In this post, we are going to talk about both LiteSpeed Web Server and LiteSpeed Cache.
For those who don’t know, LiteSpeed Web Server is the high-performance web server that we use at Raiola Networks in all our hosting plans with cPanel. This includes everything from SSD hosting to CMS hosting (such as WordPress website hosting ) as well as reseller hosting and SEO hosting.
Currently, LiteSpeed Web Server is the most powerful web server out there, the most efficient, and also one of the most compatible, although I am still a big fan of Nginx.
15 is the plugin or module for different CMS that allows us to use LiteSpeed Web Server’s LSCache in an optimized and compatible way since we can manage the cache and apply some more WPO techniques directly from the dashboard of our CMS.
LiteSpeed Cache goes far beyond being just a WordPress caching plugin, or a compatibility plugin, as it also allows us to optimize JS and CSS, optimize image loading, and apply some more interesting WPO techniques.
LiteSpeed is constantly developing all of its software components, and they are usually the first to implement most new technologies. For example, LiteSpeed supported HTTP/3 and QUIC long before all of its competition (although, of course, its competition is not paid).
Despite the fact that LiteSpeed Web Server is a paid web server, its market share continues to rise and is currently not as residual as before:
Now it is quite common for providers to use this web server for their clients since it is worth paying for its license and seeing how your clients’ websites fly when loaded.
No more messing around: in this post we are going to talk about LiteSpeed Web Server a bit and then about LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress. If you are interested in LiteSpeed Cache for PrestaShop, you can see this post where we talk about how to optimize PrestaShop using the LiteSpeed Cache module.
LiteSpeed Web Server to speed up your website
LiteSpeed is one of the few web hosts currently fighting for market share.
For many years, LiteSpeed’s market share was small. There were hardly any servers using it because no one wanted to pay for it, but as of 2019, that changed. The WPO began to gain a lot of importance (who was going to tell me when I started as a WPO consultant in 2010 ) and right now everyone wants to do magic and make their website load fast.
At the hosting provider level, LiteSpeed is “music to our ears”. I personally start to cry when I see Apache running, because it is a very inefficient software and, when we talk about a lot of traffic, it is very easy for it to have resource problems. With LiteSpeed Web Server the opposite happens.
With LiteSpeed things change: any web page flies with LiteSpeed as a web server. From the point of view of the hosting provider, the service you can provide is of much higher quality both in terms of stability and performance.
Every time I see a changelog for a new version of LiteSpeed Web Server I get excited, as the improvements are real and fully intended for agility and WPO. I give you an example. This is the summary changelog for version 6.0 of LiteSpeed Web Server:
As you can see, out of 4 improvements, 2 are related to the WPO, and 1 of them is related to improving compatibility with Apache’s .htaccess.
LiteSpeed Web Server is a web server whose main objective is for your web page to load as quickly as possible.
As you have read a little above, LiteSpeed is compatible with Apache .htaccess files and this is a great advantage since many people are used to working with this type of file for redirects and similar things.
Ventajas del plugin LiteSpeed Web Server
This part of the post is quite personal since the advantages of LiteSpeed as a web server are many, but I am only going to tell you (in detail) the ones that I consider essential.
- Compatibility with Apache: For me, it is a strong point. People are very used to Apache and its .htaccess and with LiteSpeed, we will not have a problem with this, since there is full compatibility.
- Integration with cPanel and CloudLinux: At Raiola Networks we use cPanel and CloudLinux for approximately 60% of our platform, so I believe that full compatibility with these two services is essential.
- HTTP3 + QUIC: This is essential in a high-performance web server since it is about serving the content in the most optimized way possible.
- ModSecurity and Web Application Firewall: LiteSpeed’s WAF works very well and detects in a way that doesn’t affect performance, so we don’t need any extra security software to block intrusions.
- Efficiency and resources: Although Nginx can match LiteSpeed in terms of resource consumption, LiteSpeed is usually more stable in high traffic situations.
