How to Cache Podcast Feeds

Also just wanted to note that I’m running on a powerful server so ‘just get a better server’ isn’t the solution I’m looking for. ??

I’ve asked the Blubrry dev team to look at your question. Someone will respond here with an answer as soon as possible.

We developed a free service called Podcast Mirror to solve this problem. Please check it out: https://www.podcastmirror.com.

@shawnogordo Thanks!

@amandato Thank you, I’ll look into that. So there’s no way to keep my feed and just serve a cached version on the same url?

I went with PowerPress so I didn’t have to rely on third party services to host my feed. So I was hoping to avoid that.

I’m not an expert on caching. But there are a number of caching plugins out there. PowerPress itself isn’t a tool for caching.

I’ve used WP Super Cache a few times and I believe it’s got a setting that allows you to clear caches upon making a new post, which is what you’d want, as you want to make sure your feed is updated right away after you post a new episode.

Hello @jpjp222,

You did not share the URL to your feed. Can you reply with it so I can take a look? There may be other things happening that are causing your issues, a quick look will tell me a lot.

My answer was based on your first post, you did not want to change anything with your hosting and you wanted the feed cached. I gave you a solution that solves the problem, https://www.podcastmirror.com. Podcast Mirror will cache the feed for you. Without literally setting up your server with caching built-in, you cannot add caching without literally modifying the server. Any solution that is point and click that is not provided by your web hosting is not truly going to implement caching.

Do you have root control of your server? If so you could setup Nginx with caching built-in, or put something in front of Apache like nginx, squid, varnish, haproxy, Apache Traffic Server, etc… We use a special combination of nginx with Apache that way we have 100% compatibility as far as running WordPress in Apache and https ssl, logging, and page caching through nginx. This is what we provide with some special WordPress tweaks through our PowerPress Sites service.

If you don’t have full access to your server and you want to fix WordPress performance issues, you could do any of the following…

• Use a web hosting that can cache your pages (WP Engine comes to mind)
• Setup a caching plugin (this is not really a solution, your pages still load PHP every page load or reply on clunky .htaccess rewrite rules)
• Re-architect your website to use the strengths of your existing web hosting (you need to get this advice from your web host. For example, if they mainly host weeebly sites and WordPress is a Cpanel option, then weeebly is going to run better as that is what they are truly setup for)

I assume you already did the settings in PowerPress for performance? These do not have anything to do with caching but can dramatically improve feed loading times by limiting the WordPress resources used.

PowerPress Settings > Feeds tab, make sure the following are configured…

• Do not allow other plugins to modify podcast feeds.” – make sure option checked
• Accelerate feed – make sure option checked
• Show the most recent – make sure option is set to a small number like 10 (WordPress default is 10)
• Feed Episode Maximizer – make sure option is checked

Explaining the settings: Prevent other plugins from modifying the feeds, acceleration stops WordPress from adding things that slow the feed down such as category and comment tags, the most recent is the number of items in the feed which keeping the number close to the WordPress default will help performance, and the Feed Maximizer (if you do more than 10 items in your feed) will strip out the unnecessary tags WordPress adds to keep the feed size to a reasonable size.

Also make sure not to abuse WordPress categories or tags. Excessive categories will bring the feed to a crawl the more items are in the feed due to how WordPress feeds query the categories table separately for each item. if you have 500 categories and your feed has 300 items, your feed will fetch up to 300×500=150,000 records from the database per feed load.

Many years ago I created a plugin called Static Feed, it would save a file.xml version of your podcast feed for you to serve from your website. The plugin does work if you have the correct permissions on your server and you are not using MultiSite, but I do not recommend it. Technically it is not caching as much as it is serving a static file version of your feed, which means your web server does not have to load PHP and all of WordPress every time the feed is requested. I haven’t had a use for this myself because all of our servers have caching built-in, it ends up being redundant.

@amandato thank you for this comprehensive post! This is very helpful. I apologize for not being more clear in my first post.

I think your static feed plugin is more of what I was thinking when I was talking about caching the feed.

Here’s more about my setup:

I did not do “Do not allow other plugins to modify podcast feeds.” So I will try that. Update: This fixed it, see below.

I do have accelerate and maximize checked

For show most recent, I have that set to 50 but I’d like it as high as possible which is probably what my issue is.

I barely use any categories or tags.

The hosting I have is managed and optimized for wordpress. It has nginx and varnish.

Update: just tried this and it made a huge difference. I didn’t realize this was a speed related feature. Even upping my episode count to 300 it’s not killing my server anymore!

Thanks a lot for your help and how thorough a response you gave. I’m sure that will help a lot of others trying to solve the same problem.

Glad to see Angelo’s response helped you out!

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Is there any way to create a static or cached password protected feed with powerpress?

Right now my server is getting hammered by requests on my Member’s Only feed, and I’m looking for a way to ease the burden on my PHP.

@inevitability: PowerPress itself doesn’t have any caching functionality. That’s something you’d need to use a caching plugin or caching service for.