LiteSpeed Cache Review

Previously, website performance was not at all important. Even obscenely sluggish websites load more slowly than a loris could get high rankings in Google search results. Now, things have changed.

Even if your website has excellent content, speed counts nowadays, and you will struggle to rank on Google search results if your site is sluggish. Enabling caching is one of the numerous methods to make your website faster. Your website's static content may be cached to increase performance. One of the various methods to increase your website's page load time is by caching.

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For your WordPress site, there are plenty of caching plugins available. Everyone claims to be the finest in their industry. The list might go on forever. Which one ought to you choose? Is there a substitute that may beat out all of these supposedly well-liked options?

Say hello to LiteSpeed cache, a newcomer to the caching market that is causing waves so large that you cannot ignore it. Every other caching plugin has been rendered obsolete by LiteSpeed Cache, which was developed by LiteSpeed Technologies.

Pros

It is totally unrestricted. It works with OpenLiteSpeed Server's free community version.
You get a certain amount of QUIC.cloud CDN service for free.
It made it possible to quickly load websites with placeholder images of poor quality.
It provides built-in features for database optimization.
Setting up the cache and optimization is made possible with great detail.
Additionally, it enables both lossless and lossy image compression and can produce WebP versions of photos. The default compression method is lossy.
Certain JavaScript from third-party services may be localized so they can load from the local server. This accelerates page loading. For instance, it may localize Google Analytics' analytics.js file.
It may be set up to either totally delete Google fonts or load them asynchronously.
LiteSpeed or OpenLiteSpeed servers are compatible with it.
It is true that this plugin uses server-side caching, making it quicker than others that operate at the PHP level.
Database tables are converted to InnoDB, and displaying autoload items, which may significantly slow page load times, is also supported.
It provides rapid database optimization with only one click.
It drastically reduces server consumption when used with LiteSpeed or OpenLiteSpeed servers, which enhances performance.
If you want to tinker, there are a ton of sophisticated CSS and JS optimization options.

Cons

Granular control has an excessive number of choices, which may be scary and perplexing.
It has several compatibility difficulties, particularly if you're utilizing the Easy Digital Downloads plugin with WooCommerce. LS Cache will not recognize the transaction pages.
Although it can run on Apache and Nginx, the cache feature is inoperable. Every other feature will operate. This is illogical. The main purpose is caching.

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Quick Settings For Litespeed Cache Use

In all honesty, you don't really need to modify LS Cache's default settings. The choices that come pre-installed are flawless. However, you may set up the plugin on your own if you so want.

If you don't have the patience or fortitude to read the whole explanation, here is a brief rundown of the settings I employ:

Step 1

Install LS Cache and activate the plugin as the first step. Whichever web server you choose is irrelevant. It's not necessary to be using LiteSpeed or OpenLiteSpeed; you might be using Apache or Nginx.

Step 2

General >> General >> Request Domain Key: You may continue without requesting a domain key if you are on a LiteSpeed or OpenLiteSpeed server. If you wish to integrate QUIC.cloud services and you are using Apache or Nginx, you must do this. Getting a key request is free. Once again, you may use this even if you are on a LiteSpeed or OpenLiteSpeed server. You may take advantage of a free quota of image optimization by integrating QUIC.cloud. It is beneficial.

Step 3

Cache >> Cache >> Enable Cache: This must be turned on. If you are using a web server other than LS or OLS, you must register for QUIC.cloud.

Step 4

Cache >> Cache Logged-in Users: Switch it off. As an administrator, you don't want to see cache pages.

Step 5

Cache >> Drop Query String: This ought to be filled in already. If the field seems to be empty, provide the following information (without a comma), but one entry per line: fbclid, gclid, utm*, and _ga.

Step 6

Click on the Cache >> Browser >> Browser Cache switch to ON.

Step 7

Privately Cache Cart: OFF in Cache >> WooCommerce.

Step 8

CDN >> CDN Configurations If you want to utilize QUIC.cloud CDN, simply turn this ON. Because I use Cloudflare, I turn it off.

Step 9

CDN >> CDN Configurations >> Use the Cloudflare API only if you use Cloudflare. The domain name, global Cloudflare API key, and email ID must all be entered.

Step 10

CSS Settings >> Page Optimization OFF for generating critical CSS. Only enable it if you are utilizing the QUIC.cloud CDN and Load CSS Asynchronously is enabled.

Step 11

CSS Settings >> Page Optimization Off for Inline CSS Async Lib

Step 12

Optimize the Page >> Change the Optimization Settings >> Turn off WordPress emoji. Contemporary browsers already support WordPress emojis, so you don't need to worry about anybody using an antiquated browser.

LiteSpeed Cache Explanation In Detail

LiteSpeed Cache Plugin Installation

You may get the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for free from the WordPress repository. If a LiteSpeed or OpenLiteSpeed server hosts your website, you may expect the finest caching results.

Any other web server will render the caching method useless. Use of the QUIC.cloud service is the only option to benefit from the caching functionality of the LiteSpeed Cache plugin while running a non-LiteSpeed Server.

Therefore, confirm that your hosting provider offers a LiteSpeed or OpenLiteSpeed web server before you begin installing the LiteSpeed cache.