If we want to go a little further, LiteSpeed’s LSCache has a built-in system called ESI that allows individual pieces of a page to be skipped or cached, without applying the page cache to its entirety.
This can be seen in others, such as W3 Total Cache (Fragment Cache), but in the case of LiteSpeed Web Server, it is at the server level.
This image is taken from LiteSpeed’s own website. It may seem like an exaggeration, but it is close to reality:
It’s all advantages with LiteSpeed. The only disadvantage is that the price per license has to be paid and that can put many people off.
The good thing is that the end customer of a hosting provider does not have to pay anything. If you want to use LiteSpeed Web Servers on your websites, you just have to hire hosting with us. It is included in the price of the service.
LiteSpeed for free: OpenLiteSpeed
Yes, you read that right: there is a free version of LiteSpeed, but it has most of LiteSpeed’s “powerful” features locked down and is also not supported by developers.
This version cannot be used by hosting providers due to license limitations.
OpenLiteSpeed, the free version of LiteSpeed, can be a good option in some cases. I have used it a few times on VPS servers together with the Cyberpanel control panel, although you should know what features are disabled (such as full compatibility with Apache .htaccess).
Also, OpenLiteSpeed is only compatible with 2 hosting control panels (Cyberpanel and DirectAdmin), while LiteSpeed Web Server is compatible with all commercial control panels (cPanel, Plesk, etc.).
It is not a bad low-cost option, since it is an efficient web server, but it lacks features and some of them are quite relevant.
Obviously, I prefer 1,000 times OpenLiteSpeed to Apache as a web server.
LiteSpeed Web ADC
This software developed by LiteSpeed Tech is little known, although we use it at Raiola Networks for our SEO hosting.
To make a quick summary, LiteSpeed Web ADC is an HTTP load balancer specially built to work with LiteSpeed Web Server.
What it allows us is to balance the load between several servers. This is normally done when your infrastructure needs to be supported by several servers working at the same time.
For the visitor, nothing is noticeable. It retains the features and benefits of LiteSpeed Web Server and gives the IT provider or administrator the flexibility to configure the server infrastructure the way they want.
In addition, with the ADC we can also use LiteSpeed’s Web Application Firewall to protect ourselves from external attacks.
LSCache, hidden el from LiteSpeed
LSCache is LiteSpeed Web Server’s built-in caching system. Don’t confuse LSCache with LiteSpeed Cache as they are two different things.
LiteSpeed Cache is precisely what is integrated with LSCache, that is, LiteSpeed’s native and integrated cache. However, LiteSpeed Cache is just the plugin used to “manage” that cache from our favorite CMS.
Currently, there are LSCache integration plugins for all these CMS:
As you can see, WordPress is not the only CMS for which LiteSpeed Cache exists.
QUICK.CLOUD and the LiteSpeed CDN
We will talk about this a little further down, but I still want to comment on it here.
A few years ago, LiteSpeed Tech launched a cloud service that is complemented by the LiteSpeed webserver and also by the plugins and cache modules for the different CMS.
This service provides a CDN and API functionalities to optimize the CSS (generate the critical path), as well as a service to optimize the loading of web images.
I’m not a big fan of this service, I like Cloudflare more as a CDN, although generating the critical path with QUIC.CLOUD if you use LiteSpeed Cache is essential.
I am not going to comment on QUIC.CLOUD as a CDN. I did not like it, but it may be a matter of taste totally. Actually, the QUIC. CLOUD CDN “network map” isn’t one of the worst either: https://quic.cloud/cdn-network/
LiteSpeed Cache para WordPress
The moment has come. We are going to talk about the LiteSpeed caching plugin for WordPress. A plugin that does much more than manage the cache, but whose strong point is to integrate with LSCache, obviously.
For me, LiteSpeed Cache has always been a good alternative to WP Rocket and, within the segment of WordPress caching plugins, I think it is one of the best.
In 2010 I started in the WPO and in WordPress. As a consultant since 2012 in both fields, I have tested hundreds of plugins to improve WordPress performance and honestly, I think LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress is among the best.
