No matter what service or product your business provides, it’s vitally important to provide high-quality information on your site or blog. For example, if your business provides travel-related services, you may want to include the latest information from government departments and foreign travel offices, such as news or updates on travel warnings, advice from consular offices, etc.

To create and publish this kind of information, however, takes a huge amount of work and expertise. You have to do a lot of information gathering, researching and organizing, fact-checking, content writing and editing (or hire someone to do this for you), and then continually ensure that this information is kept up-to-date. As you can imagine, this is not only a lot of work but most of the information you are dealing with is completely beyond your control.

Fortunately, there is a much easier way to regularly provide your users with expert, up-to-date information.

It’s called RSS …

(RSS - The simplest way to provide your users with the latest information)

The Ultimate Guide To WordPress RSS

RSS – Basic Information

• RSS, which, according to some experts is an acronym for RDF Site Summary, is more commonly referred to as Really Simple Syndication. It it is also referred to as a “feed” or “newsfeed”.
• When users subscribe to an RSS feed, they no longer have to physically visit and check the website for content updates. Instead, their browser will continually monitor the content and automatically keep subscribers up-to-date.
• RSS feeds are often used to publish frequently updated information, such as blog post items, news, audios, etc., to which other users can choose to subscribe.
• RSS feed content can be read using software programs called RSS readers, or aggregators. Feed readers can be used to access new content published on websites and distribute this content (and updates made to the content) to other sites.
• There are different feed formats and these can be read by different feedreaders. Some of these include RSS feeds, Atom feeds and RDF (Resource Description Framework) 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 sourced from many different sites.

In this comprehensive guide, we will explain where your RSS feed is located, how to syndicate your content online using RSS feeds, and how to display content from other sites on your site using RSS feeds.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds

Content syndication is a powerful and legitimate method used for sharing web content. RSS Feeds provide web users with an easy way to receive the latest information published on sites they are interested in.

First, let’s look at syndication.

Digital news agencies use syndication to publish content from news sources around the world.

Syndication allows online newspapers and leading online media publications to deliver readers up-to-the-minute news and newsworthy content from all around the globe without actually having to hire and set up additional news reporting agencies all around the world …

(Many online newspapers and many leading online media publications rely heavily on content syndication to publish newsworthy stories from other news agencies around the planet.)

Syndication is used to share content legitimately with other sites. Global media publications syndicate news stories using news feeds …

(Content syndication is used by news reporting agencies to share newsworthy content with other news publications)

Most websites actually would like you to syndicate their information. Content syndication not only allows information of great value to be shared, but it can also send visitors back to the site that originally published the content being syndicated. This creates links that can drive traffic back to their site.

Many news reporting agencies and leading online media publications will have an RSS feed section (look for links in their navigation menu that say “RSS” or “Newsfeeds” in them, or just search for “name of site/keyword + rss” – e.g. “nytimes rss”, “salt lake tribune rss”, “sydney morning herald rss”, etc.) …

(Many digital publishers and major content sites provide links to an RSS feed section. Image: smh.com.au )

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

(RSS feeds list. Image: New York Times)

Each of these feed items allows you to access different areas of the website (e.g. technology news, sports news, lifestyle magazine, etc.)

An RSS directory can also include further feed subcategories …

(RSS Feed section. Image: latimes.com feeds)

Note: An RSS feed is simply a URL. All you need to do to use an RSS feed is copy the URL and paste it into a program that can translate the feed into something readable. We’ll cover this further below.

The Benefits Of Using RSS Feeds

Adding someone else’s content to your site has some obvious benefits. It gives additional exposure online to someone else’s site and helps you by freeing you up from having to create this content …

(Using RSS Feeds)

While adding RSS feeds 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 sites to use YOUR content.

When other sites syndicate your RSS feed, you have the opportunity to get increased exposure online and drive new visitors …

(Get visitors to syndicate content using your feed … it will help to increase your web traffic!)

About Your WordPress RSS Feed

By default, WordPress automatically publishes a feed of your latest posts, allowing other online users to easily syndicate your content on their sites.

Depending on your WordPress theme, there are a few ways to get the WordPress RSS feed:

1) If your theme allows the Meta widget to display in a standard or custom menu, just scroll down to the Meta section and click on Entries RSS …

(Access your WordPress RSS feed from the Meta section)

2) You can also find links and buttons on certain WordPress themes that allow your visitors to copy your feed.

