Works without problems so far

Hello Knut,

Thanks for the review!

As for what is excluded, admin pages and logged in users. We provide a “For more info” link to our wiki at the end of our installation instructions which explains this. We also have a help tab at the top of our plugin’s settings page that links to “LSCache Documentation”.

If you would like to debug/test you can click on one of the links previously mentioned take a look at our more in-depth WP plugin installation guide page. It contains info on testing as well as enabling the WordPress debug log.

Let me know if you run into any issue, I would be happy to help.

Regards

I have three sites with Litespeed and this cache plugin activated.
One of the sites seems not to cache logged in users, but the other two does. This causes problems, like the toolbar not showing up.

Do I need something in .htaccess? I have tried:

`RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^(HEAD|GET)$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^(wp-admin|wp-login.php|wp-cron.php)
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !wordpress_logged_in_
RewriteRule .* – [E=Cache-Control:max-age=120]
`

with no luck.

Inspecting http response headers reveal: X-LiteSpeed-Cache: hit even when logged in.

Most of our cache control for this plugin is handled through headers and cookies, so the rewrite rules should not be necessary. The only thing we recommend in .htaccess is

<IfModule LiteSpeed>
CacheLookup public on
</IfModule>

Which allows you to disable “Check Public Cache” in the webadmin and instead enable it through .htaccess only for the sites that use LSCache.

Our current Cache Policy settings for LSCWP are:
Enable Public Cache – No
Check Public Cache – Yes
Cache Request with Query String – Yes
Cache Request with Cookie – Yes
Cache Response with Cookie – Yes
Ignore Request Cache-Control – Yes
Ignore Response Cache-Control – Yes

Since I was not able to quickly reproduce this problem on my end, could you provide a link to your affected sites? You can also email us at [email protected] with some more information/temporary login so we can investigate further.

Thanks

I don’t know about “webadmin”. This is shared hosting with cPanel.

Is it a temporary admin user for for WordPress you need, or are we talking abot “webadmin” or anything related to globally configuring Litespeed?

Hi Knut,

The WebAdmin is our graphical interface for controlling LiteSpeed Web Server and it’s settings. If you are under shared hosting than your hosting provider would have access to this.

Back to your issue, we are currently working on a fix. There seems to be some issues when there are multiple WordPress installations.

How are your sites set up? Is it using WordPress’ multisite setup, or do you have a different sub directory per installation?

Hello LiteSpeed,

does you plugin offer options to exclude from cached based on:

* request URL
* any cookie name
* any user agent

Does it also allow to create mobile cache based on user agent strings?

Thanks,
Martin

Hi Martin,

Thanks for the questions!

Our LiteSpeed Web Server has do-not-cache URL and Domain options.
The plugin itself has options to exclude (do-not-cache) by URI (specific to WordPress), Post Categories and Post Tags.

Excluding by cookie name and user agent must be done through rewrite rules.

The mobile cache is also done through rewrite rules, as seen here

The link in our previous comment has been moved here ??

Hi LiteSpeed,

Thanks for your answer. I have to say I’m very disappointed by the philosophy behind this plugin. It appears to make advanced caching really complicated leaving configuration to be done in at least THREE places.

We don’t really care about what options are available in your LiteSpeed Web Server. It’s hopelessly complex to configure on a site by site basis for small sites.

This is WordPress. Expose the logical options inside the WordPress plugin. Control the rewrite rules in the WordPress plugin. As it is now, the nice work you’ve done is almost completely useless to the WordPress community. You’ll need to finish the plugin properly to get much traction.

We’re happy to help provide you with what should be configured in the plugin and how While you know a lot about server configuration, we’re your customers and we have a whole lot more experience with WordPress and WordPress caching than you do.

Would you like our help to create a usable finished self-contained plugin?

Making the web work for you, Alec

Hi Alec,

Our primary objective is to have the cache working correctly out of the box, with minimal extra configurations. We are currently working on a script that automates enabling the plugin to make things even easier.

We agree with you in that it should be easier to manage the rewrite rules, and that it should be available in the plugin to configure.

