Do you know that incorrect WordPress caching plugin settings can delay RSS feed updates significantly. I was surprised because our feed updates were not getting pinged to Google search, Feedburner and Twitter for over an hour! This contrasts with when our RSS feed updates used to occur in minutes!
Sites posting breaking news rely heavily on RSS feeds to push content as fast as possible, before others can to get the first movers advantage. So it is important that RSS feeds ping content to search engines and social media sites as fast as possible. We use WordPress ping lists, JetPack Enhanced Distribution and Feedburner Pingshot to push our content across in minutes, soon after it is published and news reaches your Google readers and RSS aggregators as soon as it is posted.
WordPress Caching Settings Problems
I tried all ways to fix feedburner feed updates, but none seems to fix the issue. WordPress caching plugins are very essential tools as they cache content so that it is delivered in HTML everytime and all those PHP calls are not needed everytime to overload the hosting server. In the absence of caching plugins, the WordPress feed refreshes instantly as soon as the post is published. But what happens when plugins cache feeds…
As I investigated, our WordPress original feed was cached and failed to refresh after the post was published. So when Feedburner was pinged, there was no new content. We use Feedburner as our primary feed (as it has several customization options, including using it on your own domain name), and no new content meant no new content was delivered to any RSS news reader or linked social media accounts.
Now Feedburner will check your feed every 30 minutes. Will the feed update in 30 minutes? No. Because the Quickcache is set to refresh cache in 1 hour by default, so when Feedburner comes next time round, the content is still old.
We had configured Twitter to post new content when the feed was updated. This Twitter Feedburner Socialize integration works very well and you do not need to post Twitter updates everytime feed updates. But now Twitter updates were also not delivering for over an hour.
Fix RSS Feed Caching
We had earlier switched from Supercache to Quickcache, and both are amazing WordPress caching plugins. So how to fix this WordPress feed caching issue?
You simply need to prevent QuickCache from caching RSS feeds. In QuickCache configuration settings, go to No-Cache URl patterns and add ‘feed’ to the list of urls not to be cached.
Now again our feed updates are getting pushed quickly and in just a few minutes all our new content get published on all RSS integrated readers and social media tools.