With WordPress, the CMS is built to provide the ability to easily and quickly create a website that looks both professional and unique. No matter what type of website you’re developing with WordPress, it’s likely that you’re running into speed issues at some points.
- intensive graphics with huge file sizes
- slow support response times
- excessive ads slow down your website loading time.
This article will explore how to address these common problems!
Things that cause slow down your WordPress website
A slow WordPress website can be caused by a number of factors.
1. One of the most common causes of a slow WordPress website is an inadequate web host. If your web host does not have enough resources to handle the traffic your site receives, your site will run slowly.
2. Another common cause of a slow WordPress website is poorly designed or coded plugins and themes. If a plugin or theme is poorly coded, it can tax your server resources and cause your site to run slowly.
3. Finally, a slow WordPress website can also be caused by large amounts of content and/or media files. If your site has a lot of content and/or media files, it can take longer for those files to load, which can slow down your site.
What is server-side cache?
If you’re not using some form of caching on your WordPress website, you’re likely missing out on a huge opportunity to improve your performance. Caching can speed up your website in a number of ways, but here we’re going to focus on server-side caching.
Server-side caching is a type of caching that stores cached versions of your pages and posts on the server. When a visitor makes a request to your website, the server will check to see if there’s a cached version of the page or post available before it generates the page itself. If there is a cached version available, the server will serve up that cached version instead of generating a new one. This can save significant time and resources, both for the server and for the visitor’s browser.
There are several different types of server-side caching like Memcached, Redis, LiteSpeed, etc., but here we are going to dive deeply into LiteSpeed web server Cache. The important thing to know is that if you’re not already using some form of server-side caching for your WordPress site, you should be!
How to setup LiteSpeed Web Server
If you’re looking to speed up your WordPress website, one of the best things you can do is switch to a faster web server. LiteSpeed Web Server is a high-performance alternative to the popular Apache server that can make your site noticeably faster.
In this article, I’ll show you how to install and setup LiteSpeed Web Server for your WordPress website. We’ll also cover some tips on configuring LiteSpeed to get the most out of it.
Installing LiteSpeed Web Server
There are two ways to install LiteSpeed Web Server: using a pre-built package or compiling from source. Unless you have a specific reason for doing so, we recommend using a pre-built package as it’s much easier and quicker.
Pre-Built Packages
The easiest way to install LiteSpeed Web Server is by using one of the pre-built packages available from the LiteSpeed website. Just select the package for your operating system (Linux or Windows) and download it.
Once the package has been downloaded, you can install it like any other program on your system. On Linux systems, this will usually involve running a command such as “sudo dpkg -i litespeed-x”.
Installing LiteSpeed on Plesk Panel
Installing LiteSpeed Web Server (LSWS) and our Plesk Extension is simple. This guide focuses on installations for Plesk servers. We assume that you’re already familiar with Apache-Plesk setup, but in case you’re not, we’ll cover the basics of installation too. If you want to install LSWS in a different way than what this guide covers, we’ll still help you out!
Prerequisites
- A working Plesk Apache server
- In order to use LiteSpeed, you should stop your Nginx reverse proxy. If you already have a live site and are just installing or upgrading LiteSpeed, then we recommend first backing up your data.
- If Apache is not the default handler in your server, set it to FastCGI so the LSWS should be able to follow settings on how to handle requests.
Stopping the Nginx Reverse Proxy
With the latest version of Plesk, you can configure Nginx to work as a reverse proxy server. This means it sits in between your Internet and Apache. Before installing LiteSpeed Web Server, you’ll need to stop the Nginx reverse proxy so that Apache is the only web server handling live traffic. Otherwise, the LiteSpeed process won’t start properly and will block your website. If you want to install LiteSpeed from the command line then visit the guide.
How to Install LiteSpeed Plesk Extension
- Download the LiteSpeed Plesk extension from LiteSpeed Official Website
- Login to your Plesk Panel
- Go to Extensions > My Extensions (See the image below). If you don’t see the “LiteExtension” then upload the extension that you have downloaded from the LiteSpeed website.
- Click on the “Open” button.
- You’ll see the option “Install LiteSpeed WebServer”. Click on the option to continue. (See the image below)
- Scroll a little down and you’ll the “Installation Options” and “Web Console Login”
- You can leave the default values for the “Installation options”
- For “WebAdmin Console Login”, you are required to provide the passwords only. However, it is recommended to set the username too.
After filling out the required fields, click on the “Install” button. It’ll take a few minutes to be installed.
After a successful installation, click the “Restart LiteSpeed” option on the next screen.
Finally, you’ll have to click the option “Switch to LiteSpeed”.
Installing & Configuring LiteSpeed Cache Plugin
Assuming you have a WordPress website installed on a server running LiteSpeed, you can follow these steps to install and configure the LiteSpeed Cache Plugin.
1) Log into your WordPress Dashboard and go to the Plugins page.
2) Click the ‘Add New’ button at the top of the page.
3) Search for ‘LiteSpeed Cache’ in the search bar.
4) Find the plugin by LiteSpeed Technologies and click the “Install Now” button.
5) Once the plugin is installed, click the “Activate” button.
6) At the bottom of the admin menus, go to LiteSpeed > Cache. If you don’t see the error “LiteSpeed is not installed on your server” then you are good to continue.
7) Select which types of content you want to cache (e.g., HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images).
8) If you have a WooCommerce shop, tick the box labeled “Enable caching for WooCommerce”.
9) Click the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page.
For more detail visit the guide.
How to setup QUIC.cloud CDN
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a system of distributed servers that deliver content to a user based on the geographic locations of the user, the origin of the content, and a variety of other factors. CDNs are often used to improve the performance and availability of websites and applications by caching content at edge locations closer to users.
QUIC.cloud is a globally distributed content delivery network (CDN) that speeds up the delivery of your website’s content to visitors by caching it on servers around the world. Setting up QUIC.cloud CDN for your WordPress site is quick and easy, and can be done in just a few minutes.
To get started, sign up for a free account at QUIC.cloud and follow the instructions to create a new CDN distribution. Once your distribution is created, you’ll need to add a CNAME record to your DNS settings. This will route traffic from your website’s domain name to the QUIC.cloud servers.
Once your DNS settings have been updated, you can log in to your QUIC.cloud account and select your distribution from the “Distributions” page. On the distribution details page, you’ll see a section called “Origin Settings”. Here, you’ll need to enter the URL of your WordPress site.
Now that QUIC.cloud is configured for your WordPress site, all you need to do is sit back and enjoy the benefits of a faster website!
