No matter what product or service you provide, providing high-quality information to your blog visitors is vitally important. For example, if your business provides insurance-related services, it’s not a bad idea to include useful information from government departments, such as news and updates on statistical research, insurance tips, etc.
The problem with providing this kind of information, however, is that it requires a huge amount of effort and resources. You have to do a ton of data sorting, researching and organizing, fact-checking, 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 not only involves a lot of work but most of the information you are dealing with is entirely beyond your control.
Fortunately, there is an easier way to keep your site visitors up-to-date with the latest information.
It’s called RSS …
(RSS - One of the easiest ways to provide your site readers with great information)
The Ultimate Guide To WordPress RSS
RSS – A Basic Overview
- RSS stands for Rich Site Summary, or, as is more commonly referred, Really Simple Syndication. It is also often referred to as a “feed” or “web feed”.
- When users subscribe to a website’s feed, they no longer have to manually visit and check the website for content updates. Instead, their web browser will constantly monitor the feed and automatically keep subscribers updated.
- RSS feeds are typically used to publish frequently updated information, such as blog post items, news, video lists, etc., which users can then subscribe to.
- Essentially, an RSS feed is a structured XML (Extensible Markup Language) document that includes either full or summarized text along with metadata such as published date, feed author, etc. It allows people to subscribe to content on websites and then view any updates posted on these websites using a feedreader. Conversely, RSS feeds also enable publishers to automatically syndicate their content.
- There are different feed formats and these can be read by different feed aggregators. 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 let you combine several RSS feeds to display news and updates sourced from various websites.
This detailed article shows you how to find your WordPress RSS feed, how to syndicate your content online using feeds, and how to display content from other websites on your site using RSS feeds.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds
Content syndication is a powerful method used for sharing content online. Feeds provide web users with an easy way to receive the latest information published on websites and blogs they are interested in.
First, let’s take a look at how syndication is used.
Online media publications rely heavily on content syndication to publish newsworthy content from other news agencies around the world.
Content syndication allows online newspapers to deliver readers global stories and the most recent news items from all over the planet without actually having to hire more content writers in every place around the world …
(Media publications rely on syndication to publish content from other news agencies all around the world.)
Syndication is used to share newsworthy content legitimately with other sites. Online newspapers syndicate newsworthy content using feeds …
(Digital content publishers syndicate their content using news feeds)
Most websites actually want you to syndicate their content. Syndicating content not only allows information of great value to be shared, but it also sends visitors back to the original site that created and published the content being syndicated. This creates new ways to drive traffic back to their site.
Many news reporting agencies and major content sites provide links to a 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”, “salt lake tribune rss”, “sydney morning herald rss”, etc.) …
(Many news reporting agencies and major content sites include a feed section. Image: SMH )
Clicking on a site’s RSS links section will bring up a list of different RSS feed sections of the site …
(RSS feeds list. Image Source: nytimes.com RSS feeds)
Each of these RSS feed items lets readers access different areas of the website (e.g. technology news, arts news, health news, etc.)
A feed directory can also include further subcategory feeds …
(Feed sections can also include subcategories. Source: LA Times RSS)
Note: An RSS feed is just a URL. All you need to do to use RSS feeds is to copy the URLs and paste these into an application that can process the feed into something readable. We’ll cover this further below.
The Benefits Of Syndicating Content
Syndicating content from someone else’s website or blog on your website has some obvious benefits. It not only helps someone else’s business, it also adds value to your site without you having to create the 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 worth keeping in mind that there are benefits in getting other websites to use YOUR content.
When other websites syndicate your content, this gives you the opportunity to get increased exposure online and drive more visitors …
(Get other sites to syndicate your content … it will help to increase your traffic!)
About Your WordPress Feed
WordPress automatically publishes a feed of your posts, allowing others to easily syndicate your content on their sites.
Depending on the WordPress theme you have installed, there are a few ways to get your WordPress RSS feed:
1) If your theme has been configured to display the Meta widget in a standard or custom menu …
(The feed page will display the number of items you have specified in the 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 feeds is whether to display each article in a feed as full text, or as a summary …
(Settings – 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 can affect how your feed content will appear)
For a detailed tutorial about using Post excerpts in WordPress, go here:
View The Content Of Your RSS Feeds
As mentioned previously, to view a feed’s content, you have to copy the feed’s URL and paste it into an application that translates feeds into readable content.
