No matter what product or service you provide or what industry your business is a part of, providing high-quality information on your site or blog is vitally important. For example, if you provide travel-related services, it’s a good idea to provide users with useful information from government and foreign travel-related departments, such as news and updates on travel warnings, advice from consulates, etc.
The problem with creating this kind of information, however, is that it involves a great deal of work and resources. You have to do a ton of information gathering, researching and organizing, checking your sources for accuracy, content writing and editing (or hire someone to do this for you), and then ensure that this information is continually 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 beyond your control.
Thankfully, there is a much simpler way to regularly provide your readers with expert, up-to-date information.
It’s called RSS …
(RSS is one of the easiest ways to provide your site visitors with up-to-date information)
The Ultimate Guide To WordPress RSS
What Is RSS?
- RSS, which, according to some experts is an acronym for Rich Site Summary, is more commonly known as Really