W3 Total Cache Garbled My Simple Social Icons

I put it off long enough. My site was in desperate need of optimization. I installed the popular W3 Total Cache plugin and then began the task of configuring it for my needs. I will not get into the specifics here – I will let the plugin’s developers and experts guide you on the configuration.

I won’t lie, it took some time to get the site configured with W3 Total Cache but when all was said and done, I was sad to see that while the pages loaded much quicker, the graphics of the Simple Social Icons plugin displayed garbled nonsense. You can see what I’m talking about below –

I found others had similar problems but what resolved their problems had already been coded and accounted for by the developers of the W3 Total Cache plugin.

I tried a few things to no avail but because I minified the CSS of the site, I went to the Minify settings at – {website.com}/wp-admin/admin.php?page=w3tc_minify and scrolled down to the Advanced area and specifically the Never minify the following CSS files setting. In Never minify the following CSS files field I entered the path to the Simple Social Icons’ style sheet which in my case was => /wp-content/plugins/simple-social-icons/css/style.css

Once I made that change …

Viola! Problem solved.