Is LSCache set up for me, or do I configure it

The caching engine is already there on every account. On managed WordPress plans it arrives switched on and tuned. On a standard account you add the plugin and enable it, roughly a minute of work per site.

The plugin is a dial, not the engine

This trips people up, so it is worth stating plainly. Storing and serving copies happens inside the web server. What the plugin provides is your side of the conversation: which pages to leave alone, how long a copy stays valid, and clearing the right pages automatically when you edit something.

The reason that arrangement is fast is where the decision happens. A cache written purely in PHP cannot decide whether to serve a stored copy until PHP has already started, so part of the expense survives. Here the choice is made before your site's code is involved at all.

What gets stored

• Stored: anything identical for every reader. Posts, listings, static pages, your front page.
• Deliberately not stored: baskets, checkouts, account areas, logged in views. Handing one reader another reader's page would be a defect.

Confirming it works

Open a page twice in a private window. The second visit should arrive noticeably sooner. If both feel the same, something is stopping copies being kept, and the usual reason is a cookie being handed out on arrival by consent tooling or analytics.

The one thing to watch on a network

Configure every site the same way and check periodically. This layer fails without complaining: a plugin update or a new banner can switch it off, and all you notice is that the portfolio became sluggish at some point over the last month, with nothing obvious to blame.

Does it work on things other than WordPress?

The server side caching is not tied to any one application. WordPress simply has the most convenient control layer for it. Other software can be cached too, though how you clear it when content changes depends on the application.

Will it break my shop?

No, provided the personalised areas are left alone, which they are by default. Baskets, checkouts and logged in views are excluded from the start, and problems here almost always come from someone widening the rules rather than from the defaults.

How long is a copy kept?

You choose. A few hours suits a busy news site; a day or more is fine for reference content that rarely changes. Publishing or editing clears the affected pages regardless of the setting.

Rolling it out across many installs has its own traps, covered in Speed and Caching. The reference is at docs.litespeedtech.com.