You can make your WordPress website run much faster by installing a caching plugin.
Normally, every time a visitor to your website requests a page, the WordPress software creates the page from scratch by running a huge amount of php code and sql queries to get information from the database and build it into an html file to send to your website visitor’s browser. This takes time, and can sometimes cause a noticeable delay. Rebuilding the page every single time is a bit of a waste of effort – it makes more sense to keep a copy of the ready-built page, and only re-create the page when something has changed on it such as pictures, text, or menus. This is what a caching plugin does – it keeps pre-built copies of the pages, and notices when something has changed that will make it necessary to re-build the stored or “cached” copy of the page again.
On our hosting, we recommend using the LiteSpeed cache for WordPress websites if you want to speed them up. This can help especially with the more complex WordPress websites that use complicated themes and/or a lot of plugins. For a simple and small WordPress website, you usually don’t need to bother installing a caching plugin.
Installing the LiteSpeed cache is simple. First you need to go into your Cpanel hosting control panel, then scroll to the “Software” section, click on “LiteSpeed Cache” and then on the green “Enable LiteSpeed” button.
Next, go into your website’s WordPress dashboard, and install the “LiteSpeed Cache” plugin. I’m assuming that your WordPress website has just been backed up – always do a full backup before installing plugins, or running software updates, that’s standard advice from the makers of WordPress. Safely backed up? OK, then just go to Dashboard…Plugins…Add New and search for “LiteSpeed Cache”. Then click the “Install Now” button, and after that, the “Activate” button.
That’s it. There will now be a new LiteSpeed Cache section in your WordPress dashboard, with lots of settings that you could alter, but unless you’re sure you know what you’re doing, simply leave all the settings unchanged – the cache plugin works just fine with the default settings.
If you log out of your WordPress dashboard so that you’re looking at the ‘public’ view of your website, you should now notice that your pages load and re-load much faster!
If you don’t like the LiteSpeed cache plugin, or it doesn’t help your website, it’s simple to uninstall it from the WordPress dashboard – just go to Dashboard…Plugins…LiteSpeed Cache then click “Deactivate” followed by “Delete”.
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