LiteSpeed Benefits Over Other Servers for WordPress Hosting
While seeking to launch a website, many people choose WordPress. It’s not a surprise: being the most popular CMS on the market, it powers more than 60% of CMS-based websites.
In attempts to host a WordPress website, people plan it carefully. Usually, the preparation starts with learning PHP for adding more customized functions and features to the default functionality. Apart from that, additional research on the hosting plan prices and support are conducted. The server type is also one of the main decision-making factors as it defines the ease of management and website performance in the same way as the quality of code optimization.
There are three most common options: Apache, LiteSpeed, and NGINX. When it comes to hosting a WordPress website, however, there are certain benefits LiteSpeed has comparing to other server types, and they are as follows:
In-Built Cache
For a personal blog or a web-store that contains a lot of static content on the pages such as product descriptions and images, it’s important to cache your content to speed up the loading time. LiteSpeed has you covered here. LiteSpeed Web Server's cache engine is in-built into the server core and for WordPress purposes, it has its own LSCache plugin.
With its help, you receive optimization for the pages, images, CSS, and a CDN integration (if you use, for instance, Cloudflare or some other CDN solution), so that you don’t need to install the separate plugins for these purposes that bring another load on the server. It’s almost essential to use Woocommerce for WordPress if you want to make the product management easier. LSCache provides personalized Woocommerce support as well, so you have nothing to worry about.
Security Protection
With the title of the best CMS on the Market, also come the security threats. WordPress’s open-source code makes it vulnerable. Almost 70% of websites that run on WordPress fall victim to the hacker attacks through malicious software in the plugins. Another popular hacking activity is using the programs that guess admin login details also known as brute force attacks. Apart from posing the security threats, these attacks put a heavy load on the server resources, and even if your password is not guessed, it can become slower.
To prevent such attacks, LiteSpeed protects the most vulnerable xmlrpc.php and wp-login.php files. It also moves the Security Captcha from the application level to the server level and prevents unwanted login attempts by automatically blocking IP addresses. It is achieved by setting an automatic quota for logins that is reduced by 1 after each failed attempt and once it reaches 0, the throttling, denying, or dropping the requests will be applied protecting your WordPress installation.
Easier Migration From Apache Server
While the majority of Shared hosting solutions that are running on Apache, it may pose a certain challenge if you want to change the server type. It means that if you choose to go with, let’s say NGINX, all configurations have to be set up from scratch. With LiteSpeed, you won’t face such an issue as it’s built with understanding all the Apache config files, so there will not be a necessity for a configuration from scratch and it saves a lot of time and money spent on development resources.
Better Performance
To illustrate the performance of LiteSpeed, we decided to compare 2 hosting services: Apache-based and LiteSpeed-based without additional server optimization to prove that WordPress website running on the latter one shows better performance results.
Test 1: Clean Installation Performance Results
We have installed a fresh WordPress 5.4.1 installation without any modifications, content, or plugins and tested speed results with Gtmetrix and Pingdom tools from different locations. Let’s see how it goes.
Clean installation on Apache server:
- GtMetrix results from Canada:
- Pingdom results from the USA:
Clean installation on LiteSpeed:
- GTMetrix from Canada:
- Pingdom from the US:
While the difference between loading time in GtMetrix is not visible, it is clear that the page size and overall metrics are much better. However, when testing from Pingdom, we see that WordPress on LiteSpeed is 2 times faster. One can say that’s because we have LSCache working by default, so let’s install some content to compare the results once again.
Test 2. WordPress Installation With Some Content
- For this test, we have installed the following content:
- 3 pages with dummy text
- A randomly chosen Theme: Storefront
- A randomly chosen set of plugins:
- Contact form 7
- Woocommerce
- W3 total cache ( only for Apache-based server)
- Sucuri
- GA Google Analytics
- Mailchimp
- Really Simple SSL
Apache-based installation:
GTmetrix from Canada:
Pingdom from the US:
LiteSpeed-based installation:
- GTmetrix from Canada:
- Pingdom from the US:
In the installation with some content, we saw that the speed and compression better work for the LiteSpeed hosted website. Taking into account that it was a practically fresh installation with a relatively small amount of content, the difference in loading will be even more visible on the fully developed stores and blog websites.
The numbers are speaking for themselves. Of course, a lot of users may argue that it’s possible to achieve the same results on the Apache server but when it comes to time and effort balance, LiteSpeed is a perfect choice for your WordPress hosting.
Get LiteSpeed-based WordPress installation using pre-configured packages from Jelastic PaaS.
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