No matter what service or product you provide or what industry your business is in, it’s important to provide quality information to your site users. For example, if your business provides health-related services, it’s a good idea to publish the latest information from the health department, such as news and updates on medical research, health and fitness advice, etc.

The problem with providing this kind of information, however, is that it involves a huge amount of work and resources. You have to do a ton of information sifting, researching and organizing, checking the accuracy of your sources, content writing and editing (or hire someone to do this for you), and then make sure that this information is continually kept up-to-date. As you can imagine, this is not only a huge amount of work but most of the information you are dealing with is completely beyond your control.

Thankfully, there is a simpler way to provide your readers with up-to-date information.

It’s called RSS …

(RSS is the easiest way to provide your subscribers with up-to-date information)

The Ultimate Guide To WordPress RSS

Basic Information About RSS

• RSS, which, according to some definitions stands for RDF Site Summary, is more commonly referred to now as Really Simple Syndication. It it is also called a “feed” or “web feed”.
• Once a user subscribes to a website’s feed, they no longer have to manually visit and check the source website for updated content. Instead, their web browser will continually monitor the content and automatically keep subscribers up-to-date.
• Feeds are often used to publish frequently updated information, such as new blog posts, news, video lists, etc., to which users can then subscribe.
• Essentially, an RSS feed is a structured XML (XML = Extensible Markup Language) document that includes full or summarized text along with metadata like published date, feed author, etc. It allows people to subscribe to content on sites that publish feeds and then keep up with any updates posted on these websites using a feedreader. Conversely, RSS feeds also enable publishers to syndicate their information automatically.
• There are different feed formats and these can be read by different feedreaders. Some of these include RSS feeds, Atom Publishing Protocol) feeds and RDF feeds. All of these formats, however, use a standard XML file format to ensure compatibility with different machines and programs.
• Many sites and software applications also allow you to combine many RSS feeds to aggregate news and updates from several different sources.

This article shows you how to find your WordPress RSS feed, how to use your WordPress RSS feed to get your content syndicated online, and how to add someone else’s content to your site via their RSS feed.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds

Content syndication is a powerful way to share content online. RSS Feeds provide a simple and easy way for web users to receive the latest information published on different websites.

First, let’s look at content syndication.

Most news publishing agencies and many popular online publications rely on syndication to publish stories from other news agencies around the world.

Syndication allows most online newspapers and influential online media publications to deliver readers up-to-the-minute headlines from all around the globe without actually having to hire and post more news reporters and content writers everywhere around the world …

(Global media publications rely on syndication to publish newsworthy content from other news agencies all around the world.)

Syndication is used to share content legitimately. News reporting agencies syndicate their information using feeds …

(Syndication is a legitimate way of sharing content)

Most websites actually would like you to share their content. Content syndication not only allows information of great value to be shared, but it also sends visitors back to the original site responsible for creating and publishing the content being syndicated. This can be an effective way to generate web traffic.

Leading news reporting agencies will include a feed section (look for links that say ”RSS”, “Syndication”, or “Newsfeeds” in them, or just search for “name of site/keyword + rss” – e.g. “nytimes rss”, “belfast telegraph rss”, “sydney morning herald rss”, etc.) …

(Major content sites provide links to an RSS feed section. Source: SMH )

Clicking on a site’s RSS feeds section will bring up a list of RSS feeds for different content topics on the site …

(RSS directory. Image Source: NY Times)

These feed items let readers access different areas of the website (e.g. technology news, sports news, editorials, etc.)

A feed directory can also contain feed subdirectories …

(Feed sections can also contain feed subdirectories. Source: Los Angeles Times RSS)

Note: An RSS feed is simply a URL. To use an RSS feed, all you have to do is copy the URL and paste it into a program that can process the feed code into something readable. We’ll cover this further below.

RSS Feeds – Benefits

Syndicating content from someone else’s website or blog on your site has some obvious benefits. It not only gives someone else’s site additional exposure online, it also adds value to your site without you having to create that content …

(Syndicating Content Benefits Someone Else’s Business And Yours!)

While adding a feed from another site is a great way to add content to your site without having to create it, it’s a great idea to try and get other sites to use your content.

When other sites syndicate your content, this gives you the opportunity to get more exposure online and drive more visitors …

(It’s worth trying to get users to syndicate your feed … it will help increase your exposure online!)

WordPress RSS Feed – Overview

By default, WordPress automatically publishes a feed of all your posts, allowing others to syndicate your content on their sites.

Depending on the theme you have installed, there are a few ways to access your RSS feed:

1) If your theme has been configured to display the Meta widget in a navigation menu …

(The feed page 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 the WP Reading Settings section that affects your feeds is whether to display each article in a feed as full text, or as a summary …

(WP Reading Settings – ’For each article in a feed show’ options)

Post Excerpts can also affect how the content in your feed displays …

(Post excerpts can affect how content in your feeds appear)

We have written a detailed tutorial on Post excerpts here:

• Using Post Excerpts

View The Content Of Your RSS Feeds

As mentioned previously, all that’s required to view a feed’s content is to copy the feed’s URL and paste it into an application that can translate feeds into readable content.

