Hi Gretchen, and thank you for your positive feedback.
A WordPress page load cycle involves a great many components and factors, some of which actually need to be there, while some others are quite irrelevant.
Also, though I’m not quite sure which resources are meant here, resource consumption is measured in percentage of overall plugin load. So, if WP RSS Aggregator consumes on average 20% of your resources, and plugins altogether consume 50%, then WP RSS Aggregator consumes 10% of resources used on average while loading a page (P3’s results seem to be aggregated statistics gathered while testing more than one page). This means that if your page takes 0.2 seconds to load, which is quite good, then WP RSS Aggregator takes 0.02 seconds of the load time. This is a very small amount of time.
Another factor to consider is that by default while testing P3 loads pages without using many of the caching mechanism employed by WordPress during regular page loads. This means that the load time displayed by the plugin is likely to be significantly higher than the actual time of page load when a visitor accesses them.
You mention that your feed sources are configured to import only once a day. This means that 99.99% of page loads do not trigger import of feed items, and thus are unaffected by external requests to feed sources. In addition, the logic used by WP RSS Aggregator to display feed items, which is triggered far more frequently, is pretty much the same as logic used to display any posts by any plugin or theme, the logic that was intended by the creators of WordPress. This logic is already optimised.
Hence, what you probably should be asking yourself is whether you are experiencing slowness in page loads. If possible, would you mind sharing some statistics gathered by P3 on your website with us? Perhaps, it is not as bad as it looks =)
If you are still convinced that further optimization is necessary, you may want to consider some of the caching plugins available. However, please be advised that like other plugins which alter the way WP Cron works, W3 Total Cache may cause incompatibility issues with WP RSS Aggregator.
I hope this explanation shined some light on resource consumption, and what is involved in loading a WordPress page. There are many more technical articles dedicated to this subject, such as this one, that can help a technical user understand what goes on behind the scenes.
Please don’t hesitate to ask if you have further questions.
