No matter what service or product you sell or what industry your business belongs to, you need to provide high-quality information to your site or blog visitors. For example, if you provide accounting services, it’s not a bad idea to provide users with the latest information from the taxation office, such as news and updates on tax rulings, small business tax deductions, etc.
The problem with providing this type of information, however, is that it is very time-consuming. You have to filter through, research, 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 continually make sure that this information is 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.
Fortunately, there is an easier way to provide your users with up-to-date information.
It’s called RSS …
(RSS is one of the simplest ways to provide your readers with great information)
The Ultimate Guide To WordPress RSS
RSS – A Basic Overview
- RSS, which, according to some experts stands for RDF Site Summary, is more commonly referred to as Really Simple Syndication. It is also often referred to as a “feed” or “web feed”.
- Once users subscribe to a website’s feed, they no longer have to physically visit and check the website for updated content. Instead, their web browser will constantly monitor the content and automatically keep subscribers up-to-date.
- RSS feeds are also used to publish frequently updated information, such as new blog posts, news, video lists, etc., which other users can choose to subscribe to.
- You can view RSS feeds using a software called a feedreader, or feed aggregator. Feedreaders are used to find content on all different kinds of topics and distribute this content (and updates made to the content) to online properties.
- There are different feed formats and these can be read by different feed readers. Some of these include RSS feeds, Atom feeds and RDF (RDF = Resource Description Framework) feeds. All of these formats, however, use a standard XML file format to ensure compatibility with different devices and programs.
- Many sites and software tools also let you combine multiple RSS feeds to receive news and updates from various sources.
In this detailed 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 add content from other websites and blogs to your site using RSS feeds.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds
Content syndication is a very powerful and legitimate method used for sharing content online. Feeds provide web users with an easy way to keep up with the latest information posted on different websites.
First, let’s take a look at how content syndication is used.
Online media publications rely on syndication to publish content from content sources around the world.
Syndication allows many content publishing agencies and many highly-visited media publications to deliver readers the latest news and stories of general interest from all around the globe without having to set up more news writers everywhere around the world …
(Media publications use syndication to publish news and stories from other news agencies around the world.)
Syndication is a legitimate method of sharing information with other sites. online media publications syndicate newsworthy content using news feeds …
(Content syndication is a legitimate method of sharing content)
Most sites actually want you to share their information. Syndicating content not only allows information to be shared, but it can also drive visitors back to the original site responsible for publishing the content being syndicated. This provides websites with new opportunities to generate additional web traffic.
Major content sites include an RSS feed section (look for menu links that say ”RSS”, “Syndication”, or “Newsfeeds” in them, or just search for “name of site/keyword + rss” – e.g. “nytimes rss”, “chicago tribune rss”, “sydney morning herald rss”, etc.) …
(Most digital content publishing agencies and major sites include a feed section. Source: smh.com.au )
Clicking on a site’s RSS links section will bring up a directory of RSS feeds for different content sections of the site …
(RSS Feeds. Image Source: nytimes.com RSS feeds)
These feed items let readers access content from different areas of the website (e.g. business news, arts news, editorials, etc.)
Feed sections can also contain further subcategory feeds …
(Feed sections can also contain subcategory feeds. Image: latimes.com feeds)
Note: An RSS feed is just a URL. All that’s required to use a feed is copy the URL and paste it 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 helps someone else’s website and helps you by freeing you up from having to create that content …
(The Benefits Of Syndicating Content)
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 sites to use your content.
When other websites syndicate content using your feed, this gives you the opportunity to get more exposure online and drive new web traffic …
(Try to get users to syndicate content using your feed … it will help increase your exposure online!)
WordPress Feed – About
WordPress automatically publishes a feed of your posts, allowing other online users to easily syndicate your content on their websites and blogs.
