To use LiteSpeed caching plugin, you must install it. Go to WP admin > Add Plugins > search “LiteSpeed Cache”, install and activate.
Go into LiteSpeed settings, click [Show Advanced Settings] on the right side. Then set as follows. (NOTE: if I don’t mention a certain item, that means leave it on default!):
For standard sites (try this method first):
- General – ENABLE LiteSpeed cache. Everything else stays default.
- Cache – Disable “Cache Logged-in Users”. Only enable “Cache Mobile” if you have AMP or similar mechanisms (if you don’t know, you’re probably fine).
- Purge – leave all on default.
- Excludes – default is fine. But can exclude certain pages if you want.
- Optimize – “Generate Critical CSS In Background” and “Exclude JQuery” should be ON. Everything else should be OFF!
- Tuning – leave everything to OFF. Can put “Remove WordPress Emoji” to ON if you don’t use it.
- Media – everything should be off. If you have many Youtube, Googlemaps, or other iframe embeds, I highly recommend putting “Lazy Load Iframes” to ON.
- CDN – enable CDN if you have one. Those with Cloudflare, ignore the CDN section and scroll down to the bottom instead. Put “Cloudflare API” to ON and fill in the email, API key, and domain.
- ESI Settings – leave “Enable ESI” OFF.
- Advanced – put “Browser Cache” ON. Leave everything else OFF.
- WooCommerce (if you have it) – “Use Front Page TTL for the Shop Page” is ON, “Privately Cache Cart” is OFF!
Click “Save Changes” at the bottom, then hover your mouse over LiteSpeed icon in the top bar and click “Purge All”.
I choose these settings as the safest settings. Sure, you could granularly tweak every other thing but most of them are unnecessary, not recommended (by me) or make almost zero difference. If you don’t know how they affect your site, playing with them could adversely affect your speeds.
For busy sites with many database queries or slow backends
- Copy above settings but go to Advanced tab, set “Object Cache” to ON and choose Method > Redis. (NOTE: not recommended if you have constant data changes every 5 minutes.)
Bonus option for those on our Dedicated VPS plans:
- You can enable “Crawler”. Simply go to the left panel of Dashboard > LiteSpeed Cache > Crawler. Enable the “Crawler Cron”, generate the crawler file and manually run/reset as often as you like. 🙂
- This feature is not available for our managed hosting clients.
- If you’re a dedicated VPS client and don’t see the crawler option enabled, please contact us to enable it for you.
For a more detailed explanation of all the options, read this UNOFFICIAL LiteSpeed Cache Guide.