How Can LiteSpeed Cache Help Improve Your WordPress Site Speed?

In 2015, Google announced its website speed update, in which it stated that it would use website speed as a ranking factor. It started with mobile searches and then was expanded to desktop searches in 2018. This makes sense since a slow-loading site affects the user experience negatively. Therefore, a fast-loading site is desired by both Google and users.

But how can you make your WordPress site load faster? We will show how to use the LiteSpeed Cache WordPress plugin, one of the most popular and easiest plugins to speed up your site.

 

Problems In Optimizing WordPress Site

WordPress is a free, open-source content management system. It was created in 2003 to help bloggers and small websites and quickly became the world’s most widely used content management system.

The company behind WordPress, Automattic, also offers a variety of related services for bloggers, including web hosting, premium WordPress themes, plugins, and training on how to use it.

If you are new to WordPress, it is extremely easy to install too many plugins or choose poorly configured plugins (they will also put stress on your WordPress database by adding unnecessary configurations) that can dramatically slow down your website. Using too many images on a single page can also be a problem.

 

Lightweight theme is very important if you want that your site loads fast.

 

Several other issues often slow down WordPress websites. Some of them include lack of site caching, lack of minification and compression, not using server-level caching, poor browser caching, and not using a CDN.

If you want to improve speed of WordPress site without making any code changes, LiteSpeed Cache will help you do this easily and efficiently.

Some issues and obstacles in website optimization are listed below:

Why is it essential to speed up the WordPress site? 

  • Because user experience is important. It’s no secret that users on the internet have a low tolerance for slow websites. In fact, 47% of consumers expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less, and 40% will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. By speeding up your WordPress site, you can provide your users with the best experience possible, improving their overall satisfaction with your brand and company.
  • Because search engines like Google care about speed too. In 2010, Google made an official statement that site speed is one of the signals they use in their ranking algorithm when determining how high each site should be ranked in organic search results. The faster your site loads, the higher you will rank in search engine results pages (SERPs) like Google, Bing, and Yahoo!
  • Because other optimizations don’t matter if it’s slow anyway. Once you optimize WordPress site speed and increase loading speeds, all other optimizations start doing better as well, such as lower bounce rate, higher pages per session, and more time spent on the page by visitors.

 

Why Use LiteSpeed Cache?

Speed matters to your users. Fortunately, there is an easy way to speed up your WordPress site. Install the amazing LiteSpeed Cache plugin from LiteSpeed.

LiteSpeed Cache plugin is a free and open-source WordPress plugin that communicates with LiteSpeed Web Server and LSWS’s built-in page cache to dramatically reduce your site’s load times.

In addition to employing the best practices that make for a high PageSpeed score, LiteSpeed Cache Plus has advanced cache-management tools and optimization features that will significantly improve your site’s performance for an exceptional user experience.

LiteSpeed cache has now become a papular cache plugin, and many people are using it for optimization.

LiteSpeed Cache helps speed up your site by caching your HTML, cacheable scripts, and stylesheets in your browser, so they are served to new visitors faster.

 

LiteSpeed Cache dashboard.

 

It also compresses cached pages to reduce the size of each page and send fewer data to users’ computers. LiteSpeed Cache is designed for WordPress users who want better control over what content on their sites gets cached.

Please note that the LiteSpeed Cache plugin core features do not work with Apache or NGINX servers.

 

How To Install LiteSpeed Cache?

There are two ways to install the LiteSpeed Cache plugin.

 

Method 1:

  1. You can log in to your WordPress admin dashboard.
  2. Navigate to the Plugin -> Add Plugin section in the left dashboard.
  3. Search the LiteSpeed Cache in the search bar of the WordPress directory.
  4. You will see the LiteSpeed Cache plugin in the first place press the install button.
  5. Once installation is done, just press Activate the button.

 

Method 2:

  1. The other way is to download the LiteSpeed plugin from the WordPress directory.
  2. Now go to your WordPress admin dashboard.
  3. Navigate to the Plugin -> Add Plugin section in the left dashboard.
  4. You can see the upload button. Click on that, select the zip file from the computer, and press install.
  5. Once installation is done, just press Activate the button.

Once the LiteSpeed cache plugin is installed, ensure that the basic caching is on.

 

LiteSpeed Cache settings.

 

You need to make sure that you are getting cache hit because if you are not getting cache hit, it will waste your time and efforts. For checking purposes, you can use the LSCache Check site.

 

LiteSpeed Cache Optimization Options

LiteSpeed Cache has many different options like PageSpeed Optimizations, Image Optimizations, CDN, etc Under Page Optimization, the most important things are the CSS Settings and JS Settings.

 

CSS Optimization

CSS settings are basically for the optimization and minifications of CSS in your WordPress website.

 

LiteSpeed Cache CSS settings.

 

JavaScript Optimization

JS settings are basically for optimizing and minifying JavaScript in your WordPress website.

 

LiteSpeed Cache Javascript settings.

 

Image Optimization

LiteSpeed Cache also allows you to optimize images of your website. To do image optimization go to the LiteSpeed Cache-> Image Optimization-> Gather Image Data.

 

Browser Cache

LiteSpeed cache allows using of different types of caches. One of these is browser cache. To enable Browser cache go to the LiteSpeed Cache->Cache-> browser cache.

Browser caching works by storing static files locally on the user’s browser. If you want to reduce repeated requests for static files, turn this setting to ON.

 

Test Site Speed Improvements

After you’ve optimized your site, you can test the speed again to see if there’s been an improvement. If there hasn’t been much change or even a drop in performance, try adjusting the settings or a different combination of options.

It’s best to test your website at multiple different times of the day because the habits of your visitors will likely vary. Try testing your site at key moments like right when it goes live and then during peak hours in the morning, lunchtime and evening.

You can use GTMetrix to test your site performance.

 

Conclusion

Using LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress will help you speed up your website. You can set up the LiteSpeed Cache plugin even if you are not a technical person because it only takes a few clicks.

Other great plugins for cache and improving site speed are WP Rocket and WP Speed of Light.

 

 

AUTHOR BIO:

Maria Khan is a Product Manager at CyberPanel. She also oversees content writing and social media at CyberPanel.


DISCLOSURE: Posts may contain affiliate links. If you buy something through one of those links, I might get a small commission, without any extra cost to you. Read more about it here.

2 thoughts on “How Can LiteSpeed Cache Help Improve Your WordPress Site Speed?”

  1. Hello, I have a question about LiteSpeed Cache. Whether there are positive differences in website speed – you need to use these third-party cloud and redis services in this plugin. And why, after installing this plugin, the database is many times larger. I have a small website on the lite speed server https://totemat.pl/ and I do not know why it is that when I run this plugin, the website works a bit slower – according to google page speed. What could be the reason?

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