No matter what what industry you are a part of, providing high-quality information to your blog readers is important. For example, if your business provides travel-related services, you may want to include useful information from government and foreign travel-related departments, such as news and updates on travel warnings, advice from consulates, etc.
To create and publish this type of information, however, is very time-consuming. You have to sift through, gather, and organize a ton of data, check your sources for accuracy, write and edit content (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 lot of work but most of the information you are dealing with is completely beyond your control.
Thankfully, there is an easier way to keep your site readers up-to-date with your information.
It’s called RSS …
(RSS is one of the easiest ways to provide your readers with up-to-date information)
The Ultimate Guide To WordPress RSS
RSS – What Does It Mean?
- RSS is short for Rich Site Summary, or, as is more commonly referred, Really Simple Syndication. It is also often referred to as a “feed” or “newsfeed”.
- When users subscribe to an RSS feed, they no longer have to manually check the source website for content updates. Instead, their web browser constantly monitors the content and keeps feed subscribers up-to-date.
- RSS feeds are typically used to publish frequently updated information, such as blog entries, news, videos, etc., which other users can then subscribe to.
- RSS feeds can be viewed with programs called feedreaders, or aggregators. Aggregators are used to find new content published on websites and distribute this content (and updates made to the content) online.
- Feeds can be made available in different formats and read by different aggregators. Some of these include RSS feeds, Atom (also called AtomPub or APP feeds and RDF feeds. All of these formats, however, use a standard XML file format to ensure that feeds are compatible with different devices, readers, and programs.
- Many sites and software tools also let you combine different RSS feeds to display news and updates from different sources.
In this detailed article, we will show you where your RSS feed is located, how to syndicate your content online using RSS feeds, and how to display someone else’s content on your site using RSS feeds.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds
Content syndication is a really powerful and legitimate method used for sharing web content. Feeds provide a simple and easy way for online users to receive the latest information posted on different websites and blogs.
First, let’s look at syndication.
News reporting agencies rely on content syndication to publish newsworthy content from content sources around the world.
Content syndication allows most leading news reporting agencies to deliver readers global stories and the latest newsworthy content from around the globe without actually having to post additional news staff all around the world …
(Online newspapers and many leading media publications rely on syndication to publish newsworthy items from other news agencies all around the globe.)
Syndication is used to share information legitimately with other sites. News reporting agencies syndicate their information using news feeds …
(Content syndication is used by global media publications to share content with other publications)
Most websites actually want you to share their content. Syndicating content not only allows information of great value to be shared, but it also drives 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.
Most leading online media publications provide links to an RSS feed section (look for menu links that say “RSS” or “Newsfeeds” in them, or just search for “name of site/keyword + rss” – e.g. “nytimes rss”, “texas tribune rss”, “sydney morning herald rss”, etc.) …
(Leading online newspapers include an RSS feed section. Source: smh.com.au )
Clicking on a site’s RSS feeds section brings up a list of RSS feeds for different content sections of the site …
(RSS feeds list. Image Source: nytimes.com)
Each of these RSS feeds allows you to access content from different areas of the website (e.g. business news, sports news, science news, etc.)
An RSS directory can also contain further feed subdirectories …
(RSS Feed section. Image Source: Los Angeles Times RSS)
Note: A feed is only a URL. To use the feed, all that’s required is to copy the URL and paste it into a program that can process the feed into something readable. We’ll cover this further below.
RSS Feeds – Benefits
Adding someone else’s content to your site has some obvious benefits. It gives someone else’s website additional exposure online and helps you by freeing you up from having to create that content …
(Content Syndication - Benefits)
While adding feeds 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 websites and blogs syndicate your feed, this gives your business the opportunity to get more exposure online and drive more web traffic …
(Get other online users to syndicate content using your RSS feed … it will help drive more traffic to your site!)
WordPress RSS Feed
WordPress automatically publishes a feed of your posts, allowing others to easily syndicate your content on their websites and blogs.
Depending on the theme you have installed, there are a few ways to access your WordPress RSS feed:
1) If your theme allows the Meta widget to be displayed as part of your navigation menu, scroll down to the Meta section and click on Entries RSS …
(Meta widget – Entries RSS)
2) You can also find links and/or buttons on certain WordPress themes that allow your visitors to copy your RSS feed.
