RSS2HTML has been one of my most favorite free scripts for very long time. I used to use the script on many of our sites to display RSS feeds using keywords. Just recently, I noticed that one of my sites was doing 5-7 sec loading time on average. First I thought the site was slow due to heavy traffic, because I get about 4,000 uniques a day on that site. But it was hosted on a robust dedicated server and it shouldn’t be like that.
Here are the things I tried to track down the problem.
1) I removed Adsense ads one by one to see if one of the ads was causing the problem
2) I removed Analytics code to see if it was causing the problem
3) I installed WP Cache plugin to see if it helped – it did, but I didn’t like the idea
4) Finally I removed RSS2HTML code from the site – now my site’s loading time is less than 0.5 seconds.
Yes, it was RSS2HTML script that was slowing down my website. Now I have no choice but to remove it. I’m sure there’s a way to optimize how the script is called to my website and stuff, but I don’t feel like going through all that. I just simply removed the entire script and replaced it with a WP_Query statement. It works just fine for that particular site because it was not feeding from outside source.
So if your site is slow and happen to be using RSS2HTML, now you know why. :)