Is it Time to Disable Your RSS Feeds?

I perform a regular audit of the traffic hitting the origin server on my site WP-Tweaks, to see which requests are using the most resources. For a while now, I’ve noticed that feeds were the cause of a large number of requests. So if your website is:

example.com/

Then your feed URL is likely:

example.com/feed/

By nature, these feeds are supposed to be dynamic, so caching them is counterproductive. Moreover, they are a high priority target for all kinds of spam and bots that want to scrape content off your site. So they constantly hit your origin, forcing it to do work, diverting time away from actual visitors to your site.

So is it still worth using RSS feeds in today’s world?

The Glory Days of RSS

I remember a time when RSS was ubiquitous. Everyone consumed updates by their favorite sites on RSS. Google Reader was king, blogging was in its heyday. I honestly think that was the time when conversation on the Internet was at its best. Long form content from ordinary people, with their own comment boards and communities. And RSS was in the center of it all. RSS was how your community realized you had a new post.

The social media came and killed everything.

With social media, the conversation shifted from websites to 3^rd party sites like Facebook, Instagram, and others. Initially, people still wrote good content and shared it on Facebook. But they slowly lost their community as these sites allowed users to post their comments directly underneath the link, so there was no need to even visit your site anymore. Incidentally, this led to an increase in BS comments where the poster obviously didn’t even bother reading the article.

Eventually, people migrated to just posting their entire content on Facebook and Twitter. Personal websites were no longer necessary. And with that, came the slow decline of RSS.

Google Reader was the Death Knell

There was a time when Google Reader was one of the most used web applications on the planet. But as RSS started winding down, Google did what they do best, and shut it down. This wasn’t so much a cause, as it was a sign that RSS was nearing the end of its life. Yes, there are other applications that do a good job of displaying feeds like Feedly. But its usage is nowhere near what Google Reader used to be.

RSS Feeds are Now Mostly Used for Spam

Genuine RSS usage has become a ghost town. Now when someone requests an RSS fee from your site, it’s probably because they want to scrape your content, or include your posts in some automated directory or something. None of these can benefit you. So it might be a good idea to just disable RSS altogether.

Disabling RSS – Two Methods

My preferred way to disable RSS is to filter out the requests in the Cloudflare firewall. That way, my site doesn’t have to deal with the traffic, or even generate a 404-response page. It gets blocked outright. Here’s a screenshot of my Cloudflare firewall rule:

As you can see, the rule is already blocking some feed requests.

If you want, you can also disable RSS feeds directly in a CMS like WordPress using the following code:

function remove_feeds() { wp_die( __( 'Feeds Disabled' ) ); }

add_action('do_feed', 'remove_feeds', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rdf', 'remove_feeds', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss', 'remove_feeds', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss2', 'remove_feeds', 1);
add_action('do_feed_atom', 'remove_feeds', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss2_comments', 'remove_feeds', 1);
add_action('do_feed_atom_comments', 'remove_feeds', 1);
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links_extra', 3 );
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links', 2 );

If you don’t know how to add this in WordPress, you can read the tutorial on NameHero on adding custom code to WordPress.

I don’t recommend using the WordPress plugin to do this because it hasn’t been updated in a while and there’s no saying whether it will remain compatible in the future.

So short answer – yes. It’s probably time for you to do away with RSS feeds!

Bhagwad Park

I’m a NameHero team member, and an expert on WordPress and web hosting. I’ve been in this industry since 2008. I’ve also developed apps on Android and have written extensive tutorials on managing Linux servers. You can contact me on my website WP-Tweaks.com!