This guide will discuss the advantages of using a caching plugin to speed up your WordPress website. Optimizing WordPress ensures your visitors have the best experience with minimal load times, and caching content plays a vital role.
However, each plugin you install in WordPress contributes to the load time of your website, so the first step you should take is to reduce the number of active plugins you have.
What is cache?
Caching is the process of storing website data for quicker access upon request. When someone visits your website, the hosting server needs to compute and process the request to display it in your browser. Depending on the design and content of your website and the number of concurrent visitors, this can slow down the loading time.
There are two types of caching methods, and with so many WordPress caching plugins, it can be challenging to determine what’s best for your website.
Browser caching: This is when your web browsers stores cache file locally. This process enables you to load frequently visited pages faster without having to request content from the server.
Server caching: This is where cached content is stored in either the memory or hard drives of the server. This is very fast and allows you to take advantage of the servers SSD drives which are approximately 4 times faster than standard SATA hard drives.
What is LiteSpeed Cache?
LiteSpeed Cache is a premium free WordPress plugin that caches at the webserver level. A prerequisite for its operation is a LiteSpeed Web Server, which must be installed and active. With HOSTKO, all our PRO/TURBO packages are installed on the LiteSpeed webserver.
The combination of LiteSpeed Web Server and LiteSpeed Cache plugin pages achieves significantly faster loading of web pages or stores (WooCommerce).
Comparing WordPress Caching Plugins
There are various WordPress Cache plugins available. Here are the 4 most popular caching plugins:
These 4 plugins all provide the same functionality, and although they work great, the LiteSpeed Cache plugin is the best option. First, let’s look at a comparison chart between the 4 plugins and LiteSpeed LSCache, so we have a better idea of what features they support:
WordPress plugin installation
WordPress plugins LiteSpeed Cache plugin can be easily installed through WordPress administration.Log into the WordPress administration
- Log in to the WordPress administration.
- Go to Plugins > Add New
- In the search engine at the top right, type LiteSpeed Cache ( https://wordpress.org/plugins/litespeed-cache/ ) and wait a moment for the system to find the said plug-in
- Click the Install Now button and activate it by clicking the Activate button
Plugin developers have ensured that their default settings already work for most websites and significantly speed up websites and stores.