It is a completely free cache plugin that we can find in the official plugin repository. It has two modes of operation: easy and advanced.
The good thing is that the default configuration is adapted to the server. In “easy” mode, in most cases, we don’t have to touch anything to start working with the plugin. Of course, I am aware that its option panels can be scary at first sight.
Actually, on the desktop, we don’t have to do anything. It only gives us general information about the functioning of the LiteSpeed Cache plugin and the integrated services of QUIC.CLOUD.
To start configuring the LiteSpeed Cache plugin, let’s start with general options. In general, from here we are going to talk about the different configuration sections that the LiteSpeed Cache plugin has.
We must keep in mind that the LiteSpeed Cache plugin changes a lot, it receives constant updates and functionalities change. Options are also added and this means that the interface is constantly being improved.
LiteSpeed Cache General Options
In the general options of LiteSpeed Cache we find some interesting, but at the same time optional.
I usually leave them this way in the “General Settings” section:
When we open the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for the first time, we see the “Desktop”:
Now I am going to explain a little above why I have these options marked in this section.
- Update automatically: I prefer to leave it disabled since we avoid problems in unexpected updates.
- Domain key: It is used to configure QUIC.CLOUD and integrate it with our LiteSpeed Cache plugin and even implement it on CDN in WordPress. In this post we are not going to talk about QUIC.CLOUD, that is in a different article.
- Guest mode: It is a system that, if activated, serves a cached page to visitors, regardless of what we have to do later. This is useful when there are redirects by language or similar. I prefer to leave it disabled except in very specific cases.
- Guest optimization: Takes guest mode even further by optimizing CSS and JS resources for first-time unauthenticated visitors. I normally leave it disabled except in very specific cases.
- Server IP: You can leave it empty. If you want to put something, you must put the IP of the server.
- Notices: It’s personal. If you want information and advertising about LiteSpeed to appear, you can leave it OFF.
As for the “Adjust” section of the “General Options” section, I normally don’t touch anything. It is an advanced section that does not require any action unless you need something specific and you know exactly what you are doing.
Cache con LiteSpeed Cache para WordPress
Now we go with the most complete and longest section since it is the one that has to do with the cache itself and its configuration. Precisely for this reason, I say that LiteSpeed Cache is one of the most advanced caching plugins.
The problem with explaining these long sections is that… they’re a bummer. That’s why I’ve decided that to explain the most complex sections of LiteSpeed Cache to you, I’m going to do it on video. Here I explain the 8 tabs of this section:
- Cache: The caching options for the different parts of the WordPress website using LiteSpeed Cache are brutal. It is flexible and allows us to adapt the cache to our needs.
- TTL: It is a very simple section: it allows you to modify the cache expiration times for the different parts of the web.
- Flush: Here we can relax and customize LiteSpeed Cache’s cache flush and purge policies for different parts of the web.
- Exclude: This is the section that all cache solutions have to a greater or lesser extent since it allows us to exclude devices or cache pages, being able to exclude areas of the web or users based on conditions.
- ESI: Here we can configure the Edge Side Includes (ESI) system, which allows certain parts of the web to be excluded from the page cache using shortcodes. In this way, we can cache an entire page and keep a block within the dynamic page.
- Object: In this section, we can configure the object cache. At the moment, we at Raiola Networks don’t offer the possibility to use this, but we will soon let people use Redis as an object cache in WordPress.
- Browser: It allows us to activate the browser cache or browser cache, something totally necessary today to improve response times.
- Advanced: Here we have 1 interesting option, the “Instant Click”. I think you should enable this option to optimize the cache strategy.
As I told you before, I explain all these sections in the video above. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend you do it now.
Set up a CDN with LiteSpeed Cache
LiteSpeed Cache brings the option to implement any CDN and not just QUIC.CLOUD. This is good because I personally always recommend implementing a CDN on any WordPress with traffic.
A CDN provides loading speed and also stability in that loading speed, regardless of the country from which the requests are made.
