W3 Total Cache

I really don’t get this plug-in.

I got it working and it really improved speed from page loads up to 7 seconds to page loads up to 3 seconds which is significant.

However, without changing anything, today performance is crap. It’s as though it’s not even working. Where do I start? I’ve got everything set as recommended. I don’t want to “run reports” because I know it will slow performance and I can’t afford even worse performance right now. I’ve already been bragging about how the site is faster now I look like an idiot.

I enabled the Google Page Speed and it largely tells me what I know: performance sucks. What kind of feedback am I getting? None! How am I supposed to know what settings to use if the defaults and recommends don’t work?