Let’s see how this works.

First, find a website whose content you want to syndicate and search for a ‘subscribe’ button or link …

(Look for a ’subscribe to feed’ button or link. Image source: YourCoffeeGuru.com)

Next, copy the feed URL to your clipboard …

(Copy your feed URL)

If you want, you can check what the feed contains by pasting the feed URL into a feedreader …

(Paste the feed URL into a feedreader to view the feed content. Image Source: Feedreader)

Like feedreaders, WordPress also has the ability to process RSS feeds.

Adding Feeds To WordPress

Let’s show you how to add RSS content from another website or blog to yours.

Adding A Feed To Your WordPress Sidebar

As mentioned earlier, no matter what industry you are in, you could display on your site the latest content from an industry-related government department or authoritative site in your industry by simply adding their RSS feed. You can easily display a range of information on your WordPress site such as news, Facebook comments, or content from thousands of sites using the WordPress RSS widget.

Let’s add content sourced from an RSS feed to your sidebar …

(Let’s add an RSS feed to the WordPress sidebar navigation area)

copy the feed URL from a website containing content that you would like to display on your sidebar to your clipboard …

(Copy the URL of your feed to the clipboard)

Next, go to Appearance > Widgets and paste the feed into an RSS widget …

(RSS Widget)

To learn more about using sidebar widgets, go here:

• Adding And Configuring WordPress Widgets In The Website

Load your site in your web browser. The content should appear on 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 Set Up Webmaster Accounts

Adding RSS Feeds To Posts

Can you add content from an RSS feed to posts instead of your sidebar? You sure can!

You can easily do this using WordPress plugins. Just search on WordPress.org plugin repository for RSS feed, RSS feed to post, etc.

(WordPress RSS plugins)

Note: These plugins typically require configuration – visit the plugin sites for setup instructions, or contact us if you need assistance configuring plugins.

Here are a number of auto blogging plugins that let you automatically add posts using RSS feeds:

WPeMatico

(WPeMatico Plugin)

WPeMatico is an auto blogging plugin that allows you to publish posts automatically from multiple RSS/Atom feeds.

You can manage all the feeds you import and arrange them according to campaigns and categories.

For more details, go here:

• WPeMatico WordPress Plugin

WP RSS Aggregator

(WP RSS Aggregator WordPress Plugin)

WP RSS Aggregator is a comprehensive RSS feed importer and auto blogging WordPress plugin that offers extended functionality with a number of premium extensions (add-ons).

For example, the Feed to Post add-on lets you autoblog by importing RSS feeds directly into WordPress posts.

For more details, go here:

• WP RSS Aggregator WP Plugin

RSS Post Importer

(RSS Post Importer Plugin)

RSS Post Importer can be used to import, syndicate, curate, merge and display full text feeds on your WordPress blog.

RSS Post Importer fetches an RSS feed and publishes the full content of each item in the feed as a standalone post.

For more details, go here:

• RSS Post Importer – WordPress Plugin

Powr RSS Feed

(Powr RSS Feed Plugin For WordPress)

With the POWr RSS Feed plugin, you can automatically combine and display content from multiple content using RSS feeds.

This plugin also lets you display videos, images, and articles, adjust sizing and spacing of feeds, use custom backgrounds, fonts, colors, and more. It also displays feeds correctly on all computers, tablets, and phones and supports text in any language.

The premium edition of POWr contains many additional features.

For more details, go here:

• Powr RSS Feed Plugin

WP Pipes

(WP Pipes WordPress Plugin)

WP Pipes 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, autoblogging, auto post to Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn, export posts as podcasts, create Google XML sitemaps, and more!

For more details, go here:

• WP Pipes Plugin

FeedWordPress

(FeedWordPress – WordPress Plugin)

FeedWordPress is a flexible Atom/RSS syndication plugin for WordPress.

As stated in the FeedWordPress website …

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.

You can use this FeedWordPress to create aggregator site (sites that combine and display posts from different sources), or bring together all of your online activity into a Lifestream.

For more details, go here:

• FeedWordPress WP Plugin

Autoblog

(Autoblog – WordPress Plugin)

Autoblog is an easy-to-use plugin that can be set-up very quickly, with no coding required and no complicated instructions. Simply copy and paste in the URL of your feed, give the feed a name (for admin purposes) and select the blog to post content to.

For more details, go here:

• Autoblog Plugin

RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types

(RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types Plugin For WordPress)

Use a plugin like RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types if you want to include pages in your RSS feed and not just posts (by default WordPress only includes posts in your RSS feed).

