No matter what your business sells or what industry you are a part of, providing quality information to your site users is essential. For example, if your business provides medical services, you may want to publish useful information from the health department, such as news or updates on medical research, health and fitness advice, etc.
To create and publish this kind of information, however, is very time-consuming. You have to do a ton of information sifting, researching and organizing, checking your sources for accuracy, content writing and editing (or hire someone to do this for you), and then ensure that this information is continually up-to-date. As you can imagine, this not only involves a huge amount of work but most of the information you are dealing with is beyond your control.
Fortunately, there is an easier way to keep your users up-to-date with your information.
It’s called RSS …
(RSS - The simplest way to provide your blog subscribers with great information)
The Ultimate Guide To WordPress RSS
What Does RSS Mean?
- RSS is short for RDF Site Summary, or, as is more commonly referred, Really Simple Syndication. It is often called a “feed” or “web feed”.
- When a user subscribes to an RSS feed, they no longer have to physically visit and check the source website for updated content. Instead, their web browser will constantly monitor the feed and automatically keep subscribers up-to-date.
- RSS feeds are typically used to publish information that is frequently updated, such as new blog post items, news, audios, etc., which any user can then subscribe to.
- Essentially, an RSS feed is an XML document that includes full or summarized text along with other metadata like published date, feed author, etc. It allows people to subscribe to content on websites and then browse any updates posted on these sites through a feedreader. Conversely, RSS feeds also enable publishers to automatically syndicate their content.
- There are different kinds of feeds, read by different feedreaders. Some of these include RSS feeds, Atom Publishing Protocol) feeds and RDF (Resource Description Framework) feeds. All of these formats, however, use a standard XML file format to ensure that feeds are compatible with different machines, feed readers, and programs.
- Many sites and software applications also let you combine different RSS feeds to receive news and updates from different sources.
This article shows you where your RSS feed is located, how to syndicate your content online using feeds, and how to display content from other websites and blogs on your site using RSS.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds
Content syndication is a powerful and legitimate way to share web content. RSS Feeds provide a simple way for web users to receive the latest information posted on different sites.
First, let’s look at how syndication is used.
Online media publications rely on syndication to publish content from content sources all around the world.
Syndication allows news reporting agencies to deliver readers stories from all over the planet without actually having to employ and set up more news reporters and writers in every location in the world …
(Global media publications rely on content syndication to publish news and stories from news sources around the planet.)
Syndication is used to share newsworthy content legitimately with other sites. Online newspapers syndicate their news stories using feeds …
(Content syndication is used by news reporting agencies to share content with other news publications)
Most websites actually would like you to share their information. Syndicating content not only allows information to be shared, but it also sends visitors back to the original site responsible for creating and publishing the content being syndicated. This creates new ways to drive traffic back to their site.
Many online newspapers and major sites will have a feed section (look for links in their navigation section that say ”RSS”, “Syndication”, or “Newsfeeds” in them, or just search for “name of site/keyword + rss” – e.g. “nytimes rss”, “miami herald rss”, “sydney morning herald rss”, etc.) …
(Most content publishers provide links to an RSS feed section. Image Source: SMH RSS )
Clicking on a site’s RSS feeds section brings up a list of different RSS feed sections …
(RSS Feeds. Source: NY Times RSS)
Each of these feed items lets you access content from different areas of the website (e.g. technology news, entertainment news, jobs, etc.)
A feed directory can also include feed subcategories …
(RSS Feed section. Image Source: latimes.com)
Note: An RSS feed is just a URL. All you have to do to use an RSS feed is copy the URL and paste it into software that can translate the feed into something readable. We’ll cover this further below.
Using Feeds – Benefits
Adding someone else’s content to your website has some obvious benefits. It not only gives someone else’s business additional exposure online, it also adds value to your site without you having to create this content …
(Syndicating Content Benefits Someone Else’s Website And Yours!)
While adding an RSS feed from another site is a great way to add content to your site that you don’t have to create, it’s worth keeping in mind that there are benefits in getting other websites to syndicate your content.
When other websites and blogs syndicate content using your RSS feed, this gives your business the opportunity to gain increased exposure online and drive new web traffic …
(Look for ways to get users to syndicate your feed … it will help increase your exposure online!)
