No matter what service or product you provide or what industry your business is in, it’s important to provide high-value information on your site or blog that better educates, informs, and engages your readers. For example, if you provide travel-related services, it’s a good idea to publish information from government departments and foreign travel offices, such as news or updates on travel warnings, tips from consulates, etc.
To create and publish this kind of information, however, involves a lot of work and expertise. You have to do a lot of information gathering, researching and organizing, fact-checking, content writing and editing (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.
Thankfully, there is a much easier way to regularly provide your site visitors with expert, up-to-date information.
It’s called RSS …
(RSS - One of the simplest ways to provide your site readers with up-to-date information)
The Ultimate Guide To WordPress RSS
Basic Information About RSS
- RSS, which, according to some is an acronym for RDF Site Summary, is more commonly referred to now as Really Simple Syndication. It can also be called a “feed” or “newsfeed”.
- RSS lets content publishers automatically syndicate their content to save readers time from having to keep revisiting their site to check for updates.
- RSS feeds are often used to publish frequently updated information, such as new blog posts, news, video playlists, etc., to which users can then subscribe.
- RSS feeds can be read using programs called RSS readers, or aggregators. Aggregators are used to find new content published on websites and distribute this content (and updates made to the content) to other sites.
- There are different feed formats and these can be read by different feedreaders. Some of these include RSS feeds, Atom (also called AtomPub or APP feeds and RDF (Resource Description Framework) feeds. All of these formats, however, use a standard XML file format to ensure compatibility with different machines and programs.
- Many sites and software tools also let you combine many RSS feeds to aggregate news and updates from many different sources.
This article explains 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 via their RSS feed.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds
Content syndication is a powerful way to share content online. Feeds provide a simple and easy way for online users to receive the latest information posted on different sites.
First, let’s look at content syndication.
Online media publications use syndication to publish newsworthy content from other news agencies around the world.
Content syndication allows news reporting agencies and many popular online media publications to deliver readers interesting stories and up-to-the-minute newsworthy items from all over the planet without having to employ and send additional staff to every location in the world …
(Global media publications use syndication to publish content from news sources all around the world.)
Syndication is a legitimate way of sharing newsworthy content. online media publications syndicate their content using feeds …
(Content syndication is used by digital news agencies to share content with other publications)
Most websites actually would like you to syndicate their information. Content syndication not only allows great information to be shared, but it also drives visitors back to the site that originally created theoriginally created and published the content being syndicated. This creates new ways to drive traffic back to their site.
Most online newspapers have a feed section (look for navigation links that say “RSS” or “Newsfeeds” in them, or just search for “name of site/keyword + rss” – e.g. “nytimes rss”, “huffington post rss”, “sydney morning herald rss”, etc.) …
(Most online newspapers and major content sites will contain an RSS feed section. Source: SMH )
Clicking on a site’s RSS feeds section brings up a list of different RSS feeds of the site …
(RSS feeds section. Image Source: nytimes.com RSS feeds)
gives readers access to content from different sections of the website (e.g. technology news, sports news, science news, etc.)
Feed sections can also contain subcategories …
(RSS Feed section. Source: Los Angeles Times)
Note: A feed is just a URL. To use a feed, all that’s required is to copy the URL and paste it into a program that can translate the feed code into something readable. We’ll cover this further below.
The Benefits Of Syndicating Content
Syndicating someone else’s content on your website has some obvious benefits. It helps someone else’s content and helps your site by freeing you up from having to create this content …
(Content Syndication Benefits Someone Else’s Business And Yours!)
While adding RSS 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 websites to use your content.
When other websites syndicate your RSS feed, this gives your business the opportunity to get more exposure online and drive more web traffic …
(Get other websites and blogs to syndicate content using your feed … it will help drive more traffic to your site!)
WordPress RSS – Overview
By default, WordPress automatically publishes a feed of your latest posts, allowing other online users to easily syndicate your content on their websites and blogs.
