LiteSpeed Cache vs. WP Rocket – Which One is Better?

Recently, we were asked about LiteSpeed Cache vs. WP Rocket and which is better.

Now, if you don’t know, LiteSpeed Cache and WP Rocket are two of the most popular WordPress caching plugins. They allow you to optimize WordPress performance and speed easily.

In this guide, we’ll compare LiteSpeed Cache vs. WP Rocket to determine which is better for WordPress performance.

Why is Choosing The Right WordPress Caching Plugin Important?

Choosing the right caching plugin enables you to take full advantage of the performance optimization on your WordPress website.

WordPress is a dynamic website builder. This means whenever a user visits your website, WordPress generates the page they want to see and sends it to their browser.

This process consumes hosting server resources. When more people visit your website, your server gets busier and slower.

Your users will have to wait for your website to load. And no one likes slow websites.

According to research, a one-second delay in speed can drop conversions by 7%. and page views by 11%. And at 3 seconds, almost 40% of users leave the website.

Also, Google is like a speed critic. The search engine has repeatedly clarified that speed is a ranking factor in search results. This means slower websites would rank lower than faster websites with similar content.

To summarize, a slow website costs you actual money by loss in sales and conversions. You can eliminate those risks by choosing the right caching plugin for your website.

After that, when someone visits your site, instead of building everything from scratch, a caching plugin creates a quick, ready-to-go version of your page. This gives users a better experience, leading them to spend more time on your website.

WP Rocket vs. LiteSpeed Cache Comparison

WP Rocket and LiteSpeed Cache are two popular WordPress caching plugins. They both offer many similar features, but they are also different in several significant aspects.

In some situations, you will be better off with WP Rocket, while LiteSpeed Cache would be a better solution for you in other scenarios.

Let’s look at WP Rocket and LiteSpeed Cache and compare them for compatibility, ease of use, performance, and support.

Compatibility of WP Rocket vs. LiteSpeed Cache

Most WordPress hosting platforms use a different stack of technologies behind the scenes.

For instance, Bluehost uses Apache web server software. Similarly, Hostinger primarily uses LiteSpeed for its web server software.

Each of these technology setups has its advantages. However, understanding which technologies are running at the backend will help you choose the best caching solution on that platform.

How WP Rocket Works:

WP Rocket is designed to run on most hosting platforms. It saves cached pages within your WordPress file structure.

Instead of waiting for a user to visit your website, WP Rocket automatically generates cached pages in the background. It then uses rewrite rules to display the cached pages.

How LiteSpeed Cache Works:

LiteSpeed Cache is designed to run more efficiently on hosting platforms that use LiteSpeed servers instead of Apache or Nginx.

Most of the plugin features will not work on other server software, making the plugin quite inadequate as a caching plugin.

The reason for this is that LiteSpeed Cache is made specifically to use the server’s caching abilities and helps WordPress communicate with it. This makes caching faster and more efficient for users on LiteSpeed servers.

However, it does not proactively generate a cache of your WordPress pages and waits until a page is requested to create a cached version.

Winner: WP Rocket

WP Rocket provides better compatibility with all hosting platforms. LiteSpeed Cache is better if your hosting service uses LiteSpeed servers.

WP Rocket vs. LiteSpeed Cache – Easy of Use

Caching is very technical, and as a website owner, you don’t want to learn how to make it work for you.

That’s why you would want to choose a WordPress caching plugin that does all this for you with minimum effort.

Let’s see how easy to use both of these plugins are.

WP Rocket Ease of Use

One thing we like about WP Rocket is that it is easy to use for absolute beginners. Once you install and activate the plugin, it will automatically apply the optimal caching settings for your website.

It will also start building the cache in the background.

Now, if you are a beginner and don’t know much about the caching mechanisms and which settings to choose, this setup works well for you.

You can configure advanced settings like file optimization, media optimization, database cleanup, and more.

If you are willing to optimize your website further, you can look into those settings. Each option on the settings page has helpful information text to assist you.

Overall, we found WP Rocket beginner-friendly and easy to use.

LiteSpeed Cache Ease of Use:

LiteSpeed Cache comes with multi-level configuration presets. These presets are configuration settings that you can apply to your website.

However, upon plugin activation, it does not prompt users to choose one. It also does not automatically apply a preset. This can be an issue for users who expect a plugin to begin working automatically.

Users will have to go to the LiteSpeed Cache » Presets page to select and apply a preset setting.

Each preset will list the optimizations it will turn on. Below that, the plugin will explain who should use this preset.