Depending on your WP theme, there are a few ways to access your WordPress RSS feed:
1) If your theme has been configured to display the Meta widget on your sidebar or footer …
(The feed will show the number of posts as you have specified in your WordPress Reading Settings section)
Display Full Text Or Summary Of Posts In Your RSS Feed
Another setting in your WordPress Reading Settings section that affects your feeds is whether to display each article as full text, or as a summary …
(WordPress Reading Settings – ’For each article in a feed show’: ‘Full text’ or ‘Summary’)
Post Excerpts can also affect how the content in your feed appears …
(Post excerpts affect how content in your feeds will display)
We have written a detailed tutorial about WordPress Post excerpts here:
View The Content Of Your RSS Feeds
As mentioned earlier, to view a feed’s content, you need to copy the feed’s URL and paste it into an application that can translate feeds into readable content for humans.
Let’s see how this works.
First, go to a website or blog and look for a ‘subscribe’ link or icon using any of the methods described earlier …
(Look for an RSS feed link. Image source: YourCoffeeGuru.com)
Next, copy the feed URL to your clipboard …
(Copy the feed URL to your clipboard)
If you want, you can check what the RSS feed contains by pasting the URL of the feed into a feedreader …
(Paste your feed URL into a feedreader to view the content. Image Source: http://feedreader.com/online)
Like feed readers, WordPress also has the ability to process RSS/XML feeds.
How To Add A Feed To WordPress Sites
In the example below, we are going to add content from other sites to yours.
How To Add Feeds To Your WordPress Sidebar
As mentioned earlier, no matter what industry your business is in, you could 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 use feeds to display a range of information on your WordPress site such as news, Facebook updates, or content from thousands of sites using the WordPress RSS widget.
Let’s add RSS content to the WordPress sidebar navigation area …
(Add content from an RSS feed to the WordPress sidebar navigation area)
First, go to a site that publishes content that you would like to add to your sidebar and copy its RSS feed URL to your clipboard …
(Copy the URL of your feed to your clipboard)
Next, paste the feed into a new RSS widget …
(WP RSS Widget)
To learn more about using sidebar widgets, go here:
Refresh your web browser. The content will now display on your sidebar (or wherever the RSS widget has been inserted – e.g. custom menu, footer, etc) …
(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:
How To Add Feeds To Your Posts
Can content from an RSS feed be added to posts? Yes, it can!
You can do this using WordPress plugins. Search inside your Plugins screen (Plugins > Add New) for RSS feed, RSS feed to post, etc.
(’Add Plugins’ search results)
Note: These plugins typically require configuration – visit the plugin sites for complete instructions, or contact us for assistance configuring plugins.
Here are some autoblogging plugins for WordPress that allow you to automatically add posts using RSS feeds:
WPeMatico
(WPeMatico – WordPress Plugin)
WPeMatico is an auto blogging plugin that allows you to publish posts automatically from selected RSS/Atom feeds.
You can manage all of your imported feeds and organize feeds according to campaigns and categories.
For more details, go here:
WP RSS Aggregator
(WP RSS Aggregator Plugin For WordPress)
WP RSS Aggregator is a comprehensive RSS feed importer and auto blogging WordPress plugin that offers premium add-ons for extended functionality.
For example, the Feed to Post extension lets you import RSS feeds directly into posts.
For more details, go here:
RSS Post Importer
(RSS Post Importer Plugin For WordPress)
The RSS Post Importer plugin allows you to import, syndicate, curate, merge and display full-text feeds (RSS, Atom, etc.) on your WordPress 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 Plugin For WordPress)
With the POWr RSS Feed plugin, you can combine and display content from a number of different sources using RSS feeds.
The plugin also lets you display images, videos, and articles, adjust the priority of different feeds, use custom colors, fonts, borders, and more. It also displays feeds correctly on any tablet, phone, or computer and supports text in all languages.
The premium version of POWr contains a number of additional features.
For more details, go here:
WP Pipes
(WP Pipes Plugin For WordPress)
WP Pipes is a powerful data migration plugin that lets you curate content from RSS feeds, Google News, and other sources.
This plugin provides features like CSV importing for posts/WooCommerce, RSS feed creator, auto blogging, auto post to Twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook, export WordPress posts as iTunes podcasts, create Google XML sitemaps, and help take your WordPress CMS to new levels.
For more details, go here:
FeedWordPress
(FeedWordPress – WordPress Plugin)
FeedWordPress is a flexible syndication plugin for WordPress.
