 0.7+, , IIS 5+ or litespeed 4.0.2+.
- Easy CDN integration
- caching of pages by referrer or groups of user agents including theme switching for groups of referrers or user agents
- Mobile Support
- minified and compressed cached pages and posts in memory, on disk or CDN
- minified and compressed cached JS and CSS in memory, on disk or CDN
- Caching of database objects in memory or on disk
- Etc…
Right, all above features can definitely improve the score at most popular web speed tools like YSlow and Google Page Speed and those static tests represents reality.
Few Tips
- Using CDN or self hosted CDN will give you A-score for using “cooking free domain”, but in reality this may slow down website and actually will add extra HTTP request which is not good. So if it isn’t necessary and your blog traffic isn’t that high, I think purchasing CDN service isn’t very good idea.
- Minify setting may screw up your Google Analytics data, this is a known bug which doesn’t appear always, and in some cases is related to Theme or Plug-in that is used for Analytics code. Turning off minify will fix the problem with GA.
- Plug-in also works with Buddy Press.
- After installing or deleting another plug-in don’t forget to delete the cache.
- Experiment with different options until you find the perfect speed.
Plug-in is free and you can download it here: W3 Total Cache
You can find more information about website speed here
