#FasterFriday – Using LSCache to speed-up your website

LSCache (LiteSpeed Cache) is a tool for accelerating dynamic (generated by code) web site content and is part of the LiteSpeed Enterprise web server software that some web hosts (including us) use to handle user requests to your website.

As it is built in to the LiteSpeed server itself, there’s no extra overhead associated with some other solutions that need two separate pieces of software to achieve the same functionality.

If your website uses code, such as PHP, Ruby, Python, NodeJS etc. to generate the output your users see then it takes time for that code to run, perform queries on data in a database such as MySQL etc. which slows down how fast your web pages load.  With LSCache the output from the code is saved (cached) and is used again if another request is made for the same page, this has two main benefits:

1. It means pages load faster for your visitors if they are loaded from the cache
2. It means you’re using less of your CPU and memory resources for each page viewed, as you’re not repeatedly running your code

We’re glad you asked, as LSCache can deal with that as well in a number of ways:

1. Every user gets their own personal, private cache which speeds up their own browsing without affecting other visitors
2. You can mix and match the public (all visitors) and private caching for a single visitor, using only the private when you need to
3. You can make use of Edge Side Includes (ESI) to mark parts of your content e.g. shopping basket widget as private and the rest of the page as public

As you can see, it’s a very flexible and powerful solution.

As you can see that covers quite a lot of the most popular pieces of software for creating websites.  We’ll be doing a deep dive in to each of them at a future time as the different plugins have different levels of functionality, so be sure to follow us on social media so you don’t miss any.

For power-users or those that need a bit more control than the LSCache plugins offer there’s the option to use Apache style rewrite rules in your .htaccess file or inside your virtual host configuration if you’re using Apache style configuration files.

As it’s using mod_rewrite for the rewrite rules you can access to the full breadth and depth of capabilities within mod_rewrite for attaching conditions and matching user request for content:

• Want to cache your front page for 30s and all others for 5 minutes? Not a problem
• Want to cache all pages in the public cache except those starting with /cart/? Not a problem
• Want to exclude specific IP addresses from the cache? Not a problem
• Want to exclude specific pages from any caching? Not a problem
• Want to cache content for guests but not for logged in users? Not a problem

That’s just a sample of the power using rewrite rules gives you, and just like with the plugins we’ll be doing a deep dive in the future on how to use rewrite rules to control LSCache, so be sure to follow us on social media.

That all really depends on your hosting company, for our virtual hosting we don’t charge anything at all for you to make use of it as we use LiteSpeed Enterprise Server for all of our virtual hosting servers, other companies only offer LiteSpeed on specific packages.

If you want to make use of LSCache on your own dedicated or virtual/cloud server then you will need a license for LiteSpeed server – If your server is hosted with us, or we manage your server for you, then we can provide an appropriate license for you, as a LiteSpeed Partner.

As always, if you want to know more about how LiteSpeed LSCache can help speed-up your website then get in touch or book a chat with one of our team.