Depending on your WordPress theme, there are a number of ways to access the WordPress RSS feed:
1) If your theme displays the Meta widget on the sidebar menu …
(The feed page will display the number of items you have specified in the WP Reading Settings section)
Display Full Text Or Summary Of Posts In Your RSS Feed
Another setting in the Reading Settings section that affects your feeds is whether to display posts in your feed as full text, or a summary …
(Reading Settings – ’For each article in a feed show’: ‘Full text’ or ‘Summary’)
Post Excerpts can also affect how your feed content displays …
(Post excerpts affect how a feed will display)
For a detailed step-by-step tutorial about Post excerpts, go here:
View The Content Of Your RSS Feeds
As mentioned previously, to view the content of a feed, you need to copy the feed’s URL to your clipboard and paste it into an application that translates feeds into readable content for humans.
Let’s see how this works.
First, go to a website or blog and look for an RSS feed icon using any of the methods described earlier …
(Look for an RSS feed button. Image source: YourCoffeeGuru.com)
Next, copy the feed URL to your clipboard …
(Copy the URL of your feed)
If you want, you can check the feed content by pasting the URL of the feed into an online feedreader …
(Paste the URL of your feed into a feed reader to view the content. Image Source: Feedreader.com)
Like feed readers, WordPress also has the ability to process RSS/XML feeds.
Adding RSS Feeds To Your WordPress Site
Let’s show you how to add content from other websites to your WordPress site.
Adding A Feed To Your WordPress Sidebar
As mentioned earlier, no matter what industry your business is a part of, you can easily add to your site the latest updates 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 such as news, social media updates, or content from thousands of sites using the WordPress RSS widget.
Let’s add content from an RSS feed to your sidebar …
(Add an RSS feed to your sidebar)
First, Find a website or blog that publishes content that you would like to display on your sidebar and copy the RSS feed URL …
(Copy the URL of your feed)
Next, go to Appearance > Widgets and paste the feed into an RSS widget …
(RSS Widget)
To learn more about using widgets, go here:
Load your website in your browser. The content from the RSS feed will now display in your sidebar …
(RSS Feed Content 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:
How To Add An RSS Feed To Your WordPress Posts
Can content from RSS feeds be added to posts instead of the sidebar? It sure can!
You can easily do this using plugins. Search on WordPress.org plugin repository for RSS Aggregator, RSS feed to post, etc.
(’Add Plugins’ section)
Note: These plugins typically require configuration – visit the plugin sites for full instructions, or contact us if you need assistance with plugin configuration.
The plugins listed below can be used to feed content to posts, or “auto blog” (An auto blog is a blog with content that is automatically gathered and compiled from RSS feeds):
WPeMatico
(WPeMatico)
WPeMatico is an easy to use plugin that lets you publish posts automatically from specific RSS/Atom feeds.
You can manage all the feeds you import and arrange them according to categories and campaigns.
For more details, go here:
WP RSS Aggregator
(WP RSS Aggregator)
WP RSS Aggregator is a comprehensive RSS feed importer and autoblogging plugin for WordPress with a number of premium add-ons for extended functionality.
For example, the Feed to Post add-on lets you autoblog by importing RSS feeds directly into posts.
For more details, go here:
RSS Post Importer
(RSS Post Importer Plugin)
The RSS Post Importer plugin allows you to syndicate, curate, import, merge and display full text RSS feeds on your WordPress site.
RSS Post Importer will fetch an RSS feed and publish the full content of every item in the feed as a separate post.
For more details, go here:
Powr RSS Feed
(Powr RSS Feed Plugin)
The POWr RSS Feed plugin automatically combines and displays content from multiple RSS feeds.
The POWr RSS plugin also lets you display videos, images, and article content, adjust feed priority, use custom colors, backgrounds, fonts, and more. It also displays feeds correctly on all computers, tablets, and phones and supports text in every language.
The premium plugin version contains a number of additional features, such as the ability to display different feeds, accept or reject posts in your feed, and more.
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 other sources.
This plugin provides loads of powerful functionality like CSV importing for posts/WooCommerce, RSS feed creator, autoblogging, auto post to Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn, export WordPress posts as podcasts, create Google XML sitemaps, and more!
For more details, go here:
FeedWordPress
(FeedWordPress Plugin)
FeedWordPress provides flexible Atom/RSS syndication options for WordPress-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.
FeedWordPress can be used to create aggregator site (sites that combine and display content from various different sources), or bring together all of your online activity into a Lifestream.
For more details, go here:
Autoblog
(Autoblog WP Plugin)
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 the URL of your feed, give your feed a name (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 Plugin For WordPress)
RSS Includes Pages lets you display pages in your RSS feed in addition to posts.
