One of the issues that most concerns WordPress website owners today is website loading speed. WordPress is an excellent website management system that is easy to use and offers many diverse options. Among other things, the system allows the installation of plugins to expand its functionality—and although this is a huge advantage, allowing the creation of complex websites without programming knowledge—it can also be a disadvantage. Incorrect and excessive use of plugins is one of the main causes of slow WordPress websites. Other factors that contribute to website slowness include uploading large images, poorly constructed design templates, choosing an unsuitable
web hosting service (or a hosting package that does not meet the website's needs), and a website that has been hacked and had malicious files planted on it.
There are many ways
to improve the speed of WordPress sites, and one of the most common is to use cache plugins.
What is a cache plugin?
Cache plugins take complex and dynamic websites and create a lighter version of them. This way, when a user visits the website, instead of waiting for the entire website to load from scratch, they receive a pre-saved version of parts of the website, which significantly improves loading times.
What is special about the LSCache plugin?
There are quite a few cache plugins for WordPress, some better than others. The LSCache plugin is based on a website storage technology called Lightspeed. This server technology is particularly popular because it is faster than existing technologies such as Apache, and it offers better performance for websites hosted on servers built on it. Lightspeed technology is suitable for both shared website hosting and
virtual servers. LightSpeed is particularly powerful when it comes to open source websites such as WordPress, as it allows you to run a cache plugin that communicates directly with the server, ensuring extremely fast performance, even compared to other standard cache plugins. LSCache can only be activated on
LightSpeed-based servers, so it is very important to check with your website hosting service to find out what server technology it uses.
How do you install LSCache?
The plugin (also called LiteSpeed Cache)
is available for download and installation through the free WordPress plugin repository.
What options are available in LiteSpeed Cache?
The plugin offers a wide range of options. You can certainly activate it and experiment, but if you have a commercial website or a website whose activity is critical, it is recommended to test the plugin in a development environment and seek the help of appropriate professionals to avoid website malfunctions. Among the functions offered by the plugin are:
- Object Cache - object cache.
- Creating a cache for private pages on the site.
- Minimization of CSS, JS, and HTML files.
- Merging and lazy loading of JS and CSS.
- Lazy loading of images.
- Minimizing images and converting them to WebP format.
- Cleaning and optimizing the database.
- CDN support.
- Control of the WordPress Heartbeat protocol.
You don't have to use all the functions offered by the plugin, and you can turn them on and off as you choose. In addition, you can configure pages that will not be cached in order to prevent malfunctions and enable smooth operation of the site. In any case, it is very important to back up your site before installing and activating cache plugins.
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