Again, as this section is very long, I am going to walk you through a video on how to set up a CDN with LiteSpeed Cache. In this case, I have decided to use CDN77 as an example:
I’m not going to talk about QUIC.CLOUD in this post, since that deserves a separate article. As you may have seen in the previous video, we have explained how to implement a normal CDN (such as CDN77) by mapping CNAMEs.
Also, if we want to configure LiteSpeed Cache to flush CloudFlare’s cache we can as well. We simply have to put the API in this section of “CDN”:
StartBlogWordPressWPOLiteSpeed cache y LiteSpeed Web Server
LiteSpeed cache y LiteSpeed Web Server
In this post we are going to talk about both LiteSpeed Web Server and LiteSpeed Cache.
For those who don’t know, LiteSpeed Web Server is the high-performance web server that we use at Raiola Networks in all our hosting plans with cPanel. This includes everything from SSD hosting to CMS hosting (such as WordPress website hosting ) as well as reseller hosting and SEO hosting.
Currently, LiteSpeed Web Server is the most powerful web server out there, the most efficient, and also one of the most compatible, although I am still a big fan of Nginx.
15 is the plugin or module for different CMS that allows us to use LiteSpeed Web Server’s LSCache in an optimized and compatible way since we can manage the cache and apply some more WPO techniques directly from the dashboard of our CMS.
LiteSpeed Cache goes far beyond being just a WordPress caching plugin, or a compatibility plugin, as it also allows us to optimize JS and CSS, optimize image loading, and apply some more interesting WPO techniques.
LiteSpeed is constantly developing all of its software components, and they are usually the first to implement most new technologies. For example, LiteSpeed supported HTTP/3 and QUIC long before all of its competition (although, of course, its competition is not paid).
Despite the fact that LiteSpeed Web Server is a paid web server, its market share continues to rise and is currently not as residual as before:
Now it is quite common for providers to use this web server for their clients since it is worth paying for its license and seeing how your clients’ websites fly when loaded.
No more messing around: in this post we are going to talk about LiteSpeed Web Server a bit and then about LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress. If you are interested in LiteSpeed Cache for PrestaShop, you can see this post where we talk about how to optimize PrestaShop using the LiteSpeed Cache module.
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LiteSpeed Web Server to speed up your website
LiteSpeed is one of the few web hosts currently fighting for market share.
For many years, LiteSpeed’s market share was small. There were hardly any servers using it because no one wanted to pay for it, but as of 2019, that changed. The WPO began to gain a lot of importance (who was going to tell me when I started as a WPO consultant in 2010 ) and right now everyone wants to do magic and make their website load fast.
At the hosting provider level, LiteSpeed is “music to our ears”. I personally start to cry when I see Apache running, because it is a very inefficient software and, when we talk about a lot of traffic, it is very easy for it to have resource problems. With LiteSpeed Web Server the opposite happens.
With LiteSpeed things change: any web page flies with LiteSpeed as a web server. From the point of view of the hosting provider, the service you can provide is of much higher quality both in terms of stability and performance.
Every time I see a changelog for a new version of LiteSpeed Web Server I get excited, as the improvements are real and fully intended for agility and WPO. I give you an example. This is the summary changelog for version 6.0 of LiteSpeed Web Server:
As you can see, out of 4 improvements, 2 are related to the WPO, and 1 of them is related to improving compatibility with Apache’s .htaccess.
LiteSpeed Web Server is a web server whose main objective is for your web page to load as quickly as possible.
As you have read a little above, LiteSpeed is compatible with Apache .htaccess files and this is a great advantage since many people are used to working with this type of file for redirects and similar things.
Ventajas del plugin LiteSpeed Web Server
This part of the post is quite personal since the advantages of LiteSpeed as a web server are many, but I am only going to tell you (in detail) the ones that I consider essential.
- Compatibility with Apache: For me, it is a strong point. People are very used to Apache and its .htaccess and with LiteSpeed, we will not have a problem with this, since there is full compatibility.
