W3 Total Cache and DONOTMINIFY

2013.02.07 :: {web} :: #wordpress #w3 total cache

I use W3 Total Cache for all my of my website caching needs and usually it works great. There have been a few problems with the latest release, but that is for another post.

One issue that I just experienced recently with one of my sites is that even though minification (or minifying) was turned on, none of my CSS or Javascript files were actually being minified. When I would "View Source", all of my files where in their original, un-minified form.

If I scrolled down to the bottom of the source, where W3 Total Cache inserts its cache statistics, I saw something like this:

Minified using disk: basic (DONOTMINIFY constant is defined)
Page Caching using disk: enhanced (Cookie is rejected)
Database Caching using apc (Cookie is rejected)
Object Caching 1293/1305 objects using apc

The DONOTMINIFY statement jumped out at me. After doing some quick research, I discovered this forum topic, which detailed that the problem is actually in my Wordpress SEO plugin, made by Yoast. More specifically, the "Allow tracking of this WordPress installs anonymous data" option that is available under the plugin's Dashboard, under Tracking, was enabled. By disabling** **this option, minification works like a charm again.

So, in summary, if you see the DONOTMINIFY notification in your source code, and you have the Wordpress SEO plugin from Yoast, make sure that the anonymous tracking option is turned off.