The plugin recommends the Advanced option. We find it to be a bit aggressive for beginners as minifying CSS, JS, and HTML can cause conflicts that may be difficult to solve.

We recommend using the Basic setting for beginners. After that, users can individually turn on the options under plugin’s settings page.

Next, users can go through different areas under the plugin settings to turn on options they need.

Overall, we found LiteSpeed Cache to be less beginner-friendly. There are too many options spread over different plugin settings screens. The default presets are not optimal, and users will have to spend more time setting up the plugin.

Winner: WP Rocket

WP Rocket has an easier setup for beginners and provides a more helpful user experience overall. LiteSpeed Cache lets users choose how they want to setup with nice presets, but the user experience is not optimized for beginners.

WP Rocket vs. LiteSpeed Cache – Performance Comparison

Both plugins can generate cache and speed up your website, but you may wonder which plugin would give you a more considerable performance boost.

We ran our tests on an existing site running on Hostinger, which uses LiteSpeed servers. We then installed both plugins and ran tests using the Page Speed Insights tool.

Let’s look at the results.

WP Rocket Performance Test Score

We installed WP Rocket and changed some recommended settings. This included file optimization, such as minifying JavaScript and CSS code.

After that, we ran our test. Here is the desktop performance score.

The result was a whopping 99% performance on the Desktop.

This result indicates that our test website performed well and passed all core web vital tests with flying colors.

Here is how the website performed on the Pingdom speed test. This test summarizes the page load time. As you can see, our test site loaded in half a second.

LiteSpeed Cache Performance Test Score

Next, we cleaned up our cache and installed LiteSpeed Cache on the same test site.

After that, we went to the LiteSpeed Cache » Presets page and applied the recommended Advanced preset. This included file optimization, including JavaScript and CSS minification.

We then visited our website in a new incognito tab to ensure the page was loaded and saved in the cache.

Finally, we ran the test, and here are the scores:

Our test site performed well, with an excellent score of 90.

This score is slightly lower than WP Rocket, which did a better job following the recommended core web vital practices.

Here are the speed test results using Pingdom:

LiteSpeed cache performed better than WP Rocket regarding overall page load time.

Winner: WP Rocket

WP Rocket performed slightly better than LiteSpeed Cache in improving core web vitals. This is significant because Google uses core web vitals to score page load experience and affects SEO. On the other hand, LiteSpeed Cache did a better job of improving page load times.

WP Rocket vs. LiteSpeed Cache – Support Options

WordPress is infinitely customizable, with thousands of plugins and themes and countless third-party integrations available for it.

This makes it easy to build and grow your business online using WordPress but complicates caching.

To ensure you can quickly solve any compatibility issues, you would need some type of support.

We decided to look at how users can get help when needed.

Support Options for WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a paid premium WordPress plugin with no free version available. This means your WP Rocket subscription gives you access to priority support from the company.

They also have extensive documentation on their website, including how-tos, guides, video tutorials, and more.

They regularly release updates to fix bugs, add new features, and fix compatibility issues.

Support Options for LiteSpeed Cache

LiteSpeed Cache is a completely free plugin supported by the company behind LiteSpeed web server. As a free plugin, it has limited support options.

There is complimentary support available for LiteSpeed Cache on WordPress.org support forums. The support queries are answered timely on the forum, but a resolution is not guaranteed.

The plugin has essential documentation available on their website. However, it is not anywhere as extensive as WP Rocket.

This is understandable as the company does not make money from the plugin. Their main focus is their paid products, including LiteSpeed server and Quic.Cloud, which is their CDN service.

Winner: WP Rocket

As a paid WordPress solution, WP Rocket offers better customer support. They have faster email support, helpful documentation, videos, and tutorials. LiteSpeed cache has limited and slower community forum support and documentation.

WP Rocket vs. LiteSpeed Cache – Which One is Better?

In our opinion, we believe WP Rocket is a better WordPress caching plugin overall for small- to medium-sized WordPress websites.

We reached this conclusion after considering the user experience, performance gains, extensive support, and broader compatibility of WP Rocket.

LiteSpeed Cache does work well on LiteSpeed servers. But even on the LiteSpeed server, WP Rocket performed better in our tests.

We believe LiteSpeed Cache should be used by users hosting their website on LiteSpeed servers who need a free WordPress caching plugin.

We hope this article helped you compare LiteSpeed Cache vs. WP Rocket and understand their pros and cons.

You may also want to see our WordPress security guide or take a look at our comparison of All in One SEO vs. Yoast SEO to find out which one is the better SEO plugin for WordPress.

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The post LiteSpeed Cache vs. WP Rocket – Which One is Better? first appeared on WPBeginner.

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