There’s no doubt that caching is the best way to optimize your WordPress website.
Caching not only makes your website extremely fast, but also helps you in decreasing bounce rates, earning a better search engine ranking, and – most importantly – creating the best user experience.
WordPress caching plugins like LiteSpeed Cache can help you make your website load faster – for free.
The LiteSpeed Cache plugin comes with robust cache-management tools that can help you improve the performance of your WordPress website.
Why Should You Use LiteSpeed Cache Plugin for WordPress?
Once we configured LiteSpeed Cache and deployed changes, we were amazed by the way it helped us improve the performance of our WordPress website. The LiteSpeed Cache plugin is much more than a cache-management plugin – it also helps you with image and database optimization, has a fully-fledged CDN, and more.
The plugin is packed full of easy to use yet powerful features that are perfectly tailored to optimize the performance of your WordPress website.
In this detailed LiteSpeed Cache plugin review, we’ll cover all of its features, benefits, and integration options, and teach you how to enable caching in WordPress.
Let’s get started.
LiteSpeed Cache Plugin Review in a Nutshell
The LiteSpeed Cache WordPress plugin (LSCWP) is a powerful WordPress caching plugin. This plugin comes with advanced cache management tools and optimization features that make it an all-in-one acceleration solution to reduce the page loading times of your website.
LSCWP has over 8,009,579+ active installations and countless positive reviews from its customers.
This plugin features an exclusive server-level cache and collection of optimization features to help you improve the performance of your WordPress website.
The plugin takes advantage of the LiteSpeed web service’s built-in page cache. The page cache stores content from dynamically-generated pages that provide faster loading times for visitors.
Installing and configuring the LiteSpeed Cache plugin is easy and straightforward, as the default setting is ready to use for most of the websites. However, LSCWP comes with an intuitive interface that lets you customize a wide range of settings as per your needs.
With LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress, you can employ the best practices to ensure better loading times for your WordPress website, which will undoubtedly help you provide an exceptional user experience.
Needless to say, the LiteSpeed Cache plugin is so much more than just a fast cache-management plugin. It is packed with advanced features that are well-tailored to deliver superior performance for your WordPress website. Some notable features are:
- Lazy Loading images
- Database optimization
- Browser cache support
- Server-level full page cache
- PageSpeed score optimization
- Content delivery network support
- Hassle-free images optimization
The list of incredible features goes on.
What’s more, LSCWP supports WordPress multi-sites and works seamlessly with popular plugins such as WooCommerce, bbPress and Yoast SEO.
Features & Benefits of LiteSpeed Cache Plugin for WordPress
The LiteSpeed Cache plugin comes with a variety of superb features and tools that can easily help you optimize the performance of your website to load faster and provide a better user experience.
Let’s check out some of the best features offered by LiteSpeed Cache plugin:
Server-Level Full Page Cache
LSCWP communicates directly with LiteSpeed’s web server in order to easily store the static copies of dynamically-generated web pages. This plugin comes with smart features, such as tag-based smart cache purging.
Also, this feature has the capability to cash multiple versions of generated content that is based on visitors, geo locations, currencies, and more. It even enables faster page retrieval for uncached content.
The plugin comes with robust cache management tools that are literally impossible for other plugins to replicate.
Private Cache
The plugin has the capability to easily cache personalized copies of a page in conditions where the content is relevant to the user who requests it. The pages that are publicly uncacheable can be cached privately. Additionally, the caching can be extended to include the logged-in users as well.
Image Optimization
The LiteSpeed Cache WordPress plugin enables you to automatically reduce the size of your website’s images in order to improve the page load times with ease. The plugin also facilitates the WebP file format to compress smaller image files. The individual images can be reverted back to their original formats as per your requirements.
LiteSpeed Crawler
The LiteSpeed cache crawler easily crawls your website and refreshes the pages that have expired in the cache without relying on external visitors to populate the cache. Also, it minimizes the possibility of a visitor somehow encountering uncached content.
The LiteSpeed crawler is smart enough to easily adjust its own level of resource consumption in order to minimize its impact on the server of your website to ensure that your website loads faster.
Content Delivery Network Support
The plugin features a reliable content delivery network that enables the dynamic page caching functionality of LSCWP for static content. Deploying this plugin will also eliminate the need for a third-party CDN plugin, which will reduce your cost and effort.