WordPress RSS Feed – About
WordPress automatically publishes a feed of your latest posts, allowing others to syndicate your content on their websites and blogs.
Depending on your WP theme, there are a number of ways to get the WordPress RSS feed:
1) If your theme has been configured to display the Meta widget on your sidebar or footer …
(Your feed will display the number of items you have specified in your Reading Settings section)
Display Full Text Or Summary Of Posts In Your RSS Feed
The other setting in your WP Reading Settings section that affects your feeds is whether to display posts as full text, or a summary …
(Reading Settings – Display ‘Full Text’ or ‘Summary’ for articles in your RSS feed)
Post Excerpts can also affect how your feed content displays …
(Post excerpts affect how feeds display)
For a detailed step-by-step tutorial about Post excerpts, go here:
View The Content Of Your RSS Feeds
As mentioned earlier, to view a feed’s content, you have to copy the feed’s URL and paste it into a feedreader, i.e. an application that translates feeds into readable content.
Let’s show you how this works.
First, go to a website or blog and look for their RSS feed link …
(Look for an RSS feed link. Image source: YourCoffeeGuru.com)
Next, copy the feed URL to your clipboard …
(Copy your feed URL)
If you want, you can check the feed content by pasting the feed URL into an online feed reader …
(Paste the feed URL into a feedreader to view the content. Source: http://feedreader.com/online)
Like feed readers, WordPress also has the ability to process RSS feeds and convert these into readable content for humans.
How To Add Feeds To Your WP Site
In the example below, we’ll add content from another site to your WordPress site.
Adding Feeds To Your WordPress Sidebar
As mentioned earlier, no matter what industry you are part of, you can easily display on your site the latest news and updates from an industry-related government department or authoritative site in your industry by simply adding content from their RSS feed. You can easily display a range of information on your WordPress site such as news, Facebook updates, or content from thousands of sites using the WordPress RSS widget.
Let’s add content sourced from an RSS feed to the WordPress sidebar navigation area …
(Add an RSS feed to your sidebar)
First, find a website or blog containing content that you want to display on your sidebar and copy its RSS feed …
(Copy your feed URL to your clipboard)
Next, log into your wordPress Dashboard and go to Appearance > Widget paste the feed into an RSS widget …
(Widgets Section – RSS Widget)
To learn more about using widgets, go here:
Refresh your web browser. The content from the RSS feed will now show in the sidebar …
(RSS Widget)
Add Your WordPress RSS Feed To Search Consoles
You can add your WordPress RSS feed to Google and Bing’s search consoles. This will help them index your content faster.
(WordPress RSS feed added to Google Search Console)
Adding your site’s RSS feed to search consoles is simple, fast, easy, and requires no technical skills. For a step-by-step tutorial, go here:
How To Add Feeds To Your WordPress Posts
What if you want to add content from an RSS feed to posts instead of your sidebar?
You can easily do this using plugins. Search on WordPress.org plugin directory for RSS Post, RSS feed to post, etc.
(’Add Plugins’ search results)
Note: Most RSS plugins typically require configuration – visit the plugin sites for configuration instructions, or contact us if you need help with plugin configuration.
Here are some autoblogging plugins for WordPress that allow you to automatically create new using feeds:
WPeMatico
(WPeMatico – WordPress Plugin)
WPeMatico is an autoblogging plugin that lets you publish posts automatically from selected RSS/Atom feeds.
You can manage all of your imported feeds and organize feeds into campaigns and categories.
For more details, go here:
WP RSS Aggregator
(WP RSS Aggregator WordPress Plugin)
WP RSS Aggregator is a comprehensive RSS feed importer and auto blogging WordPress plugin that offers additional functionality with premium extensions (add-ons).
For example, the Feed to Post add-on for the WP RSS Aggregator plugin is an advanced importer that allows you to autoblog by importing RSS feeds directly into your posts.
For more details, go here:
RSS Post Importer
(RSS Post Importer Plugin For WordPress)
The RSS Post Importer plugin can be used to curate, syndicate, import, merge and display full-text feeds on your WordPress website or blog.
The plugin fetches an RSS feed and publishes the full article content of each item in your feed as a standalone post.