For example, in the screenshot below, a visitor can simply copy the site’s RSS feed URL by right-clicking and copying on the Subscribe to RSS link …

(Copy RSS links to your clipboard from “subscribe” buttons)

3) On some websites and again, depending on your WordPress site’s theme, you can find the RSS feed displayed in a Subscribe, Social Share, or Links section …

(Look for an RSS button in a a Stay In Touch, Links, or Social Share section)

4) You can also view your feed by simply typing your site’s URL into a browser and adding “/feed” after the URL, e.g.:

• http://www.yourdomain.com/feed
• http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/feed (if your WordPress installation is in a subdomain, e.g. “blog”)

Using any of the above methods will bring up a page containing your WordPress RSS feed …

(Feed items as seen on a Firefox browser)

Note that your feed content will display differently depending on which web browser you are using …

(RSS items displayed with a Google Chrome browser)

Specify Number Of Items To Display On Your RSS Feed

To specify how many entries you would like to show in your Feeds section, go to your Reading Settings section and type in the number of items to show in the “Syndication feeds show the most recent” field …

(WP Settings – Reading Settings – Number of syndication feed items field)

The feed section will show as many recent posts as you have specified section …

(The feed page will display as many recent items you have specified in the WordPress Reading Settings section)

Display Full Text Or Summary Of Posts In Your RSS Feed

The other setting in the Reading Settings section that affects your RSS feed is whether to display posts in the feed as full text, or just a summary …

(WordPress Reading Settings – Show ‘Full Text’ or ‘Summary’ for each article in your RSS feed)

Post Excerpts can also affect how your feed content appears …

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

If you need help Post excerpts, see this tutorial:

• WordPress Post Excerpts Explained

View The Content Of Your RSS Feeds

As mentioned previously, to view a feed’s content, you have to copy the feed’s URL to your clipboard and paste it into an application that can read and translate feeds into readable content for humans.

Let’s see how this works.

First, go to a website or blog and search for a ’subscribe to feed’ link using any of the methods described earlier …

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

Next, copy the feed URL to your clipboard …

(Copy the URL of your feed)

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 feed content. Source: http://feedreader.com/online)

Like feedreaders, WordPress also has the ability to process RSS/XML feeds and convert these into readable content for humans.

How To Add Feeds To WordPress Sites

In the example below, we’ll add content from other website or blog’s RSS feeds to your site.

How To Add RSS Feeds To Your Sidebar

As mentioned earlier, no matter what industry your business is in, you could easily add to your site the latest news and updates from an industry-related government department or authoritative site in your industry simply by adding content from their RSS feed. You can easily display a range of information on your WordPress site like news, social media comments, or content from thousands of sites using the WordPress RSS widget.

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

(Add content from an RSS feed to your sidebar)

First, Find a site that publishes content that you want to add to your site and copy the RSS feed URL to your clipboard …

(Copy the feed URL)

Next, paste the feed into a new RSS widget …

(RSS Widget)

To learn more about adding content to sidebars using widgets, go here:

• How To Add And Configure WordPress Widgets In Your Website

Refresh your browser. The content will now display in the sidebar (or wherever the RSS widget has been added) …

(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

How To Add Content From RSS Feeds To Your Posts

Can you add content from RSS feeds to posts instead of the sidebar? Yes, you can!

You can easily do this using WordPress plugins. Search inside the Plugins admin section for RSS, RSS feed to post, etc.

(‘Add Plugins’ search results – WordPress RSS plugins)

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

Here are a few plugins you can check out that you can use to curate and add content from RSS feeds to your pages and posts:

WPeMatico

(WPeMatico – WordPress Plugin)

WPeMatico is an easy to use autoblogging plugin that lets you publish posts automatically from specific RSS/Atom feeds.

You can manage all of your imported feeds and arrange feeds according to categories and campaigns.

For more details, go here:

• WPeMatico Plugin For WordPress

WP RSS Aggregator

(WP RSS Aggregator Plugin For WordPress)

WP RSS Aggregator is an RSS feed importer and autoblogging plugin for WordPress that offers extended functionality with premium add-ons.

For example, the Feed to Post add-on for the WP RSS Aggregator plugin allows you to import RSS feeds directly into posts or any other custom post type.

For more details, go here:

• WP RSS Aggregator – WordPress Plugin

RSS Post Importer

(RSS Post Importer Plugin)

The RSS Post Importer plugin can be used to curate, syndicate, import, merge and display full text feeds (RSS, Atom, etc.) on your WordPress blog.

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

For more details, go here:

• RSS Post Importer

Powr RSS Feed

(Powr RSS Feed – WordPress Plugin)

With the POWr RSS Feed plugin, you can automatically combine and display content from a number of different content using RSS feeds.

The plugin also lets you display images, videos, and articles, adjust feed priority, use custom borders, fonts, colors, and more. It also displays feeds correctly on all phones, computers, and tablets and supports text in every language.

The premium version of POWr contains a number of additional features, such as the ability to display different feeds, manually accept or reject posts in your feed, and more.

For more details, go here:

• Powr RSS Feed – WordPress Plugin

WP Pipes

(WP Pipes Plugin)

The WP Pipes plugin is a powerful data migration plugin that lets you curate content from RSS feeds, Google News, and many other sources.

