LiteSpeed Cache vs Sitemap Generator

LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress (LSCWP) is an all-in-one site acceleration plugin, featuring an exclusive server-level cache and a collection of optimization features. LSCWP supports WordPress Multisite and is compatible with most popular plugins, including WooCommerce, bbPress, and Yoast SEO. LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress is compatible with ClassicPress. Requirements General Features may be used by anyone with any web server (LiteSpeed, Apache, NGINX, etc.). LiteSpeed Exclusive Features require one of the following: OpenLiteSpeed, commercial LiteSpeed products, LiteSpeed-powered hosting, or QUIC.cloud CDN. Why? Plugin Features General Features Free QUIC.cloud CDN Cache Object Cache (Memcached/LSMCD/Redis) Support+ Image Optimization (Lossless/Lossy) Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML Minify inline & external CSS/JS Combine CSS/JS Automatically generate Critical CSS Lazy-load images/iframes Responsive Image Placeholders Multiple CDN Support+ Load CSS Asynchronously Defer/delay JS loading Browser Cache Support+ Database Cleaner and Optimizer PageSpeed score (including Core Web Vitals) optimization OPcode Cache Support+ HTTP/2 Push for CSS/JS (on web servers that support it) DNS Prefetch Cloudflare API Single Site and Multisite (Network) support Import/Export settings Attractive, easy-to-understand interface AVIF/WebP image format support Heartbeat control + This service is not provided by the LSCache plugin, nor is it guaranteed to be installed by your service provider. However, the plugin is compatible with the service if it is in use on your site. LiteSpeed Exclusive Features Automatic page caching to greatly improve site performance Automatic purge of related pages based on certain events Private cache for logged-in users Caching of WordPress REST API calls Separate caching of desktop and mobile views Ability to schedule purge for specified URLs WooCommerce and bbPress support WordPress CLI commands API system for easy cache integration Exclude from cache by URI, Category, Tag, Cookie, User Agent Smart preload crawler with support for SEO-friendly sitemap Multiple crawlers for cache varies HTTP/2 support HTTP/3 & QUIC support ESI (Edge Side Includes) support* Widgets and Shortcodes as ESI blocks* (requires Classic Widgets plugin for WP 5.8+) * Feature not available in OpenLiteSpeed LSCWP Resources Join our Slack community to connect with other LiteSpeed users. Ask a question on our support forum. View detailed documentation. Read about LSCWP and WordPress on our blog. Help translate LSCWP. Contribute to the LSCWP GitHub repo. Third Party Compatibility The vast majority of plugins and themes are compatible with LSCache. Our API is available for those that are not. Use the API to customize smart purging, customize cache rules, create cache varies, and make WP nonce cacheable, among other things. Privacy This plugin includes some suggested text that you can add to your site’s Privacy Policy via the Guide in the WordPress Privacy settings. For your own information: LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress potentially stores a duplicate copy of every web page on display on your site. The pages are stored locally on the system where LiteSpeed server software is installed and are not transferred to or accessed by LiteSpeed employees in any way, except as necessary in providing routine technical support if you request it. All cache files are temporary, and may easily be purged before their natural expiration, if necessary, via a Purge All command. It is up to individual site administrators to come up with their own cache expiration rules. In addition to caching, our WordPress plugin has online features provided by QUIC.cloud for Image Optimization and Page Optimization services. When one of these optimizations is requested, data is transmitted to a remote QUIC.cloud server, processed, and then transmitted back for use on your site. QUIC.cloud keeps copies of that data for up to 7 days and then permanently deletes it. Similarly, the WordPress plugin has a Reporting feature whereby a site owner can transmit an environment report to LiteSpeed so that we may better provide technical support. None of these features collects any visitor data. Only server and site data are involved. QUIC.cloud CDN, if enabled, uses LSCache technology to access your site, and serve your content from remote global nodes. Your data is not accessed by QUIC.cloud employees in any way, except as necessary in providing maintenance or technical support. Please see the QUIC.cloud Privacy Policy for our complete Privacy/GDPR statement.

The Sitemap Generator uses an external service to crawl your website and create a XML sitemap of your website. The generator works thus for every plugin out of the box. The computation costs for your website is also very low because the crawler acts like a normal visitor, who visits all pages of your site once. If you host your website on a dedicated server, you may not need this plugin, because you should have enough resources to generate your sitemap on your server. But if you host your website in a shared environment (as the most WordPress users do), it could be a good idea to outsource the generation of your sitemap to an external service like this plugin uses to generate the sitemap. This way it is guaranteed that the speed of your website is not affected for your visitors during the generation of the sitemap. Limitations of the free version The Sitemap Generator can be used for free, but the free version is limited. You can create sitemaps for websites with up to 500 URLs. Advanced features like image or video support aren’t available in the free version. The service cannot be offered free of charge for larger websites because the crawling is done by servers operated by the plugin developer and renting and maintaining these servers isn’t cheap. Video Features Simple setup. Works out of the box with all WordPress plugins. Low computation costs for your webserver. Technical Features Respects your robots.txt file (also the crawl-delay directive). You could use the user-agent MB-SiteCrawler to control the crawler. Support for robots (noindex) meta elements. Adds nearly all indexable filetypes (for example .pdf, .xls, .doc) to the sitemap. See the document Sitemap Generator Data on my website for more information. Additional Technical Features of the Pro Version Generation of image sitemaps. Generation of video sitemaps. Currently HTML5 video elements and embedded YouTube videos are supported. Upcoming Technical Features Support for HTML5 picture elements in image sitemaps. Automatic daily creation of sitemaps. Technical Requirements cURL 7.18.1 or higher. Current PHP versions supported by WordPress should provide a compatible cURL version in most hosting environments. OpenSSL 0.9.8f or higher. Data Aggregation and Indexable File Types I have published a detailed document about how the Sitemap Generator aggregates the data for the generation of sitemaps and which file types are getting indexed on my website. Sitemap Generator Data Warnings If you already have an existing sitemap.xml in your WordPress root directory, this file would be overwritten. It is thus recommended to backup your existing sitemap.xml file before using the Sitemap Generator. I also have not tested the generator on Windows webspace. You should also access the sitemap.xml after the generation finished and check if everything is fine. Pre-Installation Verification Test If you like to test if the Sitemap Generator works fine with your website before you will install the plugin, you could use the Online Sitemap Generator on my website, which uses to same technology as the plugin to generate the sitemaps. Use of an External Server The Sitemap Generator uses an external server, operated by the developer of the plugin, to crawl your website and detect broken links. This means, that there is some communication between your website and the server. The only data that is communicated to the external server by your website is the URL of your website and the fact that you are using WordPress. The server than crawlers your website (as a normal visitor does) and answers with the generated sitemap.