No matter what your business provides or what industry you belong to, providing high-quality information to your blog readers is vitally important. For example, if you provide accounting or financial planning services, it’s not a bad idea to provide users with useful information from the taxation office, such as news and updates on tax rulings, small business tax deductions, etc.
To create and publish this type of information, however, is very time-consuming. You have to do a ton of data gathering, researching and organizing, checking sources for accuracy, writing and editing 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 not only involves a lot of work but most of the information you are dealing with is beyond your control.
Fortunately, there is a simpler way to keep your site readers up-to-date with great information.
It’s called RSS …
(RSS - The easiest way to provide your users with great information)
The Ultimate Guide To WordPress RSS
RSS – What Is It?
- RSS, which, according to some stands for Rich Site Summary, is more commonly referred to now as Really Simple Syndication. It is often called a “feed” or “newsfeed”.
- When a user subscribes to an RSS feed, they no longer have to physically check the website for updated content. Instead, their browser constantly monitors the site and keeps subscribers updated.
- Feeds are often used to publish information that is frequently updated, such as new blog posts, news, video playlists, etc., to which users can choose to subscribe.
- Essentially, an RSS feed is an XML document that includes either full or summarized text along with metadata such as published date, author, etc. It allows people to subscribe to content on websites and then browse updates posted on these sites using a feedreader. Conversely, RSS feeds also enable publishers to syndicate their web content automatically.
- There are different feed formats and these can be 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 machines, feed readers, and programs.
- Many sites and software applications also allow you to combine multiple RSS feeds to display news and updates from multiple sources.
In this in-depth guide, we will explain where to find your WordPress RSS feed, how to use your WordPress RSS feed to get your content syndicated online, and how to display content from other websites on your site via RSS feeds.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds
Content syndication is a powerful (and legitimate) way to share web content. RSS Feeds provide online users with an easy way to stay up-to-date with the latest information posted on sites they are interested in.
First, let’s look at syndication.
News reporting agencies rely on syndication to publish content from news sources around the world.
Content syndication allows many digital news agencies and many popular media publications to deliver readers the latest news headlines and content from all around the globe without having to post additional news writers everywhere in the world …
(Global media publications rely on content syndication to publish newsworthy stories from news sources all around the world.)
Syndication is used to share content legitimately. Online newspapers syndicate newsworthy content using feeds …
(Content syndication is a legitimate way of sharing content)
Most sites actually would like you to syndicate their content. Syndicating content not only allows high-quality information to be shared, but it can also drive visitors back to the site that originally created theoriginally created and published the content being syndicated. This provides websites with new opportunities to generate additional web traffic.
Many online newspapers and leading online media publications include a feed section (look for links in the navigation menu that say ”RSS”, “Syndication”, or “Newsfeeds” in them, or just search for “name of site/keyword + rss” – e.g. “nytimes rss”, “express tribune rss”, “sydney morning herald rss”, etc.) …
(Most online newspapers and major sites have 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 content areas of the site …
(RSS directory. Source: NY Times)
Each of these feeds lets readers access content from different sections of the website (e.g. business news, arts news, jobs, etc.)
Feed sections can also include feed subdirectories …
(Feed sections can also include subcategory feeds. Source: latimes.com)
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 translate the feed into something readable. We’ll cover this further below.
The Benefits Of Using Feeds
Syndicating content from someone else’s website on your site has some obvious benefits. It not only gives someone else’s business additional exposure online, it also helps you by freeing you up from having to create the content …
(Content Syndication Benefits Someone Else’s Business And Yours!)
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 worth keeping in mind that you also want other websites to use your content.
When other sites syndicate your RSS feed, this gives your business the opportunity to get more exposure online and drive more visitors …
(Get other websites to syndicate your feed … it will help increase your exposure online!)
WordPress RSS Feed – About
By default, WordPress automatically publishes a feed of your posts, allowing others to easily syndicate your content on their websites.