For more details, go here:
Powr RSS Feed
(Powr RSS Feed – WordPress Plugin)
With the POWr RSS Feed plugin, you can automatically combine and display content from multiple RSS feeds.
The plugin also lets you display images, videos, and articles, adjust feed spacing and size, use custom fonts, colors, borders, and more. It is also mobile responsive and supports text in any language.
The premium version contains a number of additional features, such as the ability to display different feeds, manually accept or reject posts, and more.
For more details, go here:
WP Pipes
(WP Pipes – WordPress Plugin)
The WP Pipes plugin for WordPress is a powerful data migration plugin that lets you create curate content from RSS feeds, Google News, and other sources.
This plugin provides features like CSV importing for posts/WooCommerce, RSS feed creator, auto blogging, auto post to LinkedIn/Twitter/Facebook, export WordPress posts as podcasts, create Google XML sitemaps, and more!
For more details, go here:
FeedWordPress
(FeedWordPress WordPress Plugin)
FeedWordPress is a versatile syndication plugin for WordPress.
As stated in the FeedWordPress site …
FeedWordPress is an open-source Atom/RSS aggregator for the WordPress blog publishing platform. You set up feeds that you choose, and FeedWordPress syndicates posts from those sources into your WordPress posts table, where they can be displayed by your WordPress templates like any other post — but with additional meta-data, so that your templates can properly attribute the post to the source it came from.
FeedWordPress can be used to create aggregator sites, or display all of your online activity (e.g. from your blog, Twitter, YouTube, or other online services, in one place.
For more details, go here:
Autoblog by WPMUDev
(Autoblog WordPress Plugin)
Autoblog is an easy-to-use plugin that can be set-up in minutes, without coding skills or complicated instructions. Simply copy and paste in the URL of your feed, name your feed (for admin purposes) and select the blog to post content to.
For more details, go here:
RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types
(RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types)
By default, WordPress only includes posts in your RSS feed. Use a plugin like the RSS Includes Pages plugin if you want to include pages in your RSS feed in addition to posts.
For more details, go here:
Useful Tips
Tip #1 – Comment RSS Feeds
In addition to displaying RSS feeds of your latest posts, WordPress also makes available RSS feeds of the latest comments posted on your site.
You can access this by clicking on Comments RSS in your ‘Meta’ widget area (note: your theme may not be configured to display this widget) …
(WordPress Comments RSS)
All the comments posted on your site by visitors display in your Comments RSS page …
(Comments feed entries displayed with a Firefox browser)
Like post entries, your comments feed content will display differently depending on the browser you use …
(RSS comments feed content displayed on Google Chrome)
Again, you can check the feed content by pasting the URL of the feed into a feed reader …
(Paste the URL of your comments feed into a feedreader to view the feed content. Source: Feedreader)
Note: If the Meta section is not displaying on your theme, you can view the Comments RSS section of your site by opening up a browser and typing in the following URL:
- http://www.yourdomain.com/comments/feed
- http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/comments/feed (if your WordPress site installation is in a subfolder, e.g. “blog”)
Tip #2 – Specific Item Feeds
Being able to display an RSS feed for single posts can be useful. For example, you may want to add feeds from specific items to RSS directories, or you may have created a valuable resource that other online users will want to syndicate.
The formula for displaying an RSS feed for individual post items is shown below:
(Specific Post Feed)
To create the above feed, copy the web address of your post, and append “/feed/?withoutcomments=1” to the end.
(Single Post Feed)
Note: By default, if you only append “/feed” to the end of a post URL, WordPress will return the comments made on your post, not the post content itself.
Tip #3 – Displaying Post Category Feeds
Some your site users may only want to subscribe to content about specific categories. They may not want to subscribe to all of your site’s content.
With WordPress, you can easily create category feeds.
Just use the format shown below:
(WordPress post categories feed format)
Copy the category URL to your clipboard …
(Copy your category URL …)
And append “feed” to the end of it …
(Use this format for WP post categories RSS feed)
Your RSS feed now only contains content assigned to this particular category …
(Category-specific feed)
The WordPress Codex also provides different ways to create feeds not just for post categories, but also feeds for tags, authors, search, etc.