For more details, go here:

• RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types WordPress Plugin

Useful Tips

Tip #1 – Comment RSS Feeds

In addition to giving online users access to RSS feeds of your posts, WordPress also makes available RSS feeds of comments posted on your site.

To access this feed, locate the ‘Meta’ widget on your sidebar menu (note: your theme may not be configured to display this widget) and click on Comments RSS …

(Comments RSS)

All the comments posted on your site by visitors display in your Comments RSS page …

(Comments feed entries viewed on Firefox)

Like post entries, your comments feed items will display differently depending on which web browser you are using …

(Comments feed items displayed with Google Chrome)

Again, you can check what the comments RSS feed contains by pasting the feed URL into an online feed reader …

(Paste the URL of your comments feed into a feed reader to view the feed content. Image: 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 site has been installed in a subfolder, e.g. “blog”)

Tip #2 – Accessing Single Post RSS Feeds

Being able to display an RSS feed for a single post item can be useful. For example, you may want to add feeds from specific posts to RSS aggregator sites, or you may have created a valuable resource that other online users will want to syndicate.

The formula for using an RSS feed for a specific post is shown below:

(RSS Feed For Single Post Item)

To create the above feed, copy the URL of your post, and add “/feed/?withoutcomments=1” to the end.

(Single Post RSS Feed)

Note: By default, if you only append “/feed” to the end of a post, WordPress will return the comments made on that post, not actual post content itself.

Tip #3 – Displaying Post Category Feeds

Some your site users may only be interested in syndicating content about certain categories. They may not want to subscribe to your entire site’s feed.

If your site publishes content under many categories, WordPress allows you to easily offer readers a separate RSS feed for each category.

Just use the format shown below:

(Format for WP post categories RSS feed)

Select and copy the category URL to your clipboard …

(Copy your category link address …)

And add “feed” to the end of it …

(Format for WP post categories RSS feed)

The feed will now only include content posted in this category …

(Category RSS 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 – Set Up Your Own List Of RSS Feeds For Your Visitors

You can publish your own RSS feeds directory that allows readers to subscribe only to content in the categories they are interested in …

(Set Up An RSS Feeds Page)

You can link an image like the one shown below to the URL of your feed and then create a table or a list of all individual feeds on a separate page …

(RSS icon. Image Source: public-domain-photos.com)

For a detailed tutorial on creating tables in WordPress pages and posts, go here:

• How To Easily Add Tables To Your Content Without Touching Code

WordPress RSS – Notes

You can customize RSS in a number of ways, such as adding images to feeds, ads, etc. Some of these feed customizations require editing code.

WordPress allows you to configure a number of different feed types without code editing skills. Here are some examples of custom feeds you can use …

(WordPress RSS – Feed Types)

Below are the different feed types, descriptions, and feed examples shown in the diagram above:

• Feed Type: All Posts
• Description: Content feed – Includes your latest posts
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/

• Feed Type: All Comments
• Description: Comments feed – Displays the latest comments published on your website or blog
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/comments/feed/

• Feed Type: Individual Posts
• Description: RSS feed containing single post entries
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/blog-post-title/feed/

• Feed Type: Individual Posts Comments
• Description: Feed containing the latest comments made on specific post entries
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/post-title/feed/

• Feed Type: Archives
• Description: Day – Contains the latest entries in each archive
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2018/06/11/feed/

• Feed Type: Archives
• Description: Month – RSS feed that includes latest items in each archive
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2015/11/feed/

• Feed Type: Archives
• Description: Year – Displays the latest posts in each archive
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2016/feed/

• Feed Type: Search Results
• Description: Displays the latest entries for a search query
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/search/term/feed/

• Feed Type: Custom Post Type
• Description: RSS feed containing latest posts for a custom type (e.g. book)
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/?post_type=book

One last thing …

Remember to let visitors know that they can subscribe to your feeds. Place your subscribe link or button in a visible location …

(Remember to promote your RSS feeds!)

Keep in mind that other sites will only syndicate your content if you provide your subscribers with very high-quality information that will add great value to their sites and benefit their users.

(Easily add great content to your site and get others to subscribe to your content using RSS feeds!)

If you need help coming up with content ideas subscribe to our FREE content creation course using the form below:

Also, don’t forget to subscribe to our feed 🙂

RSS – Resources:

• Download RSS Icons – Visit FeedIcons.com or search online (e.g. “free rss icons”, “RSS logo”, etc.) for sites that contain downloadable RSS icons.
• RSSBoard.org – The RSS Advisory Board Go here if you want to gain a better understanding of RSS.
• Wikipedia/RSS – General information about the history and benefits of using RSS.
• WordPress Codex: Feeds – WordPress documentation. Go here for more information about using RSS feeds in WordPress.

Congratulations! Now you know where your RSS feed is located, how to use your WordPress RSS feed to get your content syndicated online, and how to display someone else’s content on your site via RSS feeds.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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