Let’s see how this works.
First, find a website whose feed you want to subscribe to and look for an RSS feed icon using any of the methods described earlier …
(Look for a ’subscribe to feed’ link or button. Image source: http://www.yourcoffeeguru.com)
Next, copy the feed URL to your clipboard …
(Copy the feed URL)
If you want, you can check what the feed contains by pasting the feed URL into an online feedreader …
(Paste the URL of your feed into a feed reader to view the feed content. Source: Feedreader)
Like feed readers, WordPress has the ability to process XML/RSS feeds and convert these into content that is readable by humans.
How To Add Feeds To Your WordPress Site
Let’s show you how to add content from other sites to yours.
Adding A Feed To Your Sidebar
As mentioned earlier, no matter what industry you are part of, you can easily add to your site the latest updates from an industry-related government department or authoritative site in your industry by simply importing their 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 RSS content to the WordPress sidebar …
(Let’s add an RSS feed to your sidebar)
copy the feed URL from a website containing content that you want to add to your sidebar …
(Copy your feed URL to the clipboard)
Next, log into your wordPress Dashboard and go to Appearance > Widget paste the feed into an RSS widget …
(RSS Widget)
To learn more about using sidebar widgets, go here:
Refresh your browser. The content can now be seen in the sidebar …
(RSS Feed Content Added To WordPress Sidebar Menu)
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 RSS Feed Content To WordPress Posts
Can you add content from RSS feeds to a post? You sure can!
You can do this using WordPress plugins. Just search on WordPress.org plugin directory for RSS Post, RSS feed to post, etc.
(RSS plugins for WordPress)
Note: These plugins typically require configuration – visit the plugin sites for setup instructions, or contact us if you need help with plugin configuration.
Here are some autoblogging plugins that allow you to create new with RSS feeds and imported content:
WPeMatico
(WPeMatico)
WPeMatico is an auto blogging plugin that lets you publish posts automatically from RSS/Atom feeds that you choose.
You can manage all the feeds you import and organize them into categories and campaigns.
For more details, go here:
WP RSS Aggregator
(WP RSS Aggregator – WordPress Plugin)
WP RSS Aggregator is an RSS feed importer and autoblogging WordPress plugin that offers extended functionality with a number of premium extensions (add-ons).
For example, the Feed to Post add-on for the WP RSS Aggregator plugin allows you to add content to your site automatically by importing RSS feeds directly into WP posts.
For more details, go here:
RSS Post Importer
(RSS Post Importer Plugin)
RSS Post Importer allows you to import, curate, syndicate, merge and display full text feeds (RSS, Atom, etc.) on your WordPress site.
The plugin will fetch an RSS feed and publish the entire content of each feed item as a separate post.
For more details, go here:
Powr RSS Feed
(Powr RSS Feed)
With the POWr RSS Feed plugin, you can automatically combine and display content from a number of different RSS feeds.
The plugin also lets you display images, videos, and article content, adjust the priority of different feeds, use custom colors, fonts, backgrounds, and more. It also has mobile-responsive design and supports text in every language.
The premium version of this plugin contains a number of additional features.
For more details, go here:
WP Pipes
(WP Pipes)
WP Pipes is a powerful data migration plugin that lets you curate content from RSS feeds, Google News, and many other sources.
This plugin provides loads of powerful features like CSV importing for posts/WooCommerce, RSS feed creator, auto blogging, auto post to Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn, export posts as iTunes podcasts, create Google XML sitemaps, and more!
For more details, go here:
FeedWordPress
(FeedWordPress – WordPress Plugin)
FeedWordPress provides flexible syndication 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 content from various different sources), or display all your online activity into a Lifestream.
For more details, go here:
Autoblog
(Autoblog)
Autoblog is an easy-to-use plugin that can be set-up very quickly, with no coding required and no complicated instructions. Just copy and paste in the URL of your feed, name your feed (for admin purposes) and select the blog that you want it to post to.
