No matter what service or product you sell or what industry your business is in, it’s important to provide quality information to your site or blog readers. For example, if your business provides insurance services, it’s a good idea to provide users with useful information from government departments, such as news and updates on statistical research, insurance advice, etc.
The problem with providing this type of information, however, is that it is very time-consuming. You have to sift through, gather, and organize a ton of information, check your facts, 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 huge amount of work but most of the information you are dealing with is completely beyond your control.
Fortunately, there is an easier way to keep your users up-to-date with your information.
It’s called RSS …
(RSS is the simplest way to provide your site visitors with great information)
The Ultimate Guide To WordPress RSS
RSS – What Is It?
- RSS stands for RDF Site Summary, or, as is more commonly known, Really Simple Syndication. It can also be referred to as a “feed” or “news feed”.
- When a user subscribes to a website’s feed, they no longer have to manually visit and check the website for updated content. Instead, their browser will continually monitor the content and automatically keep subscribers updated.
- RSS feeds are often used to publish frequently updated information, such as blog entries, news, audios, etc., to which users can choose to subscribe.
- Essentially, an RSS feed is a structured XML document that includes full or summarized text along with other metadata like date of publishing, author, etc. It allows people to subscribe to content on websites and blogs that publish feeds and then browse updates posted on these sites using a feedreader. Conversely, RSS feeds also enable publishers to automatically syndicate content.
- Feeds can be made available in different formats and read by different feedreaders. 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 compatibility with different devices, readers, and programs.
- Many sites and software applications also let you combine different RSS feeds to receive news and updates from various sources.
This article shows you where to find your WordPress RSS feed, 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 their RSS feed.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds
Content syndication is a really powerful and legitimate method used for sharing content online. RSS Feeds provide a simple and easy way for web users to receive the latest information published on different websites.
First, let’s look at how content syndication is used.
Online media publications use content syndication to publish newsworthy content from news sources all around the world.
Syndication allows many digital news publishers and many highly-visited online media publications to deliver readers interesting stories and up-to-the-minute news headlines from all around the globe without having to send more staff and writers to every place around the world …
(Global media publications rely heavily on content syndication to publish newsworthy stories from other news agencies all around the planet.)
Syndication is used to share newsworthy content legitimately. Global media publications syndicate their information using news feeds …
(Online newspapers syndicate their information using feeds)
Most sites actually want you to share their information. Content syndication not only allows information of great value to be shared, but it also sends visitors back to the site that published the original content being syndicated. This provides websites with new opportunities to generate significant web visitors.
Many news reporting agencies will contain a feed section (look for links in their navigation section that say “RSS” or “Newsfeeds” in them, or just search for “name of site/keyword + rss” – e.g. “nytimes rss”, “courier mail rss”, “sydney morning herald rss”, etc.) …
(Major sites include a feed section. Source: smh.com.au )
Clicking on a site’s RSS feeds link will bring up a list of different RSS feed sections of the site …
(RSS Feeds. Image Source: nytimes.com RSS feeds)
gives readers access to content from different sections of the website (e.g. business news, sports news, lifestyle magazine, etc.)
A feed directory can also contain subcategories …
(RSS Feed section. Source: latimes.com feeds)
Note: A feed is simply a URL. All you need to do to use feeds is to copy the URLs and paste these into a program that can process the feed code into something readable. We’ll cover this further below.
The Benefits Of Content Syndication
Syndicating someone else’s content on your website has some obvious benefits. It not only gives someone else’s business additional exposure online, 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 an RSS feed 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 syndicate YOUR content.
When other websites syndicate your feed, this gives your business the opportunity to gain more exposure online and drive more visitors …
(Get visitors to syndicate your RSS feed … it will help drive more traffic to your site!)
About Your WordPress Feed
By default, WordPress automatically publishes a feed of your posts, allowing others to syndicate your content on their sites.
Depending on your WordPress site’s theme, there are a few ways to get your RSS feed:
1) If your theme has been configured to display the Meta widget on your navigation menu …
(The feed will show the number of posts as you have specified in the 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 posts in your feed as full text, or as a summary …
(Reading Settings – Display ‘Full Text’ or ‘Summary’ for each article in a RSS feed)
Post Excerpts can also affect how your feed content appears …
(Post excerpts affect how your feed content will appear)
If you need help Post excerpts, go here:
View The Content Of Your RSS Feeds
As mentioned earlier, all that’s required to view a feed’s content is to copy the feed’s URL to your clipboard and paste it into an application that reads and translates feeds into readable content for humans.