The content delivery network easily speeds up your website by serving static content to your visitors from locations that are geographically closer to them. Enabling the content delivery network will help you provide a better user experience to your website’s visitors.
Lazy Loading Images
The LiteSpeed WordPress Cache plugin features lazy loading images. This feature saves time by loading only the necessary media to fill up the current viewport. It easily counts the remaining images and iFrames as per your requirements. In short, if a visitor of your website doesn’t scroll down to the footer of your page, the image won’t be loaded, which will make the page load faster.
Database Optimization
This plugin also helps you with database optimization to keep your WordPress database slim, trim, and more efficient in order to load faster and provide a seamless user experience.
With this plugin, you can easily speed up the database queries by eliminating the accumulated clutter. This will erase your need for a separate database optimization plugin, saving you both money and time.
Edge Side Includes (ESI)
This feature enables you to “punch holes” in a cached page and fill up said holes with differently-cached content. If you enable this feature, the entire page needs to be cached privately if a hole can be punched in a landing page or a shopping cart.
CSS, JavaScript, or HTML Minification
This plugin helps you remove all unnecessary and irrelevant characters, such as whitespace characters and comments from CSS, JavaScript, and HTML code. It can be configured separately, which will help you with the minification functions as per your needs and requirements. Also, you can minimize the size of the source code in order to make it more efficient when transmitted over other networks.
CSS and JavaScript Combination
This feature enables you to combine multiple JavaScript or CSS files into one. It can also be configured individually or separately, which will enable only the combination function that you actually need.
With the help of this feature, you can easily reduce the number of requests made by the browser and remove duplicate codes, effectively improving your website speed.
HTTP/2 Server Push
Enabling these features helps you reduce the number of requests that are necessary to load a web page when the indexed .html file is requested. Deploying this will fulfill the browser’s needs; the plugin acts instantly without waiting for a separate request, which will make your pages load faster.
LiteSpeed Cache Plugin and Web Server Pricing
LSCWP is a free to use, open-source, all-in-one site acceleration plugin. This free plugin is powerful enough to deliver maximum performance to your WordPress website without any hassle.
However, LiteSpeed’s server is required with this plugin, and there are some fees associated with different LiteSpeed server editions.
LiteSpeed provides three different server plans: Free, Site Owner, and Site Owner Plus.
- Free: This plan supports only one user and one website. The plan comes with less than 2GB of memory, along with other basic features and tools.
- Site Owner: This plan costs $10 monthly and $110 yearly. It supports five domains and one user and comes with less than 8 GB Memory. This plan also comes equipped with all pro features and tools.
- Site Owner Plus: This plan costs $16 monthly and $176 yearly. It supports up to five domains, comes with unlimited memory, and is loaded with powerful features and tools, including LSCACHE and more.
LiteSpeed also provides a 15-day free trial that you can use to try its services for free.
LiteSpeed Cache Plugin Integration & Compatibility
LSCWP seamlessly integrates with all other popular themes and plugins out there. The plugin also supports WordPress multisite.
LiteSpeed Cache plugin integration includes WooCommerce, Jetpack, Yoast SEO, WPML, Contact Form 7, Ninja Forms, Elegant Themes, BBPress, NextGen Gallery, Google XML sitemaps, and plenty more.
Generally, all popular plugins seamlessly integrate with the LiteSpeed Cache plugin; however, if a plugin does not integrate with LSCWP, you can contact the support team and they will make the integration available. There are also several basic actions you can perform in order to make them integrate with any plugin.
How to Enable Caching in WordPress with LiteSpeed (Step by Step)
The configuration and setup of this plugin are easy and straightforward; even if you are a beginner, you can get started right away.
In order to easily configure and set up this plugin, you can follow our step-by-step walkthrough to install and configure the plugin from scratch. Follow the step by step walkthrough below.
Before installing and configuring the LiteSpeed Cache plugin, make sure you have disabled any existing caching plugins already installed on your WordPress website.
Let’s start the installation and configuration of this plugin.
Step #1: Install & Activate the Plugin
The initial step is to install this plugin on your WordPress website. To install the plugin, navigate to your WordPress dashboard and click Plugins > Add New.
In the search box, you need to search for LiteSpeed Cache then click on the Install Now button.
After installing the plugin, activate it right away.
Step #2: Configuring the LiteSpeed Cache Plugin
To configure this plugin, navigate to Settings > LiteSpeed Cache. In the LiteSpeed menu, you will find numerous configuration options, such as General, Cache, Purge, etc.