- Integration with cPanel and CloudLinux: At Raiola Networks we use cPanel and CloudLinux for approximately 60% of our platform, so I believe that full compatibility with these two services is essential.
- HTTP3 + QUIC: This is essential in a high-performance web server since it is about serving the content in the most optimized way possible.
- ModSecurity and Web Application Firewall: LiteSpeed’s WAF works very well and detects in a way that doesn’t affect performance, so we don’t need any extra security software to block intrusions.
- Efficiency and resources: Although Nginx can match LiteSpeed in terms of resource consumption, LiteSpeed is usually more stable in high traffic situations.
If we want to go a little further, LiteSpeed’s LSCache has a built-in system called ESI that allows individual pieces of a page to be skipped or cached, without applying the page cache to its entirety.
This can be seen in others, such as W3 Total Cache (Fragment Cache), but in the case of LiteSpeed Web Server, it is at the server level.
This image is taken from LiteSpeed’s own website. It may seem like an exaggeration, but it is close to reality:
It’s all advantages with LiteSpeed. The only disadvantage is that the price per license has to be paid and that can put many people off.
The good thing is that the end customer of a hosting provider does not have to pay anything. If you want to use LiteSpeed Web Servers on your websites, you just have to hire hosting with us. It is included in the price of the service.
LiteSpeed for free: OpenLiteSpeed
Yes, you read that right: there is a free version of LiteSpeed, but it has most of LiteSpeed’s “powerful” features locked down and is also not supported by developers.
This version cannot be used by hosting providers due to license limitations.
OpenLiteSpeed, the free version of LiteSpeed, can be a good option in some cases. I have used it a few times on VPS servers together with the Cyberpanel control panel, although you should know what features are disabled (such as full compatibility with Apache .htaccess).
Also, OpenLiteSpeed is only compatible with 2 hosting control panels (Cyberpanel and DirectAdmin), while LiteSpeed Web Server is compatible with all commercial control panels (cPanel, Plesk, etc.).
It is not a bad low-cost option, since it is an efficient web server, but it lacks features and some of them are quite relevant.
Obviously, I prefer 1,000 times OpenLiteSpeed to Apache as a web server.
LiteSpeed Web ADC
This software developed by LiteSpeed Tech is little known, although we use it at Raiola Networks for our SEO hosting.
To make a quick summary, LiteSpeed Web ADC is an HTTP load balancer specially built to work with LiteSpeed Web Server.
What it allows us is to balance the load between several servers. This is normally done when your infrastructure needs to be supported by several servers working at the same time.
For the visitor, nothing is noticeable. It retains the features and benefits of LiteSpeed Web Server and gives the IT provider or administrator the flexibility to configure the server infrastructure the way they want.
In addition, with the ADC we can also use LiteSpeed’s Web Application Firewall to protect ourselves from external attacks.
LSCache, hidden el from LiteSpeed
LSCache is LiteSpeed Web Server’s built-in caching system. Don’t confuse LSCache with LiteSpeed Cache as they are two different things.
LiteSpeed Cache is precisely what is integrated with LSCache, that is, LiteSpeed’s native and integrated cache. However, LiteSpeed Cache is just the plugin used to “manage” that cache from our favorite CMS.
Currently, there are LSCache integration plugins for all these CMS:
As you can see, WordPress is not the only CMS for which LiteSpeed Cache exists.
QUICK.CLOUD and the LiteSpeed CDN
We will talk about this a little further down, but I still want to comment on it here.
A few years ago, LiteSpeed Tech launched a cloud service that is complemented by the LiteSpeed webserver and also by the plugins and cache modules for the different CMS.
This service provides a CDN and API functionalities to optimize the CSS (generate the critical path), as well as a service to optimize the loading of web images.
I’m not a big fan of this service, I like Cloudflare more as a CDN, although generating the critical path with QUIC.CLOUD if you use LiteSpeed Cache is essential.
