I have been struggling to improve the PageSpeed score for my site for a while now. And I have tried and tested a lot of WordPress caching plugins over time but none really delivered on their promise. My score has always been over 90 on Desktop, but on Mobile, it ranged from the high 70s to mid 80s. This is not good enough, so I kept trying out different plugins and configurations.

The other issue that was hindering my progress was that I am using shared hosting (Afrihost), which limits my options as I have no control over the servers. This past week as I was looking around in the CPanel of my site, I noticed that ther was a ‘LiteSpeed Web Cache Manager’ link under the Advanced section. This is definitely new, as I remember requesting this a few years ago.

Anyways, I immediately removed the WP Super Cache plugin that I had been using and replaced it with the LiteSpeed Cache plugin then set out to configure LiteSpeed. Config was pretty straight forward, mostly on the Plugin side. The weird part was enabling the Cloud CDN, using Quic.Cloud, this was my first time seeing this service provider. Figured out that they provide a Free tier, which is fine for my small blog.

With everything configured, I headed back to PageSpeed and voila, my score on mobile is now over 90:

I wont go into too much detail on how to configure LiteSpeed Cache, because there lots of tutorials and videos.

The one downside I still see with my Afrihost shared hosting is the lack of a Redis/Memcached server. This would allow me to have Object caching, which would further improve the perfomance of my site.