In the screenshot below, for example, a visitor can simply copy the site’s RSS feed URL by right-clicking and copying on the Subscribe to RSS link …
(Copy feed links to your clipboard from “subscribe to RSS” buttons)
3) On some websites and again, depending on your WordPress site’s theme, you can find the RSS feed displayed in a Share, Link To Us, or Follow toolbar section …
(Look for an RSS button in a a Social Share, Stay In Touch, or Links toolbar)
4) You can also view your RSS 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 WP site installation is in a subdomain, e.g. “blog”)
Using any of the above methods will bring up your RSS feed page …
(Feed items displayed with Firefox)
Note that your feed page will display differently depending on the browser you are using …
(RSS feed content displayed using a Chrome web browser)
Specify Number Of Items To Display On Your RSS Feed
Specify how many entries you want displayed in your RSS Feed section in the Reading Settings section. Enter the number of items to show in the “Syndication feeds show the most recent” field …
(WP Reading Settings – Syndication items field)
The feed page will show the number of posts as you have specified in your WordPress Reading Settings section …
(The feed page will show the number of items you have specified in the 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 feeds is whether to display each article in a feed as full text, or just a summary …
(Settings – Reading Settings – ’For each article in a feed show’ options)
Post Excerpts can also affect how your feed content displays …
(Post excerpts affect how content in your feeds will display)
If you need help Post excerpts, refer to this step-by-step tutorial:
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 translate feeds into readable content.
Let’s see how this works.
First, go to a website or blog and look for a ‘subscribe’ link or icon …
(Look for a ‘subscribe’ icon or link. Image source: YourCoffeeGuru.com)
Next, copy the feed URL to your clipboard …
(Copy the URL of your feed to the clipboard)
If you want, you can check the feed content by pasting the feed URL into an online feedreader …
(Paste your URL of your feed into a feedreader to view the feed content. Source: http://feedreader.com/online)
Like feed readers, WordPress also has the ability to process XML/RSS feeds.
Adding RSS Feeds To WordPress
Let’s show you how to add content from other sites to yours.
How To Add An RSS Feed To Your WordPress Sidebar
As mentioned earlier, no matter what industry your business is in, you can display on your site the latest content from an industry-related government department or authoritative site in your industry simply by adding content from their feed. You can use RSS feeds to display a range of information on your WordPress site like news, social media updates, or content from thousands of sites using the WordPress RSS widget.
Let’s add RSS content to the WordPress sidebar navigation area …
(Add an RSS feed to your sidebar)
copy the feed URL from a website or blog containing content that you want to display on your sidebar …
(Copy the URL of your feed to the clipboard)
Next, go to your Widgets screen and paste the feed into a new RSS widget …
(RSS Widget)
To learn more about using widgets, go here:
Refresh your web browser. The content from the RSS feed will now display in your sidebar (or wherever the RSS widget has been inserted – e.g. custom menu) …
(RSS Feed Added To Sidebar)
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 Content From RSS Feeds To Your Posts
Can you add content from RSS feeds to posts? Yes, you can!
You can easily do this using plugins. Search inside the Plugins admin section for RSS Post, RSS feed to post, etc.
(’Add Plugins’ search results)
Note: Most RSS plugins typically require configuration – visit the plugin sites for setup instructions, or contact us for assistance configuring plugins.
Here are a few auto blogging plugins for WordPress that allow you to create new with feeds:
WPeMatico
(WPeMatico WordPress Plugin)
WPeMatico is an autoblogging plugin that lets you publish posts automatically from RSS/Atom feeds that you specify.
You can manage all of your imported feeds and arrange them into campaigns and categories.
For more details, go here:
WP RSS Aggregator
(WP RSS Aggregator)
WP RSS Aggregator is a comprehensive RSS feed importer and auto blogging WordPress plugin with additional functionality with premium extensions (add-ons).
For example, the Feed to Post add-on lets you add content to your site automatically by importing RSS feeds directly into your posts.
For more details, go here:
RSS Post Importer
(RSS Post Importer – WordPress Plugin)
The RSS Post Importer plugin allows you to curate, syndicate, import, merge and display full text RSS feeds on your WordPress site.
RSS Post Importer fetches an RSS feed and publishes the full article content of each item in the feed as a separate post.
For more details, go here:
Powr RSS Feed
(Powr RSS Feed WP Plugin)
With POWr RSS, you can automatically combine and display content from various RSS feeds.
The POWr RSS Feed plugin also lets you display images, videos, and articles, adjust sizing and spacing of feeds, use custom borders, fonts, colors, and more. It is also mobile responsive and supports text in all languages.
The premium version contains a number of additional features, such as the ability to display different feeds, accept or reject posts, and more.
For more details, go here:
WP Pipes
(WP Pipes)
WP Pipes is a powerful data migration plugin that allows you to create curate content from RSS feeds, Google News, and many other sources.
