No matter what service or product you sell or what industry your business is a part of, you need to provide quality information to your site or blog visitors. For example, if you provide travel services, it’s a good idea to include information from government and foreign travel-related departments, such as news or updates on travel warnings, tips from consular offices, etc.
To create and publish this type of information, however, involves a huge amount of time and expertise. You have to do a lot of information sifting, researching and organizing, checking the accuracy of your sources, writing and editing content (or hire someone to do this for you), and then ensure 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 well beyond your control.
Thankfully, there is an easier way to continually provide your site visitors with expert, up-to-date information.
It’s called RSS …
(RSS - One of the simplest ways to provide your subscribers with great information)
The Ultimate Guide To WordPress RSS
What Is RSS?
- RSS, which, according to some definitions is short for Rich Site Summary, is more commonly referred to now as Really Simple Syndication. It it is also referred to as a “feed” or “web feed”.
- Once users subscribe to an RSS feed, they no longer have to manually visit and check the source website for content updates. Instead, their web browser will continually monitor the content and keep feed subscribers updated.
- Feeds are also used to publish frequently updated information, such as new blog posts, news headlines, video lists, etc., to which users can choose to subscribe.
- You can view RSS feeds using web-based, desktop-based, and even mobile-based software programs called feedreaders, or feed aggregators. Aggregators can be used to find new content published on websites and syndicate this content (and updates made to this content) to many online properties.
- There are different kinds of feeds, 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 that feeds are compatible with different machines, feedreaders, and programs.
- Many sites and software tools also allow you to combine several RSS feeds to display news and updates from many different sources.
In this in-depth guide, you are going to learn how to find your WordPress RSS feed, 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 their RSS feed.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds
Content syndication is a really powerful and legitimate method used to share web content. RSS Feeds provide online users with a simple and easy way to stay up-to-date with the latest information posted on different sites.
First, let’s take a look at how syndication is used.
Media publications use syndication to publish stories from other news agencies around the world.
Content syndication allows leading online newspapers to deliver readers the most recent news items and interesting stories from all around the globe without actually having to employ and set up more news staff and reporters in every location around the world …
(Global media publications rely on content syndication to publish newsworthy content from other news agencies around the world.)
Syndication is used to share newsworthy content legitimately. News reporting agencies syndicate newsworthy content using feeds …
(Online newspapers syndicate newsworthy content using news feeds)
Most websites actually want you to syndicate their information. Content syndication not only allows great information to be shared, but it also drives visitors back to the original site that published the content being syndicated. This creates links that can drive traffic back to their site.
Many news reporting agencies and major sites will have an RSS feed section (look for links in the navigation menu that say “RSS” or “Newsfeeds” in them, or just search for “name of site/keyword + rss” – e.g. “nytimes rss”, “star tribune rss”, “sydney morning herald rss”, etc.) …
(Many online newspapers provide links to a feed section. Image: SMH )
Clicking on a site’s RSS feeds link brings up a directory of different RSS feeds …
(RSS feeds directory. Image Source: nytimes.com)
These feeds give you access to information from different sections of the website (e.g. business news, arts news, science news, etc.)
Feed sections can also include feed subcategories …
(A feed directory can also include feed subcategories. Image: LA Times RSS)
Note: An RSS feed is simply a URL. All you need to do to use feeds is to copy the URLs and paste these into software that can process the feed into something readable. We’ll cover this further below.
The Benefits Of Using Feeds
Adding content from someone else’s website or blog on your website has some obvious benefits. It gives someone else’s business additional exposure online and adds value to your site without you having to create this content …
(RSS Feeds Has Many Benefits!)
While adding feeds from another site is a great way to add content to your site that you don’t have to create, it’s a great idea to try and get other sites to use your content.
When other sites syndicate your RSS feed, this gives you the opportunity to gain more exposure online and drive new web traffic …
(It’s a good idea to get visitors to syndicate your feed … it will help drive more traffic to your site!)
WordPress Feed
WordPress automatically publishes a feed of your posts, allowing others to easily syndicate your content on their websites.
Depending on the theme you have installed, there are a number of ways to access your RSS feed:
1) If your theme allows the Meta widget to be displayed on your sidebar or footer, scroll down to the Meta section and click on Entries RSS …
(Access your WordPress RSS feed from the Entries RSS menu)
2) You can also find links and/or buttons on certain WordPress themes that let your visitors copy your feed.