Let’s show you how this works.
First, find a website whose content you want to syndicate and look for a ’subscribe to feed’ button …
(Search for a ’subscribe to feed’ link or button. Image source: YourCoffeeGuru.com)
Next, copy the feed URL to your clipboard …
(Copy the URL of your feed to your clipboard)
If you want, you can check the feed content by pasting the URL of your feed into a feedreader …
(Paste your feed URL into a feed reader to view the content. Image: Feedreader)
Like feedreaders, WordPress also has the ability to process RSS/XML feeds and convert these into content that can be read by your visitors.
How To Add Feeds To Your WordPress Site
Let’s show you how to add content sourced from another site to your WordPress site.
How To Add A Feed To Your Sidebar
As mentioned earlier, no matter what industry you are in, you can easily display on your site the latest content from an industry-related government department or authoritative site in your industry by simply adding content from their RSS feed. You can use RSS feeds to display a range of information on your WordPress site like news, social media comments, or content from thousands of sites using the WordPress RSS widget.
Let’s add RSS content to the WordPress sidebar navigation menu …
(Add content from an RSS feed to your sidebar)
copy the RSS feed from a site that publishes content that you would like to display on your site …
(Copy your feed URL to the clipboard)
Next, paste the feed into a new RSS widget …
(Widgets Screen – RSS Widget)
To learn more about using widgets, go here:
Load your site in your web browser. The content from the RSS feed will now show in the sidebar (or wherever the RSS widget has been placed) …
(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:
Adding Feed Content To Your Posts
What if you want to add content from an RSS feed to WordPress posts instead of your sidebar?
You can do this using WordPress plugins. Search inside your Plugins screen for RSS Aggregator, RSS feed to post, etc.
(WordPress RSS plugins)
Note: Most RSS plugins typically require configuration – visit the plugin sites for configuration instructions, or contact us for help with plugin configuration.
Here are some plugins that allow you to add RSS feeds to your pages:
WPeMatico
(WPeMatico Plugin For WordPress)
WPeMatico is an auto blogging plugin that lets you publish posts automatically from specific RSS/Atom feeds.
You can manage all of your imported feeds and organize feeds into categories.
For more details, go here:
WP RSS Aggregator
(WP RSS Aggregator Plugin For WordPress)
WP RSS Aggregator is an RSS feed importer and auto blogging plugin for WordPress that offers premium add-ons for extended functionality.
For example, the Feed to Post add-on for the WP RSS Aggregator plugin is a feature-rich importer that lets you autoblog by importing RSS feeds directly into your WP posts.
For more details, go here:
RSS Post Importer
(RSS Post Importer Plugin)
RSS Post Importer allows you to import, syndicate, curate, merge and display full text feeds on your WordPress site.
The plugin will fetch an RSS feed and publish the full article content of each item in your feed as a standalone post.
For more details, go here:
Powr RSS Feed
(Powr RSS Feed Plugin)
With the POWr RSS Feed plugin, you can combine and display content from various RSS feeds.
The POWr RSS Feed plugin also lets you display videos, images, and article content, adjust feed spacing and size, use custom fonts, colors, borders, and more. It also has mobile-responsive design and supports text in every language.
The premium version of POWr contains many additional features.
For more details, go here:
WP Pipes
(WP Pipes Plugin)
The WP Pipes plugin for WordPress is a powerful data migration plugin that lets you create curate content from RSS feeds, Google News, and other sources.
This plugin provides functionality like CSV importing for posts/WooCommerce, RSS feed creator, auto blogging, auto post to Twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook, export your posts as podcasts, create Google XML sitemaps, and more!
For more details, go here:
FeedWordPress
(FeedWordPress Plugin For WordPress)
FeedWordPress provides simple and flexible syndication options for WordPress site 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 FeedWordPress to create aggregator sites, or bring together all of your online activity (e.g. from your blog, LinkedIn, Flickr, or other online services, into a Lifestream.
For more details, go here:
Autoblog
(Autoblog)
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 your feed URL, give the feed a name of your choosing (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)
The RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types plugin modifies RSS feeds to include pages in addition to posts.
For more details, go here:
Useful Tips
Tip #1 – Comment RSS Feeds
WordPress displays RSS feeds of your latest post comments in addition to displaying RSS feeds of your posts.