I am not going to comment on QUIC.CLOUD as a CDN. I did not like it, but it may be a matter of taste totally. Actually, the QUIC. CLOUD CDN “network map” isn’t one of the worst either: https://quic.cloud/cdn-network/
LiteSpeed Cache para WordPress
The moment has come. We are going to talk about the LiteSpeed caching plugin for WordPress. A plugin that does much more than manage the cache, but whose strong point is to integrate with LSCache, obviously.
For me, LiteSpeed Cache has always been a good alternative to WP Rocket and, within the segment of WordPress caching plugins, I think it is one of the best.
In 2010 I started in the WPO and in WordPress. As a consultant since 2012 in both fields, I have tested hundreds of plugins to improve WordPress performance and honestly, I think LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress is among the best.
It is a completely free cache plugin that we can find in the official plugin repository. It has two modes of operation: easy and advanced.
The good thing is that the default configuration is adapted to the server. In “easy” mode, in most cases, we don’t have to touch anything to start working with the plugin. Of course, I am aware that its option panels can be scary at first sight.
When we open the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for the first time, we see the “Desktop”:
Actually, on the desktop, we don’t have to do anything. It only gives us general information about the functioning of the LiteSpeed Cache plugin and the integrated services of QUIC.CLOUD.
To start configuring the LiteSpeed Cache plugin, let’s start with general options. In general, from here we are going to talk about the different configuration sections that the LiteSpeed Cache plugin has.
We must keep in mind that the LiteSpeed Cache plugin changes a lot, it receives constant updates and functionalities change. Options are also added and this means that the interface is constantly being improved.
LiteSpeed Cache General Options
In the general options of LiteSpeed Cache we find some interesting, but at the same time optional.
I usually leave them this way in the “General Settings” section:
Now I am going to explain a little above why I have these options marked in this section.
- Update automatically: I prefer to leave it disabled since we avoid problems in unexpected updates.
- Domain key: It is used to configure QUIC.CLOUD and integrate it with our LiteSpeed Cache plugin and even implement it on CDN in WordPress. In this post, we are not going to talk about QUIC.CLOUD, that is in a different article.
- Guest mode: It is a system that, if activated, serves a cached page to visitors, regardless of what we have to do later. This is useful when there are redirects by language or similar. I prefer to leave it disabled except in very specific cases.
- Guest optimization: Takes guest mode even further by optimizing CSS and JS resources for first-time unauthenticated visitors. I normally leave it disabled except in very specific cases.
- Server IP: You can leave it empty. If you want to put something, you must put the IP of the server.
- Notices: It’s personal. If you want information and advertising about LiteSpeed to appear, you can leave it OFF.
As for the “Adjust” section of the “General Options” section, I normally don’t touch anything. It is an advanced section that does not require any action unless you need something specific and you know exactly what you are doing.
Be careful, because touching something here can cause problems in other functionalities.
Cache con LiteSpeed Cache para WordPress
Now we go with the most complete and longest section since it is the one that has to do with the cache itself and its configuration. Precisely for this reason, I say that LiteSpeed Cache is one of the most advanced caching plugins.
The problem with explaining these long sections is that… they’re a bummer. That’s why I’ve decided that to explain the most complex sections of LiteSpeed Cache to you, I’m going to do it on video. Here I explain the 8 tabs of this section:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=PvM9FwAe-xA%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26origin%3Dhttps%3A%252F%252Fraiolanetworks.es
Even so, I will give you some general notions.
- Cache: The caching options for the different parts of the WordPress website using LiteSpeed Cache are brutal. It is flexible and allows us to adapt the cache to our needs.
- TTL: It is a very simple section: it allows you to modify the cache expiration times for the different parts of the web.
- Flush: Here we can relax and customize LiteSpeed Cache’s cache flush and purge policies for different parts of the web.
- Exclude: This is the section that all cache solutions have to a greater or lesser extent since it allows us to exclude devices or cache pages, being able to exclude areas of the web or users based on conditions.
- ESI: Here we can configure the Edge Side Includes (ESI) system, which allows certain parts of the web to be excluded from the page cache using shortcodes. In this way, we can cache an entire page and keep a block within the dynamic page.