Depending on your WordPress site’s theme, there are a number of ways to get your RSS feed:
1) If your theme displays the Meta widget in a navigation menu …
(The feed 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
Another setting in your Reading Settings section that affects your RSS feed is whether to display posts as full text, or as a summary …
(Reading Settings – ’For each article in a feed show’ options)
Post Excerpts can also affect how your feed content appears …
(Post excerpts can affect how content in feeds appear)
We have written a detailed tutorial about WordPress Post excerpts here:
View The Content Of Your RSS Feeds
As mentioned earlier, all you have to do to view the content of an RSS feed is to copy the feed’s URL to your clipboard and paste it into a feedreader, i.e. an application that translates feeds into readable content for humans.
Let’s take a look at how this works.
First, find a website whose feed you want to syndicate and look for an RSS feed link using any of the methods described earlier …
(Search for a ‘subscribe’ button or link. Image source: http://www.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 what the feed contains by pasting the URL of your feed into an online feed reader …
(Paste your feed URL into a feedreader to view the content. Source: http://feedreader.com/online)
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 WordPress
Let’s show you how to add content from other sites to your WordPress site.
Adding An RSS Feed To Your Sidebar
As mentioned earlier, no matter what industry you are in, you could easily add to your site the latest content from an industry-related government department or authoritative site in your industry simply by importing content from their RSS feed. You can easily 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 content from an RSS feed to the WordPress sidebar area …
(Add content from an RSS feed to your sidebar)
First, find a website containing content that you want to add to your sidebar and copy its RSS feed to your clipboard …
(Copy the URL of your feed to the clipboard)
Next, go to Appearance > Widgets and paste the feed into an RSS widget …
(Widgets Screen – RSS Widget)
To learn more about adding content to sidebars using widgets, go here:
Refresh your web browser. The content from the RSS feed will now appear on the sidebar (or wherever you have added the RSS widget – e.g. custom menu, footer, etc) …
(RSS Feed Content Added To 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:
Adding Feeds To Posts
Can content from an RSS feed be added to a post? Yes, it can!
You can do this using WordPress plugins. Search inside your Plugins admin section for RSS feed, RSS feed to post, etc.
(’Add Plugins’ section)
Note: These plugins typically require configuration – visit the plugin sites for setup instructions, or contact us if you need assistance configuring plugins.
Here are a number of autoblogging plugins that allow you to automatically add posts with feeds and imported content:
WPeMatico
(WPeMatico – WordPress 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 organize feeds into campaigns and categories.
For more details, go here:
WP RSS Aggregator
(WP RSS Aggregator WordPress Plugin)
WP RSS Aggregator is a comprehensive RSS feed importer and autoblogging plugin for WordPress that offers a number of premium add-ons for additional functionality.
For example, the Feed to Post add-on for the WP RSS Aggregator plugin is a feature-filled importer that lets you import RSS feeds directly into posts.
For more details, go here:
RSS Post Importer
(RSS Post Importer – WordPress Plugin)
The RSS Post Importer plugin lets you syndicate, import, curate, merge and display full text feeds (RSS, Atom, etc.) on your WordPress blog.
RSS Post Importer fetches an RSS feed and publishes the full article content of each feed item as a standalone post.
For more details, go here:
Powr RSS Feed
(Powr RSS Feed Plugin)
With the POWr RSS Feed plugin, you can automatically combine and display content from various content using RSS feeds.
The POWr RSS plugin also lets you display videos, images, and article content, adjust the priority of different feeds, use custom fonts, colors, backgrounds, and more. It also has mobile-responsive design and supports text in any language.
The premium plugin edition contains many additional features.
For more details, go here:
WP Pipes
(WP Pipes Plugin For WordPress)
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 Twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook, export your posts as iTunes podcasts, create Google XML sitemaps, and help take your WordPress CMS to new levels.
For more details, go here:
FeedWordPress
(FeedWordPress Plugin)
FeedWordPress provides flexible syndication for WordPress.
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 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:
Autoblog
(Autoblog by WPMUDev)
Autoblog is an easy-to-use plugin that can be set-up in minutes, without coding skills or complicated instructions. Just copy and paste in the URL of your feed, give the feed a name (for admin purposes) and select the blog to post content to.
