The Beginner’s Guide to LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress

Congratulations! You’ve installed the LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress plugin, activated it, and are ready to take the next step.

But what does that mean?

For a lot of us, the sight of the settings tabs is impressive enough to make you want to dive in. But others can become overwhelmed and feel almost frozen by the sheer number of options available.

Sound familiar? Don’t worry—you’ve come to the right place.

In this post, we’ll look at setting up LSCache in a quick, simple way. We’ll explore the major details you need to know to take full advantage of the LiteSpeed WordPress cache plugin.

• What do I do now that I’ve installed LSCache for WordPress and activated it?
• Using LSCache for WordPress as a Beginner
• The Remaining Four or Five Cache Tabs
• Additional LSCache Plugin Sections

What do I do now that I’ve installed LSCache for WordPress and activated it?

LSCache for WordPress basically serves two roles: it’s a full-page cache for a website’s dynamically-generated pages and a site-optimization plugin.

Many users who install LSCache focus on utilizing its caching functions and consider everything else to be the cherry on the cake.

The crucial thing to remember is you can enable the caching functions and ignore the rest of it. You have that freedom, which is one of the most appealing aspects of the LiteSpeed cache for WordPress.

When you activate it, you’ll see that everything is disabled. You can turn caching on by going to LiteSpeed Cache > Cache > Cache and switching Enable Cache to ON.

Now, you could leave your LSCache configuration there if you wanted to. You could forget about experimenting with additional settings and this WordPress cache plugin would likely cache your website brilliantly. We selected the default settings to work with most sites straight away.

As we move on, we’ll consider the Cache section’s first four tabs and their functions. They’re the cache’s most basic settings.

Using LSCache for WordPress as a Beginner

Cache Tab

On the Cache tab, the first option enables or disables the caching functionality. The rest of the settings let you define the content types to be cached. Everything is enabled by default. Feel unsure what these settings actually do? You may be best keeping them set to their respective defaults for the time being.

TTL Tab

TTL (Time To Live) applies to the length of time, in seconds, that a page can stay in cache before it’s regarded as being stale. When a page’s TTL is reached, it’ll be cleared out of the cache. We selected default TTLs that should be suitable for the majority of websites, but you can feel free to adjust them as you see fit.

Purge Tab

In certain scenarios, pages should be cleared from the cache ahead of their natural date of expiry. In this section, you can set the rules for this behavior. Default selections should be suitable for most sites, though you can tweak them if that works best for you.

A Brief Example

Let’s say you create a fresh post. You can give it the tag “cakes” and publish it in your “cooking” category. When you do this, a number of pages will change: the homepage, the cooking category archive page, the cooking tag archive page, the author archive page, and possibly some others.

Each of the pages affected will have to be cleared to avoid stale content being served. These settings make it easier to change the rules to suit your site’s requirements.

Excludes Tab

You might find you don’t want to cache certain pages. The Excludes Tab options enable you to define which parts of your site should be excluded from caching. It’s unlikely that you’ll need to adjust these settings for most sites, and they’re available so that you can make custom exceptions to caching rules as required.

The Remaining Four or Five Cache Tabs

You will have either four or five remaining Cache tabs (depending on whether you enabled WooCommerce). They cover caching types that are more advanced. Let’s take a closer look as we continue your LSCache configuration guide.

ESI

ESI (Edge Side Includes) is a method allowing you to “punch holes” in public content, so you can fill them with content that is uncached or private. It’s helpful for a number of things, including personalized greetings and shopping cart widgets. However, it’s deactivated by default.

Object

The Object tab’s settings give you the flexibility to control an external object cache (such as LSMCD, Redis, or Memcached) that is enabled and configured by the server admin.

Browser

Browser cache is a client-level cache for static files. When this has been switched on, static files (e.g. images) will be stored locally on a user’s computer/device when they’re requested for the first time. In the future, the content will be retrieved from this local storage until the browser cache expires. This tab’s settings control the browser cache.

Advanced

This tab’s name makes it pretty obvious that only users with a little more experience should check it out. You’re unlikely to use this, though you might if you have a conflict of some sort with a different cache plugin.

WooCommerce

LiteSpeed Cache can be utilized with WooCommerce. When you enable WooCommerce, this tab will appear. It gives you the flexibility to configure settings for caching shop content.

Additional LSCache Plugin Sections

We still have a number of other LSCache plugin sections to explore:

Dashboard

In the LiteSpeed Cache Dashboard, you can view the status of your LiteSpeed Cache and QUIC.cloud services at a glance. These include Low-Quality Image Placeholders, Image Optimization, Cache Crawler, Critical CSS Generation, and others. You also have options to assess your page load times and page speed score, both of which are vital to user experience.

General

In this section, the settings control your QUIC.cloud services usages, as well as allowing you to upgrade the plugin automatically and determine which messages should be presented on your dashboard.

CDN

With this section, you can configure your Content Delivery Network to be used with WordPress. But don’t worry if you don’t bother with a Content Delivery Network. By default, CDN support is deactivated.

Image Optimization

With LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress, you can optimize images to make them smaller and less time-consuming to transmit. You can do this via a QUIC.cloud service, and can control it in this section.

Page Optimization

You can take a number of non-cache measures to speed up your WordPress site, many of which are supported in this tab. For instance, CSS and JavaScript minification and combination, as well as HTTP/2 push, asynchronous and deferred load, etc.

Don’t know what any of this means? That’s fine. By default, they’re disabled anyway, so there’s no need to worry about them.

Database

In this section, you’re free to optimize your WordPress database. This is useful for speeding up your site. The LiteSpeed for WordPress cache DB Optimizer makes executing a number of these tasks in your WordPress database easier.

Crawler

By default, the crawler is disabled, but when it’s active, it will travel your site and refresh pages that have expired from the cache. But be aware: crawling can be a resource-intensive process, so not every hosting provider permits it. If your hosting provider allows crawling, though, it’s an effective way to ensure your cache stays fresh.

Toolbox

The Toolbox section has what you need if you’re looking to export your site settings, purge the cache manually, or debug issues. But the Environment Report is likely to be the most helpful thing here.

So, that’s the end of our LSCache configuration guide for newcomers! You should have the details you need to get set up quickly, efficiently, and confidently.

LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress and Plesk

To utilize the full power of LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress you need to use it with LiteSpeed web server. Plesk hosting control panel provides an opportunity to install, configure and manage LiteSpeed web server easily. To have a better idea about Litespeed on Plesk installation process please read this LiteSpeed installation and configuration guide.