No matter what product or service you provide, providing high-quality information on your site or blog is important. For example, if you provide health-related services, it’s a good idea to include information from the health department, such as news or updates on medical research, health and fitness tips, etc.
The problem with providing this kind of information, however, is that it is very time-consuming. You have to do a lot of data gathering, researching and organizing, checking your sources for accuracy, 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 not only involves a huge amount of work but most of the information you are dealing with is entirely beyond your control.
Thankfully, there is an easier way to continually provide your site visitors with great information.
It’s called RSS …
(RSS - The simplest way to provide your blog subscribers with up-to-date information)
The Ultimate Guide To WordPress RSS
Some Basic Information About RSS
- RSS, which, according to some experts stands for RDF Site Summary, is more commonly known now as Really Simple Syndication. It it is also called a “feed” or “web feed”.
- After a user subscribes to an RSS feed, they no longer have to manually visit and check the website for content updates. Instead, their web browser will constantly monitor the site and automatically keep subscribers updated.
- RSS feeds are also used to publish frequently updated information, such as blog entries, news headlines, audios, etc., to which any user can then subscribe.
- Essentially, an RSS feed is a structured XML (Extensible Markup Language) document that includes full or summarized text along with metadata such as date of publishing, author, etc. It allows people to subscribe to content on websites and then view any updates posted on these sites using a feedreader. Conversely, RSS feeds also enable publishers to automatically syndicate web content.
- Feeds can be made available in different types and read by different feedreaders. Some of these include RSS feeds, Atom feeds and RDF feeds. All of these formats, however, use a standard XML file format to ensure that feeds are compatible with different devices, feed readers, and programs.
- Many sites and software tools also allow you to combine multiple RSS feeds to aggregate news and updates sourced from different websites.
In this comprehensive guide, you are going to learn 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 using RSS.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds
Content syndication is a really powerful (and legitimate) way of sharing web content. Feeds provide web users with an easy way to receive the latest information posted on websites they are interested in.
First, let’s look at content syndication.
Media publications rely on content syndication to publish stories from other news agencies all around the world.
Content syndication allows most news reporting agencies to deliver readers interesting stories and up-to-the-minute newsworthy content from all around the planet without having to send more news reporting departments all around the world …
(Media publications use syndication to publish content from news sources all around the world.)
Syndication is used to share content legitimately. Online newspapers syndicate their newsworthy content using feeds …
(Content syndication is used by digital content agencies to share newsworthy content with other 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 provides websites with additional opportunities to generate new web visitors.
Major content sites have an RSS feed section (look for navigation links that say ”RSS”, “Syndication”, or “Newsfeeds” in them, or just search for “name of site/keyword + rss” – e.g. “nytimes rss”, “la times rss”, “sydney morning herald rss”, etc.) …
(Many news reporting agencies and major content sites have an RSS feed section. Image: SMH )
Clicking on a site’s RSS feeds link brings up a list of different RSS feed sections of the site …
(RSS directory. Image Source: nytimes.com)
gives you access to information from different areas of the website (e.g. technology news, entertainment news, lifestyle magazine, etc.)
An RSS directory can also include further subcategory feeds …
(RSS Feed section. Image: latimes.com feeds)
Note: A feed is just a URL. All you need to do to use RSS feeds is copy the URLs and paste these into an application that can process the feed code into something readable. We’ll cover this further below.
The Benefits Of Using Feeds
Syndicating someone else’s content on your site has some obvious benefits. It not only helps someone else’s site, it also helps you by freeing you up from having to create this content …
(Syndicating Content Has Many Benefits!)
While adding a feed 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 websites to use YOUR content.
When other websites syndicate content using your RSS feed, this gives your business the opportunity to gain more exposure online and drive new visitors …
(Try to get other websites to syndicate your feed … it will help to increase your traffic!)
WordPress Feed – Overview
WordPress automatically publishes a feed of your posts, allowing other online users to syndicate your content on their websites and blogs.
Depending on your WordPress theme, there are a few ways to access your RSS feed:
1) If your theme allows the Meta widget to be displayed on the sidebar, scroll down to the Meta section and click on Entries RSS …
(Access your WordPress RSS feed in the Entries RSS menu)
2) You can also find built-in links and/or buttons on certain WordPress themes that allow your visitors to copy your RSS feed.