For more details, go here:
Useful Tips
Tip #1 – Comment RSS Feeds
WordPress displays RSS feeds of the latest comments posted on your site in addition to giving online users access to RSS feeds of your posts.
To view this feed, locate the ‘Meta’ section on your sidebar menu (note: your theme may not be configured to display this widget) and click on Comments RSS …
(Comments RSS)
All the comments posted on your site by visitors will appear in your Comments RSS page …
(RSS comments feed entries as seen using a Firefox browser)
Like post entries, your comments feed items will display differently depending on which web browser you are using …
(RSS comments feed content displayed with 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 your URL of your comments feed into a feed reader to view the feed content. 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 website has been installed in a subdomain, e.g. “blog”)
Tip #2 – Using Specific Item Feeds
Being able to access an RSS feed for individual 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 single post items is shown below:
(Feed For Individual Post)
To create the above feed, copy the web address of your post, and add “/feed/?withoutcomments=1” to the end.
(Single Post Feed)
Note: By default, if you only add “/feed” to the end of your post URL, WordPress will return the comments made on your post, not the post content itself.
Tip #3 – Post Category RSS Feeds
Some your site users may only be interested in subscribing to content about specific topics. They may not want to subscribe to your entire site’s feed.
If your website contains content published under different categories, WordPress allows you to offer subscribers a separate feed for each post category.
All you need to do is use the format below:
(WordPress category RSS feed format)
Copy the category link address …
(Copy the selected category link address …)
Add “feed” to the end of it …
(WordPress category RSS feed format)
The category RSS feed now only includes content specific to this category …
(Category 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 Your Own RSS Feeds Directory
You can create your own feeds list that allows your readers to subscribe to specific categories, just like large authoritative sites …
(Provide A List Of Feeds For Visitors)
All you need to do is link an icon to the URL of your category feed and then create a table or a list of all your individual feeds on a new page …
(RSS button. Source: http://www.public-domain-photos.com/free-cliparts/computer/other/rss_button_roman_bertle_01-2522.htm)
If you need help with inserting tables into WordPress, refer to this step-by-step tutorial:
WordPress RSS – Notes
Feeds can be customized in a number of ways, such as adding videos to feeds, ads, etc. Some of these feed customizations require code editing skills.
WordPress allows different feed configurations that do not require messing with code. For example, the table below shows some of the kinds of feed types you can display …
(WordPress RSS – Custom Feeds)
For your convenience, here are the feed types, descriptions, and feed examples listed above:
- Feed Type: All Posts
- Description: Content feed – displays your latest post entries
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/
- Feed Type: All Comments
- Description: Comments feed – RSS feed containing the latest comments left on your website
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/comments/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts
- Description: RSS feed for an individual post
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/blog-post-title/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts Comments
- Description: Displays the latest comments made on a single post
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/title-of-your-blog-post/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Day – Feed that includes latest posts in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2010/02/14/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Month – Includes the latest post entries in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2015/05/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Year – Feed displaying the latest entries in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2016/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: Contains latest items for a custom type (e.g. book)
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/?post_type=book
One more thing …
Remember to let users know that they can subscribe to your RSS feed. Place a subscribe button in a visible location …
(Encourage visitors to subscribe to your feeds!)
Keep in mind that other sites will only syndicate your content if the information that you publish on your site is useful, educational, or highly engaging. In other words, focus on providing your subscribers with high-quality information that can add great value to their sites and benefit their users.
(Easily add content to your site and get other users to share your content using RSS feeds!)
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 feed 🙂
Additional RSS Resources:
- RSS Icons – Visit online resource sites like Iconspedia.com or search online (e.g. “free RSS icons”, “rss images”, etc.) for sites that contain downloadable RSS images and icons.
- RSSBoard.org – The RSS Advisory Board Go here if you want to gain a better understanding of RSS.
- Wikipedia.org/RSS – Learn more about using RSS feeds.
- WordPress.org/WordPress Feeds – WordPress software documentation and information site. Visit this site for more information about feeds in WordPress.
Congratulations! Now you know 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 via RSS feeds.
Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business online. To read more about using the WP web site management platform please see our related posts section.
***
"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)