For more details, go here:
RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types
(RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types Plugin For WordPress)
The RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types plugin modifies RSS feeds to include pages and not just posts.
For more details, go here:
Useful Tips
Tip #1 – WordPress Comment RSS Feeds
In addition to displaying RSS feeds of your latest posts, WordPress also makes available RSS feeds of the latest comments posted on your site.
You can view this feed by clicking on Comments RSS in the ‘Meta’ section of your sidebar (note: your theme may not be configured to display this widget) …
(WordPress Comments RSS)
Comments posted on your site by visitors and users will appear in your Comments RSS page …
(RSS comments feed content as seen using Firefox)
Like post entries, your comments feed page will display differently depending on which web browser you are using …
(Comments feed entries displayed on Google Chrome)
Again, you can check the feed content by pasting the feed URL into an online feed reader …
(Paste your feed URL into a feed reader to view the content. Image 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 subfolder, e.g. “blog”)
Tip #2 – Displaying Feeds For Specific Post Items
Being able to access an RSS feed for single posts 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 an individual post is shown below:
(RSS Feed For Individual Post)
To create the above feed, copy the URL 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 your post, WordPress will return the comments left on that post, not the content of the post itself.
Tip #3 – Displaying Category Feeds
Some your site users may only want to syndicate content from one or two post categories. They may not want to subscribe to all of your site’s content.
If your site publishes content under multiple categories, WordPress allows you to provide a separate feed for each of your categories.
Just use the format shown below:
(WP RSS feed format for post categories)
Select and copy the category link address to your clipboard …
(Select and copy your category link address …)
Now, append the word “feed” to the end of it …
(Use this format for WP category feed)
Your RSS feed now only contains content specific to this 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 – Provide A Directory Of Feeds On Your Site
You can create a directory of RSS feeds that allows your readers to subscribe only to specific content …
(Set Up An RSS Feeds Page)
All you need to do is link an RSS button graphic to a category feed and then create a table or a list of all category feeds on a separate page …
(RSS icon. Image Source: public-domain-photos.com)
For a detailed step-by-step tutorial about adding tables to WordPress posts, go here:
RSS Feeds – Additional Notes
RSS feeds can be customized in several ways, such as adding videos and images to feeds, ads, etc. Some of these feed customizations require code editing skills.
WordPress allows a number of feed configurations that do not require editing code. Here are some examples of feeds you can display …
(Different Feed Types You Can Create Using WordPress RSS)
For your convenience, here are the feed types, descriptions, and feed examples listed above:
- Feed Type: All Posts
- Description: Content feed – displays your latest entries
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/
- Feed Type: All Comments
- Description: Comments feed – Includes the latest comments posted on your website
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/comments/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts
- Description: Feed that includes a single post
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/title-of-your-blog-post/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts Comments
- Description: Feed that contains the latest comments made on a post entry
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/blog-post-title/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Day – Displays the latest post entries in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2011/12/22/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Month – Displays latest post entries in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2012/10/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Year – Includes the latest items in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2015/feed/
- Feed Type: Search Results
- Description: Contains latest post entries for a search query
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/search/term/feed/
- Feed Type: Custom Post Type
- Description: Includes latest items for a custom type (e.g. book)
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/?post_type=book
One more thing …
It’s a good idea to promote your RSS feeds. Make sure you place your subscribe links somewhere visible …
(Promote your RSS feeds!)
Keep in mind that online users will only want to subscribe to your content if you provide your visitors with very high-quality content that can add value to their sites and benefit their visitors.
(Add great content from other sites and get other users to subscribe to your content using RSS feeds!)
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 🙂
RSS – Additional Resources:
- Download RSS Buttons – Visit an online resource site like FeedIcons or search online (e.g. “free RSS icons”, “RSS logo”, etc.) for sites containing downloadable Free RSS graphics.
- RSSBoard.org – The RSS Advisory Board provides useful information about RSS.
- Wikipedia/RSS – Learn more about using RSS feeds.
- WordPress Codex: RSS Feeds – Official WordPress documentation and reference. Go here to learn more about using feeds in WordPress.
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 their RSS feed.
Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using the WordPress CMS platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)