- Object: In this section, we can configure the object cache. At the moment, we at Raiola Networks don’t offer the possibility to use this, but we will soon let people use Redis as an object cache in WordPress.
- Browser: It allows us to activate the browser cache or browser cache, something totally necessary today to improve response times.
- Advanced: Here we have 1 interesting option, the “Instant Click”. I think you should enable this option to optimize the cache strategy.
As I told you before, I explain all these sections in the video above. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend you do it now.
Set up a CDN with LiteSpeed Cache
LiteSpeed Cache brings the option to implement any CDN and not just QUIC.CLOUD. This is good because I personally always recommend implementing a CDN on any WordPress with traffic.
A CDN provides loading speed and also stability in that loading speed, regardless of the country from which the requests are made.
Again, as this section is very long, I am going to walk you through a video on how to set up a CDN with LiteSpeed Cache. In this case, I have decided to use CDN77 as an example:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=5Sa6WwN9oZI%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26origin%3Dhttps%3A%252F%252Fraiolanetworks.es
I’m not going to talk about QUIC.CLOUD in this post, since that deserves a separate article. As you may have seen in the previous video, we have explained how to implement a normal CDN (such as CDN77) by mapping CNAMEs.
Also, if we want to configure LiteSpeed Cache to flush CloudFlare’s cache we can as well. We simply have to put the API in this section of “CDN”:
The only advantage we will get from this is that when the LiteSpeed cache is flushed, the CDN cache on CloudFlare’s servers will also be flushed.
Image optimization with LiteSpeed Cache
I don’t usually use LiteSpeed Cache to optimize images in WordPress, as I use the Imagify plugin (from the creators of WP Rocket).
LiteSpeed Cache’s image optimization module is based on QUIC.CLOUD service. To use it we must create an account in QUIC.CLOUD.
I will tell you that the QUIC. CLOUD API image optimization system is good and has a good algorithm. Also, if you are hosted by Raiola Networks you have enough free fees to use this image optimization service without paying.
As you can see in the image above, LiteSpeed Cache’s image optimization service allows us to convert images to WebP by compressing and optimizing them.
Page Optimization with LiteSpeed Cache
We are going with the most complicated section but, at the same time, one of the most useful of the entire plugin. Although it has nothing to do with the WordPress cache, with this section we can optimize our online store to have a good score in Google PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals.
As I know that this part of the plugin is complex and I wanted to explain it well, I have created a video so that you can understand all the options and see exactly what to put in each case.
Some of the optimization tasks that LiteSpeed Cache does for CSS and Javascript resources are not done on the server, but on the QUIC.CLOUD servers through the connection between the plugin and the API.
Even so, although you can see the video above, I explain some of the different features of LiteSpeed Cache in this configuration section.
All these options have changed a lot over time. Updates are very common in LiteSpeed Cache, and as new features are constantly being added, there are frequent restructurings of the plugin interface.
LiteSpeed Cache CSS tweaks
We start with the CSS, which in turn is the longest section of all that we are going to see.
From this section, I want to highlight the good results of the option to combine CSS and the one to load CSS asynchronously. These two configurations can help us to comply with the CSS rules that appear in Google PageSpeed Insights (at least, apart).
Obviously, LiteSpeed Cache does not have the “Unused CSS” API that WP Rocket has, but we are talking about a free plugin that serves as a server plugin, as opposed to a paid plugin where its developers make a living from it.
The configuration to generate the critical path of CSS is quite complete in LiteSpeed Cache and, the truth is, it gives a lot of room to adapt its operation to our needs.
If you have any trouble optimizing the CSS, go to “Settings” to add exclusions and adapt the behavior. Exclusions are the basis of the configuration of any resource optimization plugin.
LiteSpeed Cache JS tweaks
Another strong point is the optimization of Javascript since in version 4.0 of the plugin they introduced the delayed loading of Javascript along with the asynchronous loading.
