Black Friday is coming up fast, and if your site isn’t ready, you could lose traffic and sales in a heartbeat. It’s the busiest time of the year, and every second your pages take to load can make or break a sale. 

If you’re running your WordPress site through RunCloud, you already have a leg up. The platform gives you the tools to manage servers easily and fine-tune performance without digging too deep into code. But to really get your site humming, caching is where the magic happens.

Less work for the server means faster load times which, during a sale, can mean the difference between a conversion and a bounce. RunCloud supports two main setups Nginx and OpenLiteSpeed (OLS) and each has its own caching system. Let’s walk through both and figure out how to get them working to your advantage.

If You’re on Nginx: RunCloud Hub Is Your Friend

For sites running Nginx, RunCloud Hub makes life easier. It’s RunCloud’s own plugin, designed to connect your WordPress install directly to server-level caching without the headache of manual configuration.

You can install it straight from your dashboard — no command line needed. Once activated, it just quietly does its job in the background.

The first thing you’ll notice is how easy it is to clear your cache. If you’ve ever updated a product, changed pricing, or launched a limited-time offer and had visitors still seeing old data, this fixes that instantly. A single click refreshes everything.

Hub also supports Redis, which is basically a fast memory system. Instead of hitting your database for every request, Redis stores important data — posts, pages, product info — in memory, ready to serve. It can shave seconds off load time.

You get a couple of caching options, too. Full-page caching through Redis delivers entire pages from memory — perfect for busy stores. If you’d rather keep things simpler, the FastCGI option saves cached pages to disk and works reliably for most sites.

And if you manage multiple WordPress sites, you’ll appreciate that RunCloud lets you handle all of them from one panel. Higher-tier users even get Magic Link Login, which lets you jump into WordPress without typing passwords — a small but nice time-saver during rush hours.

If You’re Using OpenLiteSpeed: Go with LiteSpeed Cache

Now, if your server is running OpenLiteSpeed, the plugin you want is LiteSpeed Cache (LSCache). It’s built directly into the LiteSpeed server, which means it doesn’t just speed up WordPress — it speeds up the whole environment.

LSCache stores full pages in memory and serves them before WordPress even starts processing. It’s fast. There’s also a “Guest Mode,” which makes sure first-time visitors aren’t waiting around for backend scripts to load before seeing content.

Images are another big deal, especially for eCommerce sites. LSCache automatically compresses and converts images into lighter formats like WebP or AVIF, cutting down page weight without hurting quality.

You can also let it handle code cleanup — it’ll minify and merge your CSS, JS, and HTML files so the browser has fewer requests to make. And with Critical CSS, it makes sure the visible part of your site (what people actually see first) loads right away.

Add in browser caching and CDN support — Cloudflare, QUIC.cloud, and others — and you’ve got a seriously efficient setup that can handle heavy, global traffic.

Quick answers to common questions

A few things people ask about caching on RunCloud come up often.

If you’re wondering whether RunCloud Hub works with OpenLiteSpeed, it doesn’t. Hub is for Nginx only. OLS has its own system, and LiteSpeed Cache is built specifically for that.

What about WP Rocket? It generally plays nice with RunCloud Hub. WP Rocket handles things at the application level, while Hub works at the server level. If you turn on Redis Full-Page Cache, RunCloud will automatically disable WP Rocket’s page caching to avoid overlap — everything else in WP Rocket still works as expected.

By the way, RunCloud already includes support for Redis ACL, so you don’t need to add anything extra. It basically lets you control which users can reach specific parts of your Redis database — a small but valuable layer of protection if multiple people work on your site.

Alright, here’s the summary

If your site is running on Nginx, then RunCloud Hub with Redis caching is usually the smarter route. It’s fast, stable, and doesn’t take long to configure.

But if your setup is on OpenLiteSpeed, you’ll want to stick with LiteSpeed Cache instead. It’s baked right into the server, which means it works more efficiently and gives you a bit more control over how your pages are delivered.

Each option fits its environment best, so don’t stress too much — pick the one that matches your stack, and you’ll see a noticeable difference in speed and performance almost immediately.

Both options will give you faster load times and smoother performance. When the Black Friday crowd floods in, that can make a real difference.So Which One Should You Use?

A Few Last-Minute Checks Before the Sale

Before you flip the switch on your campaign, take ten minutes to test your site. Make sure caching is active. Open a few pages and reload them to see if they’re being served from cache (they should load almost instantly).

Next, go through your images — if they’re heavy, compress or convert them. WebP usually cuts size in half. Connect your CDN if you haven’t already, and run a quick audit on PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix. It’s better to catch small issues now than under a traffic spike.

Don’t Want to Do All This Yourself?

If you’re short on time or you’d rather not risk something breaking right before your sale we can take care of it for you.

Our team has worked with dozens of WordPress sites on RunCloud, and we know exactly how to fine-tune things for speed and stability. We’ll make sure your caching setup is solid, your site loads fast, and nothing breaks when the big traffic surge comes.

If you need help with Optimizing WordPress on RunCloud, our expert support team is here to assist you. Feel free to contact us for any troubleshooting or guidance.