In the screenshot below, for example, a visitor can copy the site’s RSS feed URL by right-clicking and copying on the Subscribe to RSS link …
(Copy feed URLs to your clipboard from “subscribe to RSS” buttons)
3) On many sites and again, depending on the WordPress theme you have installed, you can find the RSS feed displayed in a Links, Share, or Keep In Touch fixed, slide-out, or floating toolbar …
(Look for an RSS button in a a Links, Social Share, or Stay In Touch section)
4) You can also view your feed by 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 site’s feed …
(RSS feed entries displayed using Firefox)
Note that your feed items will display differently depending on which web browser you use …
(RSS feed entries as seen with a Chrome browser)
Specify Number Of Items To Display On Your RSS Feed
To specify how many entries you would like to display in your RSS section, go to your Reading Settings section and enter the number of items to show in the “Syndication feeds show the most recent” field …
(Reading Settings – Syndication feeds)
Your feed section will display the number of items you have specified in your WordPress Reading Settings section …
(The feed page will display as many recent posts as you have specified in your WP Reading Settings section)
Display Full Text Or Summary Of Posts In Your RSS Feed
Another setting in the WP Reading Settings section that affects your RSS feed is whether to display posts in the feed as full text, or a summary …
(WordPress Reading Settings – Display ‘Full Text’ or ‘Summary’ for each article in a feed)
Post Excerpts can also affect how your feed content appears …
(Post excerpts affect how a feed displays)
If you need help using excerpts in WordPress Posts, refer to this step-by-step tutorial:
View The Content Of Your RSS Feeds
As mentioned earlier, all you have to do to view the content of a feed is to copy the feed’s URL and paste it into a feedreader, i.e. an application that translates feeds into readable content for humans.
Let’s see how this works.
First, go to a website or blog and look for their RSS feed section using any of the methods described earlier …
(Look for an RSS feed button. Image source: YourCoffeeGuru.com)
Next, copy the feed URL to your clipboard …
(Copy the URL of your feed to your clipboard)
If you want, you can check the feed content by pasting the URL of your feed into a feed reader …
(Paste your URL of your feed into a feed reader to view the feed content. Image Source: http://feedreader.com/online)
Like feed readers, WordPress also has the ability to process RSS/XML feeds and convert these into human-readable content.
Adding A Feed To Your WP Site
In the example below, we are going to add content sourced from another website to yours.
Adding Feeds To Your Sidebar
As mentioned earlier, no matter what industry your business is in, you can add to your site the latest news from an industry-related government department or authoritative site in your industry simply by adding their RSS feed. You can easily display a range of information on your WordPress site such as news, social media updates, or content from thousands of sites using the WordPress RSS widget.
Let’s add RSS content to the WordPress sidebar area …
(Let’s add an RSS feed to your sidebar)
copy the RSS feed URL from a website or blog that publishes content that you would like to add to your sidebar to your clipboard …
(Copy your feed URL to the clipboard)
Next, paste the feed into a new RSS widget …
(Widgets Panel – RSS Widget)
To learn more about adding content to sidebars using widgets, go here:
Load your site in your web browser. The content will now 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:
Adding Feed Content To Posts
Can you add content from RSS feeds to posts instead of your sidebar? Yes, you can!
You can do this using WordPress plugins. Search inside the Plugins admin screen (Plugins > Add New) for RSS feed, RSS feed to post, etc.
(’Add Plugins’ screen)
Note: These plugins typically require configuration – visit the plugin sites for complete instructions, or contact us for help with plugin configuration.
The plugins below can be used to feed content to posts, or “auto blog” (An auto blog is a blog with content that is automatically gathered and compiled from RSS feeds):
WPeMatico
(WPeMatico WP Plugin)
WPeMatico is an auto blogging plugin that lets you publish posts automatically from selected RSS/Atom feeds.
You can manage all the feeds you import and arrange feeds into 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 plugin for WordPress with extended functionality with premium add-ons.
For example, the Feed to Post extension is a feature-filled importer that lets you autoblog by importing RSS feeds directly into WP posts or any other custom post type.
For more details, go here:
RSS Post Importer
(RSS Post Importer – WordPress Plugin)
RSS Post Importer can be used to curate, syndicate, import, merge and display full-text RSS feeds on your WordPress website or blog.
The plugin will fetch an RSS feed and publish the entire content of each item in the feed as a standalone post.
For more details, go here:
Powr RSS Feed
(Powr RSS Feed Plugin For WordPress)
POWr RSS Feed lets you automatically combine and display content from various sources using RSS feeds.
The POWr RSS Feed plugin also lets you display images, videos, and article content, adjust feed priority, use custom fonts, colors, borders, and more. It also has mobile-responsive design 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 in your feed, and more.
For more details, go here:
WP Pipes
(WP Pipes WP Plugin)
The WP Pipes plugin is a powerful data migration plugin that lets you create curate content from RSS feeds, Google News, and other sources.
This plugin provides loads of functionality like CSV importing for posts/WooCommerce, RSS feed creator, auto blogging, auto post to Twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook, export posts as podcasts, create Google XML sitemaps, and more!
For more details, go here:
FeedWordPress
(FeedWordPress WordPress Plugin)
FeedWordPress is a flexible syndication plugin for WordPress content.
