WP Cron, LiteSpeed, and the caching layer are three pieces of WordPress infrastructure that everyone uses and few people understand. Here is the 60-second mental model.
WP Cron: scheduled tasks in WordPress
WP Cron is WordPress scheduled jobs. Publish scheduled post at 9am. Check for theme updates every 12 hours. Run the backup plugin every night. Most plugins use it.
How it works: WP Cron is not a real cron. It fires when someone visits the site. If your site gets no traffic, WP Cron does not run. That is the most common cause of “my scheduled post did not publish” issues.
The fix: on busy sites this is fine. On low-traffic sites, set up a real system cron to ping wp-cron.php every 5 minutes. Most managed hosts (including Hostinger) do this automatically.
LiteSpeed: the web server (and its cache)
LiteSpeed is a web server like Apache or Nginx, but faster. Most Hostinger accounts run LiteSpeed instead of Apache. The difference shows up under load — LiteSpeed handles 5-10x the traffic on the same hardware.
The cache layer: LiteSpeed Cache is a plugin that hooks into the server cache. The first request to a page renders PHP and queries the database. Subsequent requests get the static HTML straight from memory. This is the difference between a 600ms TTFB and a 50ms TTFB.
The caching layer
Page cache
The full HTML of the page is stored. The next visitor gets the HTML directly without PHP or database. This is what LiteSpeed Cache does.
Object cache
Database query results are stored in memory. Used by WooCommerce and some other plugins. Redis or Memcached. Most small sites do not need this.
Browser cache
The visitor browser stores static files (CSS, JavaScript, images). Set via headers. The site loads faster on the second visit. This is what expires and cache-control headers control.
CDN
Static files served from edge locations close to the visitor. Cloudflare is the most common. Cuts TTFB for visitors far from the origin server.
How they fit together
Visitor hits the site. Browser checks its cache — serves files locally if they are still valid. If not, requests go to the CDN. CDN serves cached files if available. If not, the CDN fetches from the origin server. Origin server (LiteSpeed) checks its page cache. If valid, serves the cached HTML. If not, PHP runs, queries the database (or object cache), generates the page, caches it, and serves.
Every layer in that chain is a chance to skip work. A well-cached site does almost no work per visitor.
The 60-second model
WP Cron = scheduled tasks, fires on visits. LiteSpeed = web server, faster than Apache. Caching = storing results so you do not redo the work. They are three separate things. Most WordPress problems involve at least one of them being misconfigured.