This plugin provides features like CSV importing for posts/WooCommerce, RSS feed creator, auto blogging, auto post to LinkedIn/Facebook/Twitter, export your posts as podcasts, create Google XML sitemaps, and help take your WordPress CMS to a new level.

For more details, go here:

• WP Pipes Plugin

FeedWordPress

(FeedWordPress – WordPress Plugin)

FeedWordPress is a simple and flexible syndication plugin for WordPress site-generated content.

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.

FeedWordPress can be used to create aggregator sites, or bring together all your online activity (e.g. from your blog, Twitter, YouTube, or other online services, in one place.

For more details, go here:

• FeedWordPress Plugin

Autoblog by WPMUDev

(Autoblog by WPMUDev)

Autoblog is an easy-to-use plugin that can be set-up in minutes, with no coding required and no complicated instructions. Just copy and paste in your feed URL, give it a name of your choosing (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 – WordPress Plugin)

Install RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types if you want to include pages in your WordPress RSS feed in addition to posts (by default WordPress only includes posts in your RSS feed).

For more details, go here:

• RSS Includes Pages

Useful Tips

Tip #1 – Comment RSS Feeds

In addition to displaying RSS feeds of your latest posts, WordPress also displays RSS feeds of your post comments.

To view 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)

Comments posted on your site by visitors can be seen in your Comments RSS page …

(Comments feed items displayed on a Firefox web browser)

Like post entries, your comments feed page will display differently depending on the browser you are using …

(Comments feed items displayed with Google Chrome)

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

(Paste the URL of your comments feed into a feed reader to view the feed content. Source: Feedreader.com)

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 subdomain, e.g. “blog”)

Tip #2 – Individual Post Item RSS Feeds

Being able to create an RSS feed for a single post item can be useful. For example, you may want to add feeds from specific items 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 item is shown below:

(Single Post Feed)

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

(Single Post RSS Feed)

Note: By default, if you only add “/feed” to the end of the post URI, WordPress will return the comments for that post, not the post content itself.

Tip #3 – Category RSS Feeds

Some your site users may only be interested in subscribing to content from specific categories. They may not want to subscribe to your entire site’s feed.

With WordPress, you can create individual category feeds.

Just use the format below:

(WordPress post categories RSS feed format)

Copy the selected category link address …

(Copy the category link address to your clipboard …)

Now, add “feed” to the end of it …

(Feed format for post categories)

The feed now only displays content published in that category …

(Category-specific feed page)

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 Page Of Feeds On Your Site

You can provide your own RSS feeds directory that allows readers to subscribe only to specific content …

(Publish Your Own RSS Feeds List)

You can link a button image like the one shown below to the URL of your feed and then create a table or a list of your category feeds on a new page …

(RSS graphic. Image: public-domain-photos.com)

For a detailed step-by-step tutorial about creating tables in WordPress content, go here:

• How To Create And Add Tables To WordPress Easily

RSS – Additional Notes

You can customize your feeds in several ways, such as adding videos to feeds, ads, etc. Some of these customizations require code editing skills.

WordPress allows a number of RSS feed configurations that do not require messing with code. For example, here are some of the kinds of feed types you can display …

(WordPress RSS – Custom Feeds)

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

• Feed Type: All Posts
• Description: Content feed – displays your latest post entries
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/

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

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

• Feed Type: Individual Posts Comments
• Description: Includes the latest comments made on a post
• 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/2015/04/02/feed/

• Feed Type: Archives
• Description: Month – Displays latest posts in each archive
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2018/07/feed/

• Feed Type: Archives
• Description: Year – Displays the latest posts in each archive
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2015/feed/

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

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

One last thing …

It’s a good idea to let your visitors know that they can subscribe to your feeds. Make sure you place your subscribe buttons in a visible location …

(Encourage your site users to syndicate your feeds!)

Finally, keep in mind that online users will only subscribe to your content if you provide your visitors with very high-quality content that can add value to their sites and benefit their users.

(Add content to your site and get others to subscribe to your content using WordPress and RSS!)

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 🙂

Resources:

• Download RSS Feed Buttons – Visit sites like Iconspedia.com or search online (e.g. “free RSS icons”, “rss images”, etc.) for sites that contain downloadable Free RSS icons.
• RSSBoard.org – The RSS Advisory Board is an independent organization responsible for publishing RSS specifications, guiding developers who create RSS applications and broadening the general public understanding of RSS.
• Wikipedia.org/RSS – General information about RSS.
• WordPress Codex – Official WordPress documentation and reference. Go here for additional information about WordPress RSS feeds.

Congratulations! Now you know where to find your WordPress RSS feed, how to syndicate your content online using feeds, and how to display content from other websites and blogs on your site using their RSS feed.

Hopefully, this information has given you 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 the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.

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