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If not, you could think about switching to a different host that does. You may always look at WPX Hosting if you are thinking about switching to a managed WordPress hosting option.

You may always check out DigitalOcean, Google Cloud Hosting, AWS (AWS Lightsail does not provide LiteSpeed), and other cloud hosting providers. Consider purchasing a QUIC.cloud membership if you don't plan on switching hosts.

Setting Up The LiteSpeed Caching Plugin

General >> General Settings

Automatic Improvement

Although you can turn this OFF, it doesn't really make sense to do so. The plugin will ultimately need to be updated. In reality, unlike WP Rocket, automated upgrades have never broken my website. In order to use WP Rocket, I had to revert to an earlier version of the plugin till it was patched.

I now manage three WordPress blogs (all on OpenLiteSpeed web server and all using LS Cache). No automated upgrade or update has succeeded in crashing my website. Although there were a few minor problems, they were simple to repair. Some CSS and JS optimization options were reset to their default settings after automated upgrades. I needed to change them back.

Domain Name

You must get a domain key if you wish to utilize QUIC.cloud. If you wish to exclude the QUIC.cloud function completely, it is not essential. Even so, I continue to use it with Cloudflare. A CDN service called QUIC.cloud offers a number of intriguing capabilities, like creating crucial CSS, picture placement, conversion to webp format, etc. The most crucial thing to realize is that utilizing the QUIC.cloud service is required if you're running a server other than LiteSpeed or OpenLiteSpeed if you want to leverage the caching technique.

LiteSpeed Cache is a fantastic plugin for caching and optimization for systems like WordPress, Magento, Joomla, OpenCart, Drupal, and others. This plugin functions smoothly with the LiteSpeed web server as a server-level caching plugin.

The same business, LiteSpeed Technologies, is responsible for both the LiteSpeed web server and the LiteSpeed Cache. These two items have been designed to work together effortlessly. Because of this, LiteSpeed Cache's caching functionality is unmatched by anything else.

Perhaps using FastCGI caching in NGINX, you could get a comparable arrangement, but WordPress's LiteSpeed Cache and LiteSpeed server combination provide greater simplicity and speed in every regard.

But if you are unaware of it, the LiteSpeed web server is now regarded as the finest one for hosting websites. LiteSpeed is the one that is most often advised, especially if you are utilizing a WordPress website. It performs far better than both of its rivals, NGINX and Apache. See this chart as an illustration.

LiteSpeed Cache is a fantastic optimization plugin that handles pretty much all you would need to do to effectively optimize your site for performance in addition to caching. It is so effective at optimizing that using this plugin alone might raise your website's current low PageSpeed Insights score to a level comparable to that of the 1990s.

Features Of LiteSpeed Cache

There are no WordPress caching and optimization plugins that can match it in terms of features. I am speaking from personal experience when I say this.

You can certainly think of a handful that accomplishes this and that. Some provide you complete control over caching and some over HTML, CSS, and JS files. For example, the W3 Total Cache plugin offers a special optimization with plenty of customization possibilities. However, there is nothing for database or image optimization. Additionally, the number of options they provide will tire even a seasoned user, much alone a novice.

Other plugins may provide a lot of functionality and customization choices, but they may not perform well enough to be of much use.

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A few plugins have characteristics comparable to those of LiteSpeed Cache, but they don't provide as many customization choices. WP Rocket is a good illustration. It is a fantastic optimization plugin and highly user-friendly for beginners.

It will provide reliable results from your WordPress website without ever altering any settings. Anyone may easily adjust all of its parameters to their preferences. That's because there aren't many customizing choices available.

In contrast, LiteSpeed Cache offers many functionality and customization choices that you can use to tailor things to your preferences. Other plugins do not provide it. And LiteSpeed Cache's server-level caching functionality outperforms all competing caching plugins. Even just that reveals a lot about it.

The Benefits That LiteSpeed Cache Gives Its Users Are Listed Below:

Client/Server Caching

In my opinion, the caching capability is one of LiteSpeed Cache's most distinctive features. Let me explain why it is so crucial.

WordPress automatically creates a new copy of each of your web pages whenever someone requests to see one of them. The page is created again the next time it has to be served, and so on. All of the websites on your website experience this.

To generate a full website, this process needs executing PHP programs, conducting database queries, and assembling the results. Because it takes a while to finish and consumes a lot of resources from your web server, this procedure lengthens the time it takes for your website to load.

Now consider how much time and processing power might have been saved if you could create each page once and then preserve it so that the subsequent visitors could be served without creating the pages again.

Caching does just that. Once the pages are created, they are kept and then used to serve any subsequent visitors. There are several caching plugins available right now that can do that. However, they are all plugins for application-level caching. It implies that although they will preserve the websites, they will still need to execute certain PHP scripts in WordPress to offer them to the viewers.

However, since LiteSpeed Cache is a server-level caching plugin, serving users with cached websites won't even involve executing PHP scripts in WordPress. The most optimal approach for delivering your websites is that. Serving such pages will take the least amount of time and computing power.