For example, in the screenshot below, a visitor can copy the feed URL by clicking on on the Subscribe to RSS link …
(Copy feed links to your clipboard from “subscribe” buttons)
3) On some sites and again, depending on your WordPress site’s theme, you can find the RSS feed displayed in a Link To Us, Subscribe, or Social Share section …
(Look for an RSS button in a a Follow Us, Links, or Social Share toolbar)
4) You can also view your RSS feed by typing your site’s URL into a web browser and adding “/feed” after the URL, e.g.:
- http://www.yourdomain.com/feed
- http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/feed (if your website is located in a subfolder, e.g. “blog”)
Using any of the above methods will bring up your site’s feed page …
(Feed items displayed with a Firefox browser)
Note that your feed items will display differently depending on the browser you use …
(RSS feed entries displayed on Google Chrome)
Specify Number Of Items To Display On Your RSS Feed
Specify how many items you would like to display in your Feeds section in the Reading Settings section. Select the number of items to show in the “Syndication feeds show the most recent” field …
(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings – Number of syndication feed items)
Your feed page will display the number of items you have specified section …
(Your feed page will display as many recent items you have specified in your Reading Settings section)
Display Full Text Or Summary Of Posts In Your RSS Feed
The other setting in your Reading Settings section that affects your RSS feed is whether to display each article as full text, or as a summary …
(WP Settings – Reading Settings – Show ‘Full Text’ or ‘Summary’ for articles in a feed)
Post Excerpts can also affect how your feed content appears …
(Post excerpts can affect how your feed content appears)
We have written a detailed tutorial about using excerpts in WordPress Posts here:
View The Content Of Your RSS Feeds
As mentioned previously, all that’s required to view the content of a feed is to copy the feed’s URL to your clipboard and paste it into an application that can translate feeds into readable content for humans.
Let’s show you how this works.
First, find a website or blog and search for their RSS feed section 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 your feed URL)
If you want, you can check the feed content by pasting the URL of your feed into an online feedreader …
(Paste the URL of your feed into a feed reader to view the content. Image: Feedreader)
Like feed readers, WordPress has the ability to process XML/RSS feeds.
Adding RSS Feeds To Your Site
Let’s show you how to add content from other website’s RSS feeds to your WordPress site.
How To Add Feeds To Your Sidebar
As mentioned earlier, no matter what industry you are part of, you could display on your site the latest updates from an industry-related government department or authoritative site in your industry by simply adding content from their RSS feed. You can use feeds to display a range of information on your WordPress site such as news, social media 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 menu)
copy the RSS feed from a website or blog containing content that you want to add to your site …
(Copy your feed URL to your clipboard)
Next, go to your Widgets area and paste the feed into an RSS widget …
(WordPress RSS Widget)
To learn more about using sidebar widgets, go here:
Load your site in your web browser. The content can now be seen on your sidebar (or wherever you have inserted the RSS widget) …
(RSS Feed Content Added To WP 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 Content From RSS Feeds To Your WordPress 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 inside your Plugins screen (Plugins > Add New) for RSS, RSS feed to post, etc.
(‘Add Plugins’ screen – RSS plugins for WordPress)
Note: These plugins typically require configuration – visit the plugin sites for complete instructions, or contact us if you need help with plugin configuration.
Here are a few plugins that allow you to add RSS feeds to your pages and posts:
WPeMatico
(WPeMatico – WordPress Plugin)
WPeMatico is an autoblogging plugin that allows you to publish posts automatically from RSS/Atom feeds that you choose.
You can manage all the feeds you import and arrange them into categories.
For more details, go here:
WP RSS Aggregator
(WP RSS Aggregator Plugin)
WP RSS Aggregator is an RSS feed importer and auto blogging plugin for WordPress with a number of premium add-ons for additional functionality.
For example, the Feed to Post extension for the WP RSS Aggregator plugin lets you import RSS feeds directly into your WP posts.
For more details, go here:
RSS Post Importer
(RSS Post Importer WP Plugin)
The RSS Post Importer plugin allows you to curate, syndicate, import, merge and display full text feeds on your WordPress website or blog.
The plugin fetches an RSS feed and publishes the full article content of each feed item as a separate post.
For more details, go here:
Powr RSS Feed
(Powr RSS Feed – WordPress Plugin)
With the POWr RSS Feed plugin, you can combine and display content from multiple RSS feeds.
The plugin also lets you display videos, images, and articles, adjust feed size and spacing, use custom fonts, colors, backgrounds, and more. It also displays feeds correctly on all computers, phones, and tablets and supports text in every language.
The premium version of POWr contains a number of additional features.
For more details, go here:
WP Pipes
(WP Pipes WordPress Plugin)
The WP Pipes plugin for WordPress is a powerful data migration plugin that allows you to 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, autoblogging, auto post to Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn, export your posts as iTunes podcasts, create Google XML sitemaps, and more!
