Refreshing a large feed several times a day costs server resources, and on a big catalogue it can slow the whole site down. If nothing about your products has changed, that work is wasted. This article explains what happened to the old “refresh only when products changed” option, and how to keep refresh load down now.
The “refresh only when products changed” option was removed
Older versions of Product Feed Pro had a Refresh only when products changed checkbox on the feed’s General step. It was removed in version 13.4.7, because it could stop a feed being regenerated at all. Some stores were left serving a stale feed to their channels without any warning, which is worse than a feed that refreshes more often than it needs to.
If you are looking for that checkbox, it is gone on purpose and it is not coming back in that form. Use the settings below instead.
Set a refresh interval that matches how often your products actually change
The simplest lever is frequency. A catalogue you update once a week does not need an hourly feed refresh.
- Go to Product Feed → Manage feeds and open your feed.
- On the General step, set Refresh interval.
- Save your changes.
The choices are No Refresh, Daily, Twice Daily, Hourly and Custom. Pick the longest interval your channel will tolerate. For most stores that is daily.
Custom gives you finer control, such as weekdays only or specific hours. See How to Set Up Custom Refresh Interval.
Lower the load of each refresh
Two settings under Product Feed → Settings change how heavy a single refresh is, which matters more than frequency once your catalogue gets large.
- Change products per batch number: sets how many products the plugin processes per batch. Lower it if refreshes time out or exhaust memory. Raise it on a strong server to finish sooner.
- Disable HTTP feed generation requests: stops the plugin making HTTP calls to drive generation. Useful where the host blocks or throttles loopback requests.
Take the schedule off WordPress entirely
WordPress only runs its scheduler when someone visits the site, so on a quiet store refreshes drift. If you want them at an exact time, or your host throttles the scheduler, drive the refresh from a server cron job instead. See How to refresh product feeds using cron jobs.
Troubleshooting
My feeds stopped refreshing on their own. Go to Product Feed → Settings and use Regenerate Action Schedulers. It re-creates the scheduled refresh tasks for all active feeds and does not change feed data or configuration. This is the usual fix after a server migration, a plugin conflict, or an Action Scheduler cleanup.
A refresh times out or runs out of memory. Lower Change products per batch number and try again.
My channel says the feed is stale. Your interval is too long for that channel. Shorten it, and check the feed’s last updated time on Manage feeds.
Frequently asked questions
Can I still make the feed skip a refresh when nothing changed?
No. That behaviour was removed in 13.4.7 because it could stop feeds regenerating altogether. Control the frequency instead.
Does a manual refresh respect the interval?
No. A manual refresh from Manage feeds always runs immediately, so you can keep testing configuration changes without waiting.
Need more help?
Elite customers get priority support. If you’re on Product Feed Elite, open a support ticket, and our team will help you tune your refresh schedule.
If you’re on the free Product Feed Pro plugin, post your question on the WordPress.org support forum, and we’ll point you in the right direction.