If I had to highlight something from this section, it would be the “defer loading of JS” part, as it allows us to apply asynchronous loading or delayed loading of JS.
Although in this section we cannot find an exclusion box, it is in the “Adjust” section.
The configuration of the optimization of the JS is usually more complex at the level of exclusions than the same optimization in the CSS. To give a practical example, minifying JS is much more complex than minifying CSS.
LiteSpeed Cache HTML tweaks
After CSS and Javascript come to HTML. In the “HTML Settings” section we can optimize the rendering of the HTML and adjust some things related to external resources and resource hints.
Here we can tweak some cool things for the WPO, like served HTML minification, DNS prefetch, and asynchronous loading of fonts loaded from Google Fonts.
Although it is not the definitive configuration panel when it comes to loading speed, it allows you to do interesting things.
LiteSpeed Cache media settings
In «Media settings» we can play with the images, but not with the optimization, but with the part of the lazy load or delayed loading of images and iframes.
It also allows the implementation of a technique, based on LQIP, which serves the images in a lower quality before and then changes them to the final ones. Personally, I don’t like it.
I am not going to put the “Media Settings” part here in a photo since it is very long and would take up a lot of space, that is what the video that I have recorded and left above is for.
If I had to highlight something from this section it is the ability to implement lazy loading of images and iframes, along with the ability to add element dimensions to the layout to prevent CLS issues in Google PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals.
Also, if you want to make exclusions in the lazy loading you have them in the next section, called «Media exclusions».
LiteSpeed Database Optimization
I am only going to mention this functionality of LiteSpeed Cache since I have an opinion about the functionalities to optimize the database that includes cache solutions (and others, such as Perfmatters) and that do not have the main objective of optimizing the WordPress DB.
First of all, I want to say that the “Database” configuration part of LiteSpeed Cache is not one of the worst:
It even allows checking lines in wp_options with autoload parameter and converting MyISAM tables to InnoDB.
Other than that, it’s the same as the others. We can clean the typical WordPress database garbage and nothing else. This has little to do with performance.
Precisely for this reason, I like more advanced solutions, such as Advanced Database Cleaner, instead of more standardized and repetitive solutions, such as WP-Optimize or any of these solutions integrated as “padding” in different cache solutions.
In fact, within the part to optimize the WordPress database, Perfmatters is much better than LiteSpeed Cache.
Crawler de LiteSpeed Cache y LSCache
We come to the final part of the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress.
The crawler part is complicated because most hosting providers have it disabled to avoid resource problems in customer accounts.
Therefore, although the configuration is active, it already clearly states that the crawler is not:
Precache is a very important part of a caching strategy, but only if you know exactly what you’re doing. Otherwise, you could drop the web due to excessive consumption of resources.
There is a plugin called Automatic Cache Warmer that acts as a precache bot, useful to implement with a cache system that does not have a crawler or that you cannot use for some reason.
Without a doubt, the efficiency of LiteSpeed is quite a differentiating factor. This is from someone who is a fan of Nginx and uses Nginx quite a bit.
In fact, at Raiola Networks we use Nginx as a reverse proxy for Apache on VPS servers optimized with the VestaCP control panel. This is because the cost of the LiteSpeed license would not cover the base price of the server. However, at cPanel hosting, we offer LiteSpeed Web Server completely free of charge.
LiteSpeed Web Cache Manager
To finish, I want to tell you that in hosting with cPanel from Raiola Networks, you can activate or deactivate the LSCache or even install LiteSpeed Cache using the LiteSpeed Web Cache Manager module of cPanel.
After looking for that option in your cPanel, you will be able to access the LiteSpeed Web Cache Manager settings:
From here you can flush the LSCache cache the same way you would directly from LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress.
In fact, another of the things that we can do from here is to install LiteSpeed Cache in the compatible CMS. In the case of WordPress, we can do it directly:
As you can see in the previous image, it even has a connection with some QUIC.CLOUD functionalities through the corresponding API, which we must have configured in advance.
