Create static xml for Wordpress feeds to reduce processing burden

Although WP Super Cache includes feeds, there is still an overhead that I wanted to reduce. Not to mention the thrashing by Automattic’s feed reader when a blog on wordpress.com has the feed in a widget. Here's a simple solution I came up with.

(1) Add a cron job to run as often as necessary (depending on how often it needs updating; this example is twice a day at 9:24): 

24 9,21 * * * wget -q -O - 'https://www.domain.org/feed/' > /home/domainownner/public_html/feed.xml

(2) Add a rewrite to htaccess: 

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /feed/
# The following exempts the domain’s own IP, 
# so that the Crontab command itself is not redirected
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^000\.000\.000\.000
RewriteRule ^(.*)$  https://www.domain.org/feed.xml [L,R=301]

That's it.

I also looked at a few weeks of access logs to see what other feeds (category and tag) had high numbers of requests, and added them as well, e.g.:

25 9 * * * wget -q -O - 'https://www.domain.org/category/topic/feed/' > /home/domainownner/public_html/feed-topic.xml

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /category/topic/feed/
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^000\.000\.000\.000
RewriteRule ^(.*)$  https://www.domain.org/feed-topic.xml [L,R=301]