For more details, go here:
FeedWordPress
(FeedWordPress)
FeedWordPress provides simple and flexible Atom/RSS 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 combine and display posts from various different sources), or display all of your online activity (e.g. from your blog, Facebook, Flickr, or other online services, in one place.
For more details, go here:
Autoblog by WPMUDev
(Autoblog by WPMUDev)
Autoblog is an easy-to-use plugin that can be set-up very quickly, without coding skills or complicated instructions. Just copy and paste in your feed URL, 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 WordPress Plugin)
Install RSS Includes Pages if you would like to include pages in your WordPress RSS feed and not just posts (by default WordPress only includes posts in your RSS feed).
For more details, go here:
Useful Tips
Tip #1 – WordPress Comment RSS Feeds
WordPress displays RSS feeds of your post comments in addition to making RSS feeds of your latest posts available to online users.
You can see this feed by clicking on Comments RSS in the ‘Meta’ section of your sidebar menu …
(Comments RSS)
All the comments posted on your site by visitors and users display in your Comments RSS page …
(RSS comments feed items as seen on a Firefox web browser)
Like post entries, your comments feed items will display differently depending on the browser you use …
(Comments feed entries as seen with Google Chrome)
Again, you can check the feed content by pasting the feed URL into an online feedreader …
(Paste your URL of your comments feed 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 is located in a subdomain, e.g. “blog”)
Tip #2 – Single Post Feeds
Being able to use an RSS feed for specific post items 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 creating an RSS feed for individual post items is shown below:
(Specific Post RSS Feed)
To create the above feed, copy the post URI, and append “/feed/?withoutcomments=1” to the end.
(Single Post Feed)
Note: By default, if you only add “/feed” to the end of the post URI, WordPress will return the comments associated with that post, not the post content itself.
Tip #3 – Using Category RSS Feeds
Some your site visitors 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 easily create separate category feeds.
Just use the format shown below:
(Format for WP category RSS feed)
Select and copy the category link address …
(Copy the category link address to your clipboard …)
Now, add “feed” to the end of it …
(Format for WordPress category feed)
Your category feed will now only include content posted for this particular 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 A Feeds Directory
You can publish a list of RSS feeds on your site that allows your readers to subscribe only to content in the categories they are interested in, just like the larger websites do …
(Provide Your Own List Of Feeds)
You can link a button icon to a feed and then create a table or a list of all your feeds on a new page …
(RSS icon. Image Source: http://www.public-domain-photos.com/free-cliparts/computer/other/rss_button_roman_bertle_01-2522.htm)
We have written a detailed tutorial about inserting tables into WordPress pages and posts here:
RSS – Notes
Feeds can be customized in various different ways, such as adding images and videos to feeds, ads, etc. Some of these feed customizations require editing code.
WordPress allows you to configure different feed types without editing code. Here are some examples of feed types you can use …
(Different Feed Formats You Can Create Using WordPress RSS)
For your convenience, here are the different feed types, descriptions, and feed examples shown in the diagram above:
- Feed Type: All Posts
- Description: Content feed – contains your latest post entries
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/
- Feed Type: All Comments
- Description: Comments feed – Displays the latest comments left on your website or blog
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/comments/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts
- Description: Feed for individual posts
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/blog-post-title/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts Comments
- Description: Contains the latest comments made on single items
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/post-title/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Day – Contains the latest posts in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2016/07/06/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Month – RSS feed containing the latest entries in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2012/04/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Year – Includes the latest items in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2012/feed/
- Feed Type: Search Results
- Description: Includes latest posts for a search query
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/search/term/feed/
- Feed Type: Custom Post Type
- Description: Displays the 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. Make sure you place a ’subscribe to RSS’ link or button somewhere visible …
(Encourage visitors to syndicate your RSS feeds!)
Finally, keep in mind that online users will only want to syndicate your content if you provide your visitors with high-quality information that can add great value to their sites and benefit their users.
(Add great content from other sites and get other users to share your content online using WordPress and 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 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 provides useful information and resources about RSS.
- Wikipedia/RSS – General information about the benefits of using RSS.
- WordPress Codex: WordPress Feeds – Official WordPress documentation and information. Visit this site to learn more about WordPress RSS.
Congratulations! Now you know where to find your WordPress RSS feed, how to syndicate your content online using RSS, and how to add content from other sites to your site using RSS.
Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To read more about using WordPress for a business web site please see other great articles and tutorials on this site.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now