For more details, go here:
RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types
(RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types Plugin For WordPress)
RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types lets you display pages in your WordPress RSS feed in addition to posts.
For more details, go here:
Using RSS Feeds – Useful Tips
Tip #1 – Comment RSS Feeds
In addition to making RSS feeds of your latest posts available to online users, WordPress also makes available RSS feeds of comments posted on your site.
You can see this by clicking on Comments RSS in your ‘Meta’ widget (note: this section may not be visible on some themes) …
(WordPress Comments RSS)
Comments posted on your site by visitors and users will appear in your Comments RSS page …
(RSS comments feed content displayed on Firefox browser)
Like post entries, your comments feed content will display differently depending on the browser you are using …
(RSS comments feed content viewed on Google Chrome)
Again, you can check the feed content by pasting the URL of the feed into an online feedreader …
(Paste the feed URL into a feed reader to view the 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 website or blog has been installed in a subfolder, e.g. “blog”)
Tip #2 – Individual Item Feeds
Being able to access an RSS feed for an individual 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 making an RSS feed for a single post is shown below:
(RSS Feed For Specific Post)
To create the above feed, copy the post URL, and append “/feed/?withoutcomments=1” to the end.
(Single Post RSS Feed)
Note: By default, if you only append “/feed” to the end of the URI of your post, WordPress will return the comments left on that post, not the content of the post itself.
Tip #3 – Category Feeds
Some your site users may only be interested in subscribing to content from one or two categories. They may not want to subscribe to your entire site’s feed.
WordPress allows you to create individual category feeds.
All you have to do is use the format below:
(WP post categories feed format)
Select and copy the category URL …
(Copy your category link address …)
Add “feed” to the end of it …
(Feed format for category)
The feed now only displays 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 Your Own Directory Of RSS Feeds
You can set up your own list of RSS feeds that allows your readers to subscribe only to content in specific categories …
(Provide Your Own Directory Of Feeds)
Link an RSS button graphic to category feeds and then create a table or a list of all your category feeds on a separate page …
(RSS button graphic. Source: public-domain-photos.com)
If you need help with adding tables to WordPress content, see this tutorial:
WordPress RSS – Additional Notes
RSS feeds can be customized in several ways, such as adding videos to feeds, ads, etc. Some of these customizations require code editing skills.
WordPress allows different RSS feed configurations without messing with code. Here are some examples of feeds you can display …
(Different Feed Types You Can Create Using WordPress RSS)
Here are the different feed types, descriptions, and feed examples shown in the table above:
- Feed Type: All Posts
- Description: Content feed – Includes your latest post entries
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/
- Feed Type: All Comments
- Description: Comments feed – Includes the latest comments posted on your blog
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/comments/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts
- Description: Feed containing individual items
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/post-title/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts Comments
- Description: RSS Feed that contains the latest comments made on individual post entries
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/title-of-blog-post/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Day – Includes latest entries in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2014/11/14/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Month – Displays the latest items in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2013/05/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 entries for a search query
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/search/term/feed/
- Feed Type: Custom Post Type
- Description: Includes the latest posts for a custom type (e.g. book)
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/?post_type=book
One last thing …
Remember to let your visitors know that they can subscribe to your RSS feed. Make sure you place your ’subscribe to RSS’ buttons somewhere visible …
(Remember to make your RSS feeds visible your RSS feeds!)
Also, keep in mind that other sites will only want to subscribe to your content if you provide your subscribers with very high-quality content that will add value to their sites and benefit their users.
(Easily add great content to your site and get other users to syndicate 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 RSS feed 🙂
Additional Resources:
- Download RSS Icons – Visit Feedicons.com or search online (e.g. “free rss icons”, “rss buttons”, etc.) for sites containing downloadable Free RSS icons.
- RSSBoard.org – The RSS Advisory Board Go here to learn more about RSS.
- Wikipedia/RSS – Learn more about RSS feeds.
- WordPress Codex: WordPress Feeds – WordPress documentation repository. Visit this site to learn more about using RSS feeds in WordPress.
Congratulations! Now you know how to find your WordPress RSS feed, how to syndicate your content online using RSS, and how to display content from other sites on your site via RSS feeds.
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you expand your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts on this site.
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum