Low-Quality Image Placeholders¶

QUIC.cloud provides an image placeholder service for LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress. Low-Quality Image Placeholder (LQIP) service takes your original images and creates unique placeholders from them to be used when lazy loading the images. These placeholders are of extremely low quality, which allows them to transmit rapidly. They retain many of the colors of the original images, which means they fit seamlessly into your site design.

If you use lazy load for images on your site, LQIPs are a nice alternative to the ubiquitous solid gray placeholders that are common across the internet.

You don't need to have a QUIC.cloud account to use LQIP, but you do need an API key, which you can get by pairing WordPress and QUIC.cloud. You should only need to do this once, so if you've already paired WordPress and QUIC.cloud for some other service, you should be good to go.

You get a free amount of LQIP quota every month, and may purchase more when you run out, if you wish.

Configuring and Using LQIP¶

Requests for LQIP generation are sent to QUIC.cloud in batches. The placeholder images are generated using QUIC.cloud's own service nodes so there is no impact on your server performance. Finally, QUIC.cloud notifies WordPress to pick up the new images for use on your site.

Because Low-Quality Image Placeholders are configured and controlled in the LiteSpeed plugin, we have only provided an overview here. Full documentation of the available WordPress plugin settings can be found in our LSCWP documentation.

The QUIC.cloud LQIP Dashboard¶

If you have a QUIC.cloud account, you can monitor LQIP requests and purchase more quota from your QUIC.cloud Dashboard.

Visit your QUIC.cloud Dashboard, select the domain you wish to use, and then select LQIP.

The first section will show an overview of the most recently processed LQIP requests and an indicator of the online service's current status.

Scroll down to see usage information for the current month. You can see how many requests you are entitled to, how many you have already used, and how many you have remaining.

Scroll down some more, and you will see a reminder of the QUIC.cloud tiers, and how many monthly free requests you are allowed under each tier. It also displays the tier that QUIC.cloud has detected for your domain. If you feel this tier has been incorrectly detected, please see Fixing an Incorrect Free Quota Tier.

Below the tiers is a pay-as-you-go option. Use this to increase your quota on an ad-hoc basis. You can manage this manually, or enable auto-refill to top up your quota whenever you are running low.

Please see Online Services Pricing to learn more about paying for additional quota.