LITESPEED – ALL-IO-ONE
SPEEDUP SOLUTION
All-in-one speedup solution
Litespeed cache is an open source WordPress plug-in. It consists of a free part downloadable from wordpress.org, and a paid part, which Easy Travel Hosting offers exclusively to all its customers.
The first, free for anyone, is LSCWP (LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress) which can be installed as a plugin on your wordpress site.
Like any other cache optimisation plugin, it creates an optimised copy of its website to speed up the call from the browsers.
The second part, which we offer exclusively and free of charge to our customers, is LSWS (LiteSpeed Web Server) which integrates with LSCWP to drastically reduce page load times, thanks to advanced cache management tools, which interact with the server by allocating the resources intelligently.
With advanced cache management tools and optimization features, LSCWP is an all-in-one site acceleration solution. It is the only optimization plug-in you need!
With LiteSpeed, your site can use best practices that guarantee a high PageSpeed score and, more importantly, an exceptional user experience.
If you want to know your PageSpeed score, click here.
To understand what page caching is, it might be easier if we deal with an example of a site created with the WordPress content management system. The same general principle applies to any content management system, however.
When WordPress is installed for the first time, it should work fairly quickly. Nobody uses a WordPress without add-ons, however. Usually you will use a custom theme and also add a number of plugins. Your site now looks good and, thanks to the various plugins, it has all the features you need. However, following all these extras, the site will inevitably load a little slower.
Why is this happening?
It happens in part because every time someone loads a page, all the PHP code in your theme and active plugins must be run in order to create the final output of the page. If you have a lot of plugins, or a poorly coded theme or plugin, this can cause significant overhead and cause a very slow site.
The idea of caching is that instead of doing all the heavy work every time a page is loaded and for each visitor, we only do it once when we access the page for the first time. So we store the output of the code and the next time someone visits the page instead of rebuilding the whole page dynamically, instead, we just generate the stored HTML code.
This makes things much faster, but there is one big problem that needs to be addressed: what happens when content changes?
If we cache content, we need to know when the content changes. For example, if you change text on a page or product prices, you need to be sure that when visitors arrive on that page they get updated content instead of previously cached content.
To ensure this, the cached copy of the page must be ‘evicted’ from the cache when the content changes. Once the specific content is cached, the next time someone accesses that page, it will be dynamically generated again and then the new updated HTML output will be cached ready for the next visitor.
To handle this, applications like WordPress have numerous plugins available that create cached content and eject any specific content when someone edits it through the WordPress admin area.
You should now have a good understanding of the general concept of a page cache. If you are a WordPress user, you may even have used one or several caching plug-in solutions, but so far these are likely to be all application-level caches.
In most cases, if someone visits a WordPress site with a cache plug-in implemented, PHP has yet to run. The code that tells the user to load the cached HTML is encoded in PHP within the caching plugin. It is therefore necessary that WordPress ‘core’ PHP code is executed and the cache plug-in PHP code executes and loads the HTML from the cache. So you saved a lot of overhead as you don’t have to run the code of all the plugins you have installed, but you’re still running PHP code anyway.
With server side page caching, there is no need to run PHP. When a request for a page arrives in a cached server side page environment, if there is cached content, it is passed directly to the visitor without even invoking WordPress or a PHP run.
But what about cache “eviction”? How does the web server know that its content is up to date?
In the same way an application-level cache needs to clear pages from the cache when content changes, as does the server side page cache. In order for this to work, you need to install a plug-in or extension in the application itself that knows how to properly delete cached content from the server side page cache. As with application page caches, the LiteSpeed server-side page cache can be cleared using a simple plug-in, one designed specifically to work with LiteSpeed or one that has been designed in a more generic way to work with a cache Server-side pages (e.g. as paint). This is because LiteSpeed has been designed to work exactly like the other server side page caches and can have the cache cleared upon receipt of the HTTP delete requests or, more simply, by deleting the files in a cache folder hidden in your user account.
For WordPress, caching is only the beginning.
WordPress is by far the most popular CMS on the Internet today, feeding over 35% of websites.
It is therefore not surprising that LiteSpeed took a long time to develop cache integration with WordPress.
They went above and beyond the essential functions of page caching and cache eviction processing, and they also integrated a host of other in-app optimisation features, all designed to load turbo WordPress websites.
All the imaginable features you would want in an optimisation solution are there: combine CSS and Javascript, minimise the code, upload lazy images, take advantage of the Push Server HTTP / 2 support, resend javascript, optimise the images and much more.
Once configured, your WordPress site will not only be fast due to caching, but super optimised in terms of internal code, boosting site speeds and helping you achieve PageSpeed scores and increase your SEO.