LiteSpeed Cache Caching On Non-LiteSpeed Servers

You wouldn't be able to utilize the LiteSpeed Cache plugin's incredible caching capability if you used another web server, such as Apache or NGINX. This is so because LiteSpeed Cache and LiteSpeed web servers were designed to function together without any issues. As a result, some web servers cannot support this kind of server-level cache integration.

You may still use any other caching plugins with LiteSpeed Cache to make up for being on a different web server than LiteSpeed. However, they would clearly be a server-level caching solution rather than an application-level one. You wouldn't be able to utilize server-level caching at all if you were using a different server, like Apache.

Additionally, if you are using an NGINX server, you could utilize FastCGI caching to get the same arrangement, although it would take a lot of work and coding. But even then, it wouldn't operate as well as a LiteSpeed server. Additionally, you will lose access to the caching features provided by the LiteSpeed cache and LiteSpeed server configuration.

Caching In Public And Private

Public caching refers to the delivery of a cached website to anybody, regardless of its origin. Therefore, in the case of public caching, every visitor will see identical content on a website. Consider that you operate a blog website on WordPress and that all of your website's visitors come to read your blog entries. The public will cache this.

Public caching is usually a relatively simple solution since it enables you to cache a page and provide it to anybody requesting the page. This is why all WordPress caching plugins provide this kind of caching.

Private caching refers to caching a website that must be altered depending on who is accessing it. As a result, different visitors will see various renditions of the same page. If you enter into the WordPress dashboard as the administrator for your blog website, you will see an admin bar, your name in the corner of the admin bar, and a ton of additional choices that are only visible to you.

In this scenario, private caching will be used to store those pages. Private caching is challenging since it necessitates caching pages depending on particular user situations and appropriately delivering them to the appropriate users. As a result, only a few WordPress caching plugins provide this feature.

You have access to both public and private caching options with LiteSpeed Cache. Contrary to the majority of caching plugins, LiteSpeed Cache provides not only private caching but also extra customizable possibilities. For example, you may cache unapproved comments for only the commenting visitor.

Additionally, you can specify which resources should be cached by default, which resources should be excluded from public caching, which resources should be cached separately for mobile views, which query parameters should be dropped or ignored when serving cached files, and you can make other customizations.

Image Enhancement

Since images are hefty, they make websites bulky and slow down loading times. Thus, optimizing photos by lowering their weight reduces the time they take to load. As a result, this feature is available in many WordPress optimization plugins. Even many plugins that are solely intended to optimize photos exist. However, they are either compensated, have restrictions, or don't perform well.

However, LiteSpeed Cache offers limitless, cost-free picture optimization with excellent image quality. Its Fast Queue allows you to optimize many photographs without cost, and its Standard Queue allows infinite image optimization. QUIC.cloud further offers LiteSpeed Cache image optimization.

Adaptive image optimization would be lacking, if anything. But for most websites, this isn't a crucial feature. Additionally, no other caching and optimization plugin offers these functionalities as of yet. Therefore, a separate plugin would be required if you wanted to apply adaptive picture optimization.

Placeholder Image Of Poor Quality

One of the distinctive qualities of the LiteSpeed Cache plugin is this. A very compressed version of the original picture is called a Low-Quality Image Placeholder (LQIP). This version is so heavily compressed that it only takes up around one kilobyte of space.

And as a result of the excessive compression, the picture is rendered exceedingly pixelated or blurry and loses all of its features. However, the most crucial aspect is that, in contrast to the enormous original picture, it loads very quickly due to its tiny size. That's ideal because, while the original picture is being downloaded, this image is shown in its place.

By eliminating the need for visitors to see white space on their screens while the original picture loads, LQIPs enhance user experience even if they don't significantly slow down the page's loading speed due to how lightweight they are.

Conclusion

Yes, LiteSpeed Cache is unquestionably a feature-rich plugin with a wide range of customization possibilities. And when you mix the two, you often get a clumsy interface and drown in a sea of impossible-to-fathom choices. But the user interface of LiteSpeed Cache is quite well done.

They minimized the customizing possibilities without removing anything that might have been removed. Then neatly arrange the remaining items in a well-organized manner. I truly do mean structured.

You'll be able to master it very quickly. However, there are still many customization possibilities available to you. These choices could be everything a seasoned user has ever desired. However, that's a different scenario for the typical user.

They will take specialist skills to put up properly. The good news is that LiteSpeed Cache may be used immediately without any setup. But if you want to use the plugin's full potential, you will need to set it yourself. This implies that in order to improve the performance of your website, it must be correctly configured to meet your demands.

But even in such a tidy compact, there are still too many choices for the typical user. Every on/off button has to be carefully considered, especially for optimization and caching plugins like LiteSpeed Cache. Because of this, virtually everyone does not find LiteSpeed Cache's UI to be easy enough.

I trust you enjoyed this article about the LiteSpeed Cache Review. Would you please stay tuned for more articles to come? Take care!

JeannetteZ

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Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? I would love to hear from you. Please leave me your questions, experiences, remarks, and suggestions about the LiteSpeed Cache Review in the comments below. You can also contact me by email at Jeannette@WorkFromAnywhereInTheWorld.com.

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