Imagine installing a plugin that destroys all of your hard work. That is what w3 total cache can do if you are not on exactly the right hosting.

Just yesterday I spent the whole day trying to recover 2 blogs because once I logged out of them, w3 total cache blocked me from getting back in. So you are asking why I didn’t just have my host restore the blogs to a previous point. The Blogs were fairly new. A backup wasn’t done yet and they only get backed up once per week. Never the less I had done a bunch of work on these blogs already.

I would have been furious if this was one of my big websites. In fact one of my big websites has this pluging installed and it works on different hosting. I hope I can deactivate it without problems. In terms of wp super cache vs w3 total cache, I have had problems with super cache also to be fair. Not blog killing problems but that plugin doesn’t seem to want to let me delete it once I deactivate it.

So here are the instructions for manually deleting w3 total cache once you get locked out of your blog and can’t deactivate it.

This will work in most cases but in some like one of these 2 blogs, I lost the blog totally, it didn’t work.

I don’t take any responsibility that this will work, proceed at your own risk.

Remove from the wp-content folder:

wp-content/advanced-cache.php

wp-content/db.php

wp-content/w3-total-cache-config.php

wp-content/w3tc/

wp-content/object-cache.php

wp-content/plugins/w3-total-cache/

sign into your phpMyAdmin from cpanel and bring up your database of the blog.

Drop the DB entry wp_w3tc_cdn_queue

remove all the reference to w3 added to the .htaccess file

or upload the original htaccess file if you have it.

edit

Open wp-config.php of your blog in notepad

Remove the following line in wp-config.php

file: define(‘WP_CACHE’, true);

Now in the case of one of my blogs, I was able to get in the next day, but wasn’t able to get in right after I did these deletions. Apparently there is some updating time needed on the server.

Do yourself a favor and do not install w3 total cache ever on any blog. It isn’t necessary. Even though it is free, what is free worth when you lose so much time and money trying to restore your blog? This plugin is crap. The Russian Roulette of the plugin world.