What is caching and why do I need it?
When it comes to website acceleration, caching is a way to speed up the loading time of your website by saving what a web page looks like inside memory very fast, and by showing this saved version instead of potentially doing millions of calculations to render this page dynamically using a scripting language like PHP.
In practical terms, effective caching will help your website load up to 100 times faster when there is little traffic, and will help your website handle more concurrent visitors (often MUCH more) without slowing down or plant. So yes, you need it. Everyone needs it!
LiteSpeed Cache (LSCache) is an all-in-one acceleration solution for WordPress websites that can manage your cache and optimize performance.
Clear cache
If left alone, cache files will update after a certain amount of time (also known as Time-to-Live or TTL), but there are situations (like adding a new item or changing the price of an item) where you will want to purge the cache manually so that your updated content is visible immediately.
Here's how to manually clear your cache.
- When you are in your WordPress dashboard, scroll down and click on LiteSpeed Cache.
- It will open the management page where you will see all the cache purge (deletion) options.
- There are several options:
- From the home page to completely purging the entire cache, just click on the appropriate tile. If you are unsure, click on Purge All.
- You can choose by category, post ID, tag or URL to target a specific group or web page. Enter the relevant information in the field and click on Purge List.
It's safe: Purging the cache will only delete pre-existing files and then update them. You won't lose any information on your site, so feel free to choose to purge everything as your default tactic. However, this may take some time depending on the size of your site. If you know the specific page, copy and paste it into the URL section for faster results.
Database Optimization
You can optimize your WordPress database to be as compact and fast as possible with this plugin. Here's how.
- When you are in your WordPress dashboard, scroll down and click on LiteSpeed Cache.
- At the top of the purge page, click the DB Optimizer tab.
- To clean your database, select Clean All. It will indicate that cleaning is required by displaying a red number and a red 'X'.
- Once the cleanup is complete, it may be necessary to optimize the database tables. This happens because cleaning can remove unnecessary elements from the table and leave "gaps" in the information. Click Optimize Tables to perform the action.