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 site (sites that bring together posts from different sources), or bring together all your online activity (e.g. from your blog, Facebook, Flickr, or other online services, into a Lifestream.
For more details, go here:
Autoblog
(Autoblog by WPMUDev Plugin For WordPress)
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, give it a name of your choosing (for admin purposes) and select a blog to post content to.
For more details, go here:
RSS Includes Pages
(RSS Includes Pages Plugin For WordPress)
Use a plugin like RSS Includes Pages 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:
Useful Tips
Tip #1 – WP Comment RSS Feeds
WordPress displays RSS feeds of your post comments in addition to displaying RSS feeds of your posts.
To view this feed, locate the ‘Meta’ section on your sidebar menu (note: your theme may not be configured to display this widget) and click on Comments RSS …
(WordPress Comments Feed)
Comments posted on your site by visitors will appear in your Comments RSS page …
(RSS comments feed items as seen with Firefox)
Like post entries, your comments feed content will display differently depending on the web browser you use …
(RSS comments feed entries displayed using Google Chrome)
Again, you can check the feed content by pasting the URL of the feed into an online feed reader …
(Paste the comments feed URL into a feedreader to view the feed content. Image 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 website or blog has been installed in a subfolder, e.g. “blog”)
Tip #2 – Creating Feeds For Specific Posts
Being able to select an RSS feed for single post items can be useful. For example, you may want to add feeds from specific posts 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 a specific post item is shown below:
(Specific Post Feed)
To create the above feed, copy the URI of your post, and add “/feed/?withoutcomments=1” to the end.
(Single Post RSS Feed)
Note: By default, if you only add “/feed” to the end of the web address of your post, WordPress will return the comments associated with that post, not the post content itself.
Tip #3 – Category Feeds
Some your site users may only be interested in subscribing to content from a specific post category. They may not want to subscribe to all of your site’s content.
If your site displays content published under multiple categories, you can provide a separate feed for each different category.
All you have to do is use the format shown below:
(WP post categories RSS feed format)
Copy the category link address to your clipboard …
(Copy your category URL …)
Append “feed” to the end of it …
(RSS feed format for category)
The category RSS feed will now only include content posted for this particular 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 – Provide A Directory Of Feeds
You can create an RSS feeds directory that allows readers to subscribe to specific categories, just like large authoritative sites …
(Set Up Your Own Page Of Feeds On Your Site)
You can link an icon like the one shown below to category (or specific post) feeds and then create a table or a list of your feeds on a separate page …
(RSS button image. Image Source: public-domain-photos.com)
For a detailed step-by-step tutorial about creating tables in WordPress content, go here:
RSS – Notes
You can customize feeds in various different ways, such as adding videos to feeds, ads, etc. Some of these feed customizations require editing code.
WordPress allows different RSS feed configurations that do not require editing code. Here are some examples of custom feed types you can display …
(Different Custom Feeds You Can Create With WordPress RSS)
For your convenience, here are the feed types, descriptions, and feed examples shown above:
- Feed Type: All Posts
- Description: Content feed – RSS feed that contains your latest post entries
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/
- Feed Type: All Comments
- Description: Comments feed – Displays the latest comments published on your site
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/comments/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts
- Description: Feed for a specific post
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/title-of-your-blog-post/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts Comments
- Description: RSS Feed that includes the latest comments made on specific posts
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/post-title/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Day – Feed containing latest posts in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2018/03/07/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Month – Feed containing latest items in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2011/04/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Year – Contains latest items in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2016/feed/
- Feed Type: Search Results
- Description: Feed that displays latest items for a search query
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/search/term/feed/
- Feed Type: Custom Post Type
- Description: Displays latest post entries for a custom type (e.g. book)
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/?post_type=book
One last thing …
Remember to promote your RSS feeds. Place a ’subscribe to RSS’ button in a visible location …
(Remember to promote your RSS feeds!)
Finally, keep in mind that online users will only syndicate your content if you provide your subscribers with high-quality information that can add great value to their sites and benefit their users.
(Add someone else’s content and get other users to syndicate your content with 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 RSS feed 🙂
Additional Resources:
- RSS Feed Images – Visit Feedicons or search online (e.g. “free RSS icons”, “RSS icon”, etc.) for sites that allow you to download Free RSS icons.
- RSSBoard.org – The RSS Advisory Board is an independent organization responsible for publishing RSS specifications, providing guidance to developers who create RSS applications and furthering the understanding of RSS.
- Wikipedia/RSS – Learn more about RSS.
- WordPress Codex – WordPress software documentation and information. Visit this site for more information about using WordPress RSS.
Congratulations! Now you know where your RSS feed is located, how to syndicate your content online using feeds, and how to display someone else’s content on your site via RSS.
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit other great articles and tutorials on this site.
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