For this example, let’s create a feed for a specific post category using the format shown below:
(Post Category feed format. Source: WordPress Codex)
Here is the feed format WordPress recommends using. In this example, the post category ID is ’42’. We’ll need to replace the post category ID and the domain name …
(WordPress post category feed format)
To find the post category ID, go to Posts > Categories …
(Posts > Categories menu)
Locate the post category you want and hover your mouse over the title to reveal its unique ID …
(Post Category ID)
In our example, the post category ID is ’29’ and the post category feed format we need to use for this specific category with our domain name looks like this …
(Post category feed format with domain name and ID)
Copy and paste the feed into your browser and hit enter …
(Paste the feed into your browser)
This will display the feed for that specific category …
(RSS feed of a specific post category)
Note that in this example, WordPress automatically converted the feed format we pasted into the browser into the category feed we had used in the previous section of this tutorial …
(Post category feed format)
Here is the feed format again …
(Post category feed)
In this case, the simplest way to create additional feeds for specific categories is to simply change the post category slug …
(Change the post category slug to create a new category specific feed)
Paste the edited feed into your web browser and hit enter to display the content for that specific category’s feed …
(Post category feed content)
Now that you have a method for creating feeds for specific post categories (or tags, authors, etc.), you can even create a directory or list of individual feeds for visitors.
Tip #4 – Publish A Feeds Directory
You can create a page of feeds that allows your readers to subscribe only to content in specific categories, just like large authoritative sites …
(Create Your Own Feeds Directory)
You can link an image like the one shown below to each feed URL and then create a table or a list of all individual feeds on a new page …
(RSS button graphic. Source: public-domain-photos.com)
If you need help with adding tables to WordPress posts and pages, see this tutorial:
RSS Feeds – Additional Notes
You can customize your RSS in several ways, such as adding videos to feeds, ads, etc. Some of these feed customizations require editing code.
WordPress allows various RSS feed configurations that do not require code editing skills. For example, the table below contains some of the kinds of custom feeds you can display on your site and how to format your feeds …
(Different Feed Formats You Can Create With WordPress RSS)
For your convenience, here are the feed types, descriptions, and feed examples shown in the diagram above:
- Feed Type: All Posts
- Description: Content feed – RSS feed that displays your latest posts
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/
- Feed Type: All Comments
- Description: Comments feed – Displays the latest comments published on your blog
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/comments/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts
- Description: RSS feed for a specific post
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/title-of-your-blog-post/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts Comments
- Description: RSS Feed containing the latest comments made on a post
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/title-of-your-blog-post/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Day – Contains the latest posts in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2012/08/19/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Month – Displays the latest post entries in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2014/01/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Year – Feed containing the latest post entries in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2011/feed/
- Feed Type: Search Results
- Description: Includes the latest posts for a search query
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/search/term/feed/
- Feed Type: Custom Post Type
- Description: Displays the latest post entries for a custom type (e.g. book)
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/?post_type=book
One more thing …
It’s a good idea to promote your RSS feed. Make sure you place a subscribe button in a visible location …
(Encourage visitors to subscribe to your feeds!)
Keep in mind that other sites will only syndicate your content if the information that you publish on your site is useful, educational, or highly entertaining. In other words, provide high-quality information that will add great value to their sites and benefit their visitors.
(Easily add content to your site and get other sites to syndicate your content with RSS feeds!)
If you need great content ideas subscribe to our FREE content creation course using the form below:
Also, don’t forget to subscribe to our feed 🙂
Additional RSS Resources:
- Download RSS Icons – Visit online resource sites like www.feedicons.com or search online (e.g. “free RSS icons”, “RSS logo download”, etc.) for sites containing downloadable RSS icons.
- RSSBoard.org – The RSS Advisory Board is an independent organization with three primary duties: publishing the RSS specification, providing guidance to developers who create RSS applications and helping the general public gain a better understanding of RSS.
- Wikipedia.org/RSS – Learn more about the history and benefits of using RSS feeds.
- WordPress.org/Feeds – Official WordPress documentation and information site. Visit this site for additional information about RSS feeds in WordPress.
Congratulations! Now you know where to find your WordPress RSS feed, how to syndicate your content online using feeds, and how to display someone else’s content on your site using RSS.
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To read more about using WordPress for a business web site please see other great articles and tutorials on this site.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now