Every WordPress install on Flashcloud comes with a serious caching stack pre-configured. You don't need to install caching plugins, set up Redis, or hire a performance consultant — the moment your site is live, it's running on:
- LiteSpeed Web Server + LSCache (full-page cache at the server)
- LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress (auto-installed and pre-tuned)
- Redis-backed object cache (standard on all WordPress hosting)
Here's what each one does and when you should care.
LiteSpeed Web Server with LSCache
We don't run nginx + PHP-FPM. We run LiteSpeed Web Server, which on WordPress workloads is meaningfully faster than the nginx setup you'll see at most other hosts. The headline feature is LSCache — a full-page cache that lives at the server level, ahead of PHP entirely.
When LSCache has a cached copy of a page, the request never touches PHP or your database. It's served from disk in milliseconds. That's the difference between "WordPress feels slow" and "WordPress feels instant," and it's on by default.
LSCache is smart about what to cache and when to invalidate:
- Logged-out visitors get cached pages.
- Logged-in users (you in
/wp-admin, customers in WooCommerce, etc.) bypass the cache automatically. - When you publish a post, edit a page, or change a setting, the affected pages are evicted automatically — you don't need to think about it.
The LiteSpeed Cache plugin
We auto-install the LiteSpeed Cache plugin (LSCWP) on every WordPress site. It's the bridge between WordPress and the server-level LSCache, and it adds a pile of useful extras:
- Image optimization (WebP conversion, lazy loading)
- CSS/JS minification and combination
- Critical CSS generation
- Browser cache headers
- Database cleanup tools
We pre-configure sensible defaults at install time — you can tune them from wp-admin → LiteSpeed Cache if you want, but most sites are fine on the defaults.
Redis object cache
LSCache handles the full-page cache. The Redis object cache handles something different — the database query results that WordPress generates while building a page.
When WordPress renders a page (even a cached one, the first time), it makes hundreds of small database queries: post metadata, options, user data, term relationships. The object cache memorizes the results so subsequent requests skip the database for repeated lookups.
We provision Redis automatically on every WordPress hosting account and wire it into your install. You don't need to install Redis Object Cache, W3 Total Cache, or any other plugin to make it work. It's there from minute one.
Cloudflare on top
The three layers above run on our server. On top of that, Cloudflare acts as the global edge — caching static assets (images, CSS, JS) close to your visitors regardless of where your server sits. Combined with LSCache, the result is:
- Cloudflare serves static files from the nearest edge.
- LSCache serves cached HTML pages from the server.
- Redis speeds up everything LSCache can't cache.
- PHP + MySQL only run for the small percentage of requests that genuinely need fresh work.
For details on how Cloudflare is wired into our hosting, see Our nameservers and DNS provider and How we make your site fast.
When to flush the cache
Almost never, in practice. WordPress, the LiteSpeed Cache plugin, and LSCache talk to each other — when you publish or update content, the right pages get evicted automatically.
You might want to flush manually if:
- You changed something via FTP or the file manager (bypassing WordPress).
- You're debugging a "why am I still seeing the old version?" issue.
- You just imported a database from another host.
To flush:
- From the portal: open your WordPress site detail page in Services → flip into the Tools tab → Flush cache.
- From WP admin:
wp-admin → LiteSpeed Cache → Toolbox → Empty Entire Cache.
When to tune
The defaults are fine for the vast majority of sites. Reach for the tuning options if:
- You run a complex WooCommerce store and want to fine-tune what's cacheable per route.
- You have a custom theme that ships its own CSS/JS bundle and the auto-combine is producing render-blocking output.
- You see a "Your site is slow" report from a tool like GTmetrix or PageSpeed Insights and want to push specific scores higher.
Otherwise, don't touch it. The default config is what we'd recommend you set anyway.
Power-user note
If you want to verify LSCache is doing its job, send a request to your homepage and look for the x-litespeed-cache: hit header in the response. A hit means the page came from cache; miss means PHP rebuilt it (which it will the first time after a publish or after the cache expires). Both are normal — you just want a high hit-to-miss ratio over time.