This plugin provides functionality like CSV importing for posts/WooCommerce, RSS feed creator, auto blogging, auto post to Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn, export your posts as podcasts, create Google XML sitemaps, and more!
For more details, go here:
FeedWordPress
(FeedWordPress Plugin For WordPress)
FeedWordPress is a simple and flexible Atom/RSS syndication plugin for WordPress site-generated 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.
You can use this plugin to create aggregator site (sites that combine and display posts from many different sources), or bring together all your online activity (e.g. from your blog, Twitter, YouTube, or other online services, into a Lifestream.
For more details, go here:
Autoblog
(Autoblog Plugin)
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 the URL of your feed, name your feed (for admin purposes) and select a blog that you want it to post to.
For more details, go here:
RSS Includes Pages
(RSS Includes Pages Plugin)
The RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types plugin lets you display pages in your RSS feed in addition to posts.
For more details, go here:
Useful Tips
Tip #1 – Comment RSS Feeds
In addition to making RSS feeds of your latest posts available, WordPress also makes available RSS feeds of your latest post comments.
To see your comments feed, locate the ‘Meta’ section on your sidebar (note: your theme may not be configured to display this widget) and click on Comments RSS …
(WordPress Comments RSS)
All the comments posted on your site by visitors and users will appear in your Comments RSS page …
(Comments feed items viewed on a Firefox browser)
Like post entries, your comments feed content will display differently depending on the web browser you use …
(Comments feed items as seen with a Google Chrome web browser)
Again, you can check the feed content by pasting the feed URL into an online feed reader …
(Paste your URL of your comments feed into a feedreader to view the feed content. Image: http://feedreader.com/online)
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 – Single Post Feeds
Being able to select an RSS feed for individual posts 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 specific post item is shown below:
(Feed For Individual Post)
To create the above feed, copy the post URL, 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 URI, WordPress will return the comments made on that post, not the content of the post itself.
Tip #3 – Displaying Post Category Feeds
Some your site visitors may only be interested in subscribing to content from specific categories. They may not want to subscribe to all of your site’s content.
WordPress allows you to create separate category feeds.
All you need to do is use the format shown below:
(Use this format for WP post categories RSS feed)
Select and copy the category URL to your clipboard …
(Copy the selected category link address …)
Append the word “feed” to the end of it …
(RSS feed format for post categories)
Your feed now only displays content posted for this 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 – Set Up A Page Of RSS Feeds
You can publish your own list of feeds on your site that allows your readers to subscribe only to specific categories …
(Create A Feeds Page)
Link an icon to category feed URLs and then create a table or a list of your feeds on a separate page …
(RSS image. Image Source: public-domain-photos.com)
For a detailed tutorial about inserting tables into WordPress pages and posts, go here:
RSS – Notes
You can customize RSS in various different ways, such as adding images and videos to feeds, ads, etc. Some of these customizations require code editing skills.
WordPress allows you to configure different feed types that do not require messing with code. Here are some examples of feed types you can use …
(Different Feed Types You Can Create Using WordPress RSS)
For your convenience, here are the feed types, descriptions, and feed examples listed in the table above:
- Feed Type: All Posts
- Description: Content feed – RSS feed that displays your latest entries
- 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 individual post entries
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/blog-post-title/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts Comments
- Description: RSS Feed that contains the latest comments made on a single post entry
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/blog-post-title/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Day – Includes the latest posts in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2011/05/18/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Month – Includes the latest post entries in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2012/10/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Year – Displays the latest items in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2010/feed/
- Feed Type: Search Results
- Description: RSS feed displaying latest entries for a search query
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/search/term/feed/
- Feed Type: Custom Post Type
- Description: Contains latest posts for a custom type (e.g. book)
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/?post_type=book
One last thing …
Remember to promote your RSS feed. Make sure you place a ’subscribe to RSS’ button or link somewhere visible …
(Promote your RSS feeds!)
Finally, keep in mind that other sites will only subscribe to your content if you provide your visitors with very high-quality content that will add great value to their sites and benefit their users.
(Add someone else’s content and get others to share your content using RSS!)
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 Resources:
- Download RSS Feed Icons – Visit a site like Iconspedia or search online (e.g. “free rss icons”, “RSS buttons”, etc.) for sites that contain downloadable Free RSS graphics.
- RSSBoard.org – The RSS Advisory Board provides useful information and resources about RSS.
- Wikipedia.org/RSS – Learn more about the history and benefits of using RSS feeds.
- WordPress.org – Official WordPress documentation site. Visit this site for additional information about WordPress feeds.
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 add someone else’s content to your site using RSS.
Hopefully, you now 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 web site please see our related posts section.
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)