If you don’t mind me asking, what are you looking to do with excluding by cookie or user-agent? Do you have any example use cases? We’d like to make it work automatically if it isn’t already covered yet.

Also, this plugin is open source, so we welcome any/all contributions and suggestions.

Hello Litespeed,

There is no perfect cache configuration out of the box, although there are defaults which we find work well for most commercial WordPress sites with both logged in and logged out users.

As Martin mentioned, want to offer various white and blacklists for caching for:

* request URL
* any cookie name
* any user agent

What Martin forgot to mention was no cache for comment posters (as they need to see fresh comments or will think their comment didn’t go through).

We’re really facing a lot of work right now on our own plugins and client sites but will be happy to make some more detailed suggestions. Unfortunately Martin is in the mountains now and I’m still at work working late. LiteSpeed Cache is important to us so I’m answering you right now.

The best cache plugins to look at for simple strong rules are Hyper Cache 2.9 (not Hyper Cache 3 which is more complex and buggy) and WP Rocket. Do not even look at W3TC (W3 Total Cache). W3TC an overly complex piece of buggy confusionware (none of the guides work right unless you have a server configured exactly like the server of the person who wrote that specific guide). WP Super Cache is a simple file based caching plugin which while it works well enough has little to do with what you are trying do do.

We’ve written a lot about WordPress caching. You might want to look through our articles on WordPress caching to get an idea of what you are up against.

Goal: a single screen with checkboxes for the kinds of caching enabled, along with whitelists and blacklists for those features which would require exceptions.

Looking forward to the next version!

Alec

LiteSpeed:

We use single site (mostly) or multisite, always on shared hosting. If this plugin could just stop caching logged in users it would be almost perfect for us. Others may also need to have caching disabled for visitors who have commented.

This is crucial for any WordPress caching system. It must be configurable from WordPress, if any configuration is necessary, as most WordPress sites run on shared hosting.

I would select Litespeed over Apache for more client sites of this was working well. Our hosting company adds Litespeed servers according to demand by advanced customers and partners like us.

Good point Knut. Litespeed (it would be nice if you’d sign your posts, this is Alec Kinnear writing now), I’ve been doing some thinking on the issue. You’ve created a first rate caching solution which even advanced users and customers like Foliovision are unable to use as it’s so damn difficult to deploy. Without extensive custom work per website, your deep caching breaks all of our customer sites (whether for ecommerce, membership or commenting). So we don’t use it and are only getting about half the potential out of Litespeed.

As a private company, you should be moving faster than open source and not just waiting for someone else to come in and solve deployment issues.

I should also warn you guys about one more issue. Most of us are leaving cPanel behind for our WordPress hosting. There’s no easy deployment of Litespeed without cPanel. You’d better fix this in a hurry (mini-control panel of your own which works on a barebones Apache server) if you don’t want to yield the entire market to nginx.

Litespeed has been an important part of our business historically. I’d like to see you remain part of our business.

Hi Knut, Alec,

Regarding caching logged in users, this should have been fixed already. We did find an issue where if there were multiple web applications installed in a single directory, it may cause issues.

Please add this line to your .htaccess file right after the RewriteBase line:
RewriteRule .? - [E=Cache-Vary:_my_custom_vary]
The _my_custom_vary part can be whatever you want it to be, as long as it is unique for each install. You may also need to update the web server. This should work for 5.0.15.

Regarding general configurations, we are currently working on solutions to implement the features you guys are looking for. Since our cache serves pages before hitting PHP, there are different limitations that we have to overcome to provide a working solution.

We hope that the next update will cover what you need (it should be ready soon). If not, we are always open for suggestions on other ways to improve the product.

Regarding your cPanel warning, we have some questions that we’d like to ask before we can properly respond to this note. Please send us an email to info at litespeedtech dot com with a link to this thread.

Cheers,
Kevin

Hello Kevin and the LiteSpeed crew,

thank you for posting the examples. I see you can really do a lot using .htaccess.

I think you should really make it configurable using the plugin settings screen. The plugin should have good default and it should write it out into .htaccess on activation.

Thanks,
Martin