    Publishing & media 

Two hundred episodes, and a feed that never sleeps.

RSS feedsEpisode archivesShow notes

Jump to the prompt The Blogs & publishers playbook

The speed brief

Who arrives

A listener looking for the link mentioned in episode 84

What they want

The show notes, the player, and the subscribe buttons

How long you get

They are mid-episode. Keep it short.

5–15ms cached what xSpeed serves instead of PHP

The story

Nadia has been publishing weekly for four years. The site is a deep archive: two hundred episode pages, each with show notes, links, and a full transcript that doubles as the reason people find her in search at all.

Two things were slow. The archive, because a four-year back catalogue is a lot of pages nobody had thought about since publishing them; and the RSS feed, which every listener’s podcast app polls on its own schedule, generating the same XML from the database over and over for an audience that is mostly machines.

Caching the feed alongside the pages removed a surprising amount of load — the feed was quietly one of the busiest endpoints on the site. The archive is prewarmed, so an episode from 2022 that someone finds in search answers as fast as this week’s.

When speed decides the outcome

Three beats. Everything xSpeed Cache does on this page is aimed at the gap between the second and the third.

The mention

You said “link in the show notes” and they went to find it.

The archive

Two hundred episodes, each with notes, a transcript and a player.

The feed

Your RSS feed is hit constantly by apps — and it is a live query every time.

What a site like this actually needs

Not a redesign — three properties the site has to have before anything else matters.

A feed that is not rebuilt every poll

Podcast apps hit RSS constantly. Regenerating that XML per request is pure waste.

A deep archive that stays fast

Old episodes are search traffic. They should not be slower than the homepage.

Transcripts that load quickly

Long transcript pages are the SEO asset. Their size should not be the visitor’s problem.

The xSpeed features doing the work

Each one is a real setting with a real guide — nothing here is a marketing abstraction.

Feed cache

RSS output is cached and served without rebuilding it for every podcast app that polls.

Read the guide

Cache preloader

Build the cache across the whole episode archive, so an old episode found in search answers instantly.

Read the guide

Minify CSS, JS & HTML

Long transcript pages get meaningfully smaller when the markup around them is stripped.

Read the guide

The exact prompt

Connect your site via xSpeed MCP or xSpeed Hub, then paste this into Claude or ChatGPT. It is written for this business, not a generic template.

COPY & PASTE

Using xSpeed, optimise my podcast site. Benchmark it, enable page caching, turn on feed caching so my RSS is not rebuilt for every podcast app poll, run the preloader across the whole episode archive, and enable minification for the long transcript pages. Re-test the feed and an old episode page and show me the before/after.

What happens: Your AI reports the new response time on both your RSS feed and a back-catalogue episode — usually the two slowest things on a podcast site.

Questions from Podcasters & audio shows

Only by the cache lifetime you set, and publishing an episode purges the feed immediately — so in practice the new episode is in the feed as soon as it goes live. The caching only affects the repeat polls between episodes, which is where all the wasted work was.

The audio is usually served from your podcast host, not WordPress, so xSpeed Cache does not sit in that path. What it speeds up is everything around the audio — the episode page, the show notes, the transcript, and the feed — which is what your visitors and the search engines actually load from you.

Keep reading

The full playbook

xSpeed for Blogs & publishers

Articles served as static HTML, the archive prewarmed on schedule, and auto-purge on publish — first impressions at 5–15ms.

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Local news & magazines

The story broke. So did the server.

Food bloggers Travel bloggers Schools & universities

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