Let’s review and start the configuration of this plugin.
General Section
In the general section, you can easily enable/disable the LiteSpeed Cache plugin and even set different TTL values. Also, you can use the default recommended values to extend them as per your requirements.
Cache
Using this feature, you need to turn Browser Cache on. Enabling this will store your website’s content on your visitor’s browser cache and drastically improve the page loading times of your website.
Additionally, there is no need to manually edit your .htaccess file, as this plugin does it automatically.
Excludes
The Excludes tab comes with a configuration option that defines which type of content is not cached. You can enable/disable these options as per your needs and requirements.
Optimize
The next step is to enable CSS Minify and CSS Combine, along with the CSS HTTP/2 Push options.
Enabling these options will help you optimize the CSS codes and decrease the size of CSS files so that your website loads faster than before.
LiteSpeed CDN
The CDN tab contains all content delivery network settings that you can enable/disable as per your needs. If you’re using Cloudflare, this plugin seamlessly integrates with your Cloudflare account — you can provide your Cloudflare email and Global API key to sync it. Then, you can easily enter the Cloudflare Development Mode to sync it and make things right on your website.
Enabling the CDN will speed up your website by providing static content to your visitors from locations that are geographically closer to them.
Advanced
The Advanced tab contains the various additional and miscellaneous settings present out there. Before configuring this tab, make sure you know all the settings and changes you’re making under the Advanced tab. If you somehow configure this section incorrectly, it might cause some unexpected errors or make your website inaccessible.
Debug
The Debug tab contains debugging settings that you can use to troubleshoot various settings.
Image Optimization
Using this feature, you can easily optimize your images to make your pages load faster without losing the size of the images. First, when you optimize the image settings, you will be asked for a Request Key. Simply click the button in order to obtain a key from the central server that you can use for your future image optimizations.
In the image optimization page, you can see all of your website images’ information:
Images Total: It displays the total number of images that are actually present on your website, along with “Image Not Requested Yet.”
From the image optimization menu, you can easily click the Send Optimization Request button to submit all of the images that aren’t yet optimized.
Purging the Cache
In order to manage the cache manually, navigate to your WordPress dashboard and select LiteSpeed Cache > Manage.
Once you click on Manage, you will be provided various options to purge the cache: Front Page, Purge Pages, Purge 404 Error, Purge 403 Error, Empty Entire Cache, etc.
It also comes with a Purge All option, where you can easily clear all cache entries that are related to your WordPress installation. When you click on the Empty Entire Cache button, all of your cache entries for your WordPress website will be moved to the trash, which will empty the Entire Cache section.
If you have made any changes to the settings, then don’t forget to click on Save Changes in order to save the new configuration options.
LSCWP Customer Support
The customer support offered by LiteSpeed is reliable and responsive. They offer free as well as paid customer support for various kinds of support, such as installation, hourly support, email support, account merge/transfer support, and more.
The LiteSpeed Cache plugin comes with a flexible support option — WordPress Cache (LSCWP).
WordPress Cache (LSCWP): This is a paid support option that starts at $39. This support includes troubleshooting for a single issue with your LSCWP setup. It also includes optimization, crawler, and CSS/JS optimization tasks.
Overall, LiteSpeed strives to provide reliable free support options; however, they also provide top-notch paid support options.
You can opt for the paid options to complete your plugin setup if you don’t have much experience with caching.
LiteSpeed Cache Plugin Reviews Conclusion
While there are many reasons why you should use the LiteSpeed Cache plugin, one of them is to make your WordPress website load faster and provide a better user experience to your visitors.
As a marketer, you understand that fast loading speeds help you rank higher on Google search engines because Google gives preference to fast loading websites. That’s why making sure that your website loads fast will help your exposure and provide a better user experience to your visitors.
The LiteSpeed Cache plugin is an all-in-one website acceleration solution. Most importantly, it’s the only optimization plugin you need to improve the performance of your WordPress website.
LSCWP is capable of helping with many aspects of your website performance, such as purging the cache, image optimization, lazy loading images, CDN, and more. All of these aspects can be managed with the help of the LiteSpeed Cache plugin at no extra cost.
On top of that, everything is free – you just need to purchase one of the LiteSpeed server plans to get started. If you’re looking to drastically improve the performance of your website, LiteSpeed Cache is worth a try.
We hope that our LiteSpeed Cache plugin review suits your purpose well.
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