As stated in the FeedWordPress website …
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 display all of your online activity (e.g. from your blog, LinkedIn, Flickr, 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. Simply 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
(RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types WP Plugin)
Install RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types if you would like 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 – WordPress Comment RSS Feeds
WordPress makes available RSS feeds of comments posted on your site in addition to displaying RSS feeds of your latest posts.
To inspect this, go to the ‘Meta’ widget area on your sidebar (note: this section may not be visible on some themes) and click on Comments RSS …
(Comments RSS)
All the comments posted on your site by visitors display in your Comments RSS page …
(RSS comments feed content displayed on Firefox web browser)
Like post entries, your comments feed content will display differently depending on the browser you are using …
(RSS comments feed content viewed on a Google Chrome browser)
Again, you can check what the RSS feed contains by pasting the URL of the feed into a feedreader …
(Paste the comments feed URL into a feedreader to view the 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 WP site installation is in a subfolder, e.g. “blog”)
Tip #2 – Accessing Specific Item RSS Feeds
Being able to access an RSS feed for specific posts can be useful. For example, you may want to add feeds from specific items to RSS directories, or you may have created a valuable resource that other online users will want to syndicate.
The formula for accessing an RSS feed for single post items is shown below:
(Feed For Single Post)
To create the above feed, copy the URL of your post, and append “/feed/?withoutcomments=1” to the end.
(Single Post RSS Feed)
Note: By default, if you only add “/feed” to the end of the post URL, WordPress will return the comments associated with your post, not the content of the post itself.
Tip #3 – Post Category RSS Feeds
Some your site users may only want to syndicate content about specific topics. They may not want to subscribe to your entire site’s feed.
With WordPress, you can easily create separate category feeds.
All you have to do is use the format below:
(Feed format for category)
Copy the category URL …
(Select and copy your category link address …)
Append the word “feed” to the end of it …
(WP post categories RSS feed format)
The feed now only includes content posted under that 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 – Create A Feeds Directory
You can create a list of RSS feeds that allows your readers to subscribe only to content in specific categories, just like the larger authoritative sites do …
(Publish A Page Of RSS Feeds For Your Subscribers)
All you need to do is link an RSS button image to the URL of your feed and then create a table or a list of your individual feeds on a separate page …
(RSS button image. Image Source: public-domain-photos.com)
We have created a detailed tutorial about creating tables in WordPress posts here:
WordPress RSS – Additional Notes
You can customize RSS in a number of ways, such as adding videos to feeds, ads, etc. Some of these customizations require editing code.
WordPress allows you to configure a number of feed formats without touching code. Below are examples of some of the kinds of custom feed formats you can use …
(WordPress RSS – Feed Formats)
Below are the different feed types, descriptions, and feed examples shown in the image 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 – RSS feed containing the latest comments posted on your blog
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/comments/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts
- Description: RSS feed for single posts
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/blog-post-title/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts Comments
- Description: RSS Feed that displays the latest comments made on a post
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/blog-post-title/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Day – Feed that contains the latest post entries in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2014/05/20/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Month – Displays latest items in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2015/11/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Year – Feed displaying latest posts in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2013/feed/
- Feed Type: Search Results
- Description: RSS feed displaying the latest entries for a search query
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/search/term/feed/
- Feed Type: Custom Post Type
- Description: Contains the latest post entries for a custom type (e.g. book)
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/?post_type=book
One more thing …
Remember to let your users know that they can subscribe to your RSS feeds. Make sure you place your ’subscribe to RSS’ button in a visible location …
(Encourage your visitors to syndicate your RSS feeds!)
Also, keep in mind that online users will only syndicate your content if you provide your subscribers with high-quality information that will add great value to their sites and benefit their users.
(Easily add great content from other sites and get other sites to syndicate your content with 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 RSS feed 🙂
Additional Resources:
- RSS Buttons – Visit Iconspedia or search online (e.g. “free RSS icons”, “rss logos”, etc.) for sites containing downloadable Free RSS images.
- 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.org/RSS – General information about the benefits of using RSS feeds.
- WordPress Codex: RSS Feeds – WordPress software documentation and information site. Visit this site to learn more about using feeds in WordPress.
Congratulations! Now you know 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 via RSS feeds.
Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To read more about using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.
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