Performance questions

Measure before changing anything — a speed test will tell you whether the delay is the server, the page weight or a specific script. On small sites the answer is usually oversized images or too many plugins, not the hosting.

Caching saves a ready-made copy of a page so the server doesn’t have to rebuild it for every visitor. It is usually the single biggest speed improvement available to a database-driven site like WordPress.

Measure first, then fix the biggest thing. For most small sites the order is: compress the images, turn on caching, remove unused plugins. Those three account for the majority of real-world slowness.

Test the same page several times from the same tool, and compare the numbers rather than chasing a score. The first load after a change is always slower because nothing is cached yet, which makes single tests misleading.

An inode is one file or folder — so the inode count is simply how many separate items your account holds, regardless of their size. A single 1GB video uses one; a cache folder of 100,000 tiny files uses 100,000.

Look in this order: old backups stored on the server, cache folders, uncompressed images, and mailboxes with large attachments. Those four account for nearly all unexpected disk use.

Your account briefly asked for more processing power or memory than a shared account is allotted, so requests were queued or refused. It is usually a burst rather than a permanent state — a traffic spike, a bot, or one heavy script.

It helps database-heavy sites — a busy WordPress site with WooCommerce or many plugins — by keeping repeated database results in memory. For a small brochure site, page caching alone gives you nearly all the benefit with less to configure.

LiteSpeed is web server software that reads Apache-style .htaccess configuration, and LSCache is its built-in page caching. Caching at server level is faster than caching inside PHP, which is why the LiteSpeed Cache plugin is the one to reach for on Traxio.

They are Google’s three measures of how a page feels to use: how quickly the main content appears, how quickly the page responds to input, and how much the layout jumps around while loading. They are measured from real visitors, not from a test tool.

Time to first byte is how long the server takes to start answering. A high TTFB points at the server or the code building the page — which is exactly what page caching fixes, because a cached page is already built.

WebP is an image format that produces much smaller files than JPEG or PNG at the same visible quality, and every current browser supports it. Converting images is one of the most effective speed improvements available to a normal site.

They are the ways a shared server caps how much work one account can do at once — entry processes count the requests being handled simultaneously, and the CPU limit caps processing. Hitting them produces brief errors under load rather than a permanent failure.

Page caching stores the finished HTML so a visit skips PHP and the database entirely. Object caching stores individual database results so repeated queries are faster. Page caching gives most sites the bigger win, and they work well together.