Hello @lelb
First of all, thank you for your review, and I am sorry about the bad experience you’ve had with W3 Total Cache.
The optimal W3 Total Cache configuration takes into account a number of factors: your theme, your plugins, the technologies available on the server. Since everyone’s site and traffic and theme is different, there is no one size fits all solution. W3 Total Cache is a complex plugin with a lot of features so yes it may take some time to configure.
I am sorry your website cherished. When you configure W3 Total Cache and especially when doing this on shared hosting, the only available caching method is caching to disk. This however can prove to be resource-consuming. So if you have Page cache, Minify, Database Cache, and Object Cache, and all caching to disk, there is going to be a lot of space on your disk occupied depending on the size of your website. This being said, the “junk” you mentioned are the cached files (Object Cache, Page Cache, Database Cache, etc).
Once again I am very sorry about the experience you had With W3TC and please let me know if we can help you with the configuration.
Thanks!
