Blazing Performance (v3.0)

Page load time is important. Customers will click away if your site loads too slowly, and Google knows this, so rewards fast page load times with a higher search position. Your server hardware and web server software are a part of it, so a fast private server or VPS is a good start. Plus LiteSpeed or OpenLiteSpeed give lightning performance, especially for static files and PHP. Plus they support HTTP/2 HTTP/3 and QUIC.

Having gone through the trials and tribulations of juggling a page optimizing plugin (tried a lot of them), Cloudflare (security, page optimization and edge cache), and Amazon Cloudfront (for fast edge caching of static files), and the headaches that came with it, I’ve replaced all that with LiteSpeed Cache and quic.cloud

While the old set up gave me sub 400ms page load times, there would be some odd interactions between the components and menus would often not open or require the page to be reloaded. Then there would be the matter of interactive pages, which were painfully slow, down to the network lag between Cloudflare and my origin server. That meant that working in the wp-admin area was also painfully slow.

Now that I’ve switched to LiteSpeed Cache and quic.cloud, there’s no headaches: quic.cloud provides security, static caching, dynamic caching, page optimization, image optimization, critical css calculation, low quality image placeholder creation (for lazy loading images), and it communicates with my origin server over HTTP/3 (QUIC). The whole lot connects to the LiteSpeed Cache plugin using the quic.cloud API.

So far, so excellent.

Front end static pages are loading in under 200ms on Pingdom and get an A. It also gets A’s in every category on WebPageTest.Org. Google Pagespeed gives it 97 Mobile and 100 Desktop. GTmetrix give it A/A and Yellowlab Tools give it A.

Interactive performance is quite impressive, too – my WooCommerce dashboard loads in 700ms. Helped, no doubt, by the origin server and quic.cloud communicating over QUIC (HTTP/3)!

I’ve never before seen a WordPress site get such excellent performance with so little effort. I would definitely recommend trying out LSCache and Quic.Cloud. The set up requires you to carefully follow their instructions as you need to switch your domain to point to their edge server in two steps, but if you want high performance without a headache, this is a great way to do it.