You can access this feed by clicking on Comments RSS in the ‘Meta’ section of your sidebar menu (note: your theme may not be configured to display this widget) …
(Comments Feed)
All the comments posted on your site by visitors and users display in your Comments RSS page …
(Comments feed items viewed on Firefox)
Like post entries, your comments feed page will display differently depending on which web browser you are using …
(RSS comments feed content as seen using a Google Chrome web browser)
Again, you can check what the feed contains by pasting the URL of the feed into an online feed reader …
(Paste the feed URL into a feed reader to view the content. Image Source: 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 WordPress installation is in a subfolder, e.g. “blog”)
Tip #2 – Accessing Individual Item RSS Feeds
Being able to create an RSS feed for a single post item can be useful. For example, you may want to add feeds from specific posts to RSS directories, or you may have created a valuable resource that other online users will want to syndicate.
The formula for displaying an RSS feed for an individual post is shown below:
(Feed For Individual Post)
To create the above feed, copy the URI of your post, and append “/feed/?withoutcomments=1” to the end.
(Single Post RSS Feed)
Note: By default, if you only append “/feed” to the end of a post URI, WordPress will return the comments made on your post, not the post content itself.
Tip #3 – Displaying Category Feeds
Some your site users may only be interested in subscribing to content from a particular post category. They may not want to subscribe to all of your site’s content.
If your website or blog publishes content under several categories, WordPress allows you to offer users a separate feed for each of these categories.
All you have to do is use the format shown below:
(Use this format for WP category feed)
Copy the category URL …
(Copy your category URL …)
Add the word “feed” to the end of it …
(WP post categories RSS feed format)
Your category feed will now only contain content published in 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 Page Of RSS Feeds
You can publish an RSS feeds list that allows your readers to subscribe to specific content …
(Provide Your Own Feeds List)
Link an icon like the one shown below to the URL of your feed and then create a table or a list of your individual feeds on a new page …
(RSS icon. Image Source: public-domain-photos.com)
We have created a detailed tutorial on creating tables in WordPress posts and pages here:
RSS Feeds – Notes
You can customize your feeds in several ways, such as adding videos to feeds, ads, etc. Some of these customizations require editing code.
WordPress allows a number of feed configurations that do not require touching code. Below are examples of some of the kinds of custom feeds you can create …
(WordPress RSS – Custom Feeds)
Here are the different feed types, descriptions, and feed examples shown above:
- Feed Type: All Posts
- Description: Content feed – Feed that displays your latest entries
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/
- Feed Type: All Comments
- Description: Comments feed – Feed containing the latest comments left on your website or blog
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/comments/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts
- Description: Feed for a post entry
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/blog-post-title/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts Comments
- Description: Includes the latest comments made on an individual post entry
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/blog-post-title/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Day – Includes the latest entries in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2010/03/01/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Month – Includes latest entries in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2014/03/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Year – Contains latest entries in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2016/feed/
- Feed Type: Search Results
- Description: Displays the latest entries for a search query
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/search/term/feed/
- Feed Type: Custom Post Type
- Description: Contains latest items for a custom type (e.g. book)
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/?post_type=book
One last thing …
It’s a good idea to let your users know that they can subscribe to your RSS feeds. Place a ’subscribe to RSS’ link somewhere visible …
(Promote your feeds!)
Also, keep in mind that other website owners will only want to syndicate your content if you provide useful information that informs, engages, and entertains. In other words, provide high-quality information that will add value to their sites and benefit their visitors.
(Add content from other sites and get other users to share your content using RSS!)
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:
- RSS Feed Icons – Visit a site like www.feedicons.com or search online (e.g. “free rss icons”, “RSS images”, etc.) for sites that allow you to download Free RSS images.
- RSSBoard.org – The RSS Advisory Board is an independent organization with three primary duties: publishing RSS specifications, providing guidance to developers who create RSS applications and helping the public to gain a better understanding of RSS.
- Wikipedia/RSS – Learn more about the benefits of using RSS.
- WordPress.org/RSS Feeds – WordPress documentation and reference. Go here to learn more about using WordPress RSS feeds.
Congratulations! Now you know where to find your WordPress RSS feed, how to syndicate your content online using RSS feeds, and how to add someone else’s content to your site using RSS feeds.
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using the WordPress software please click on links to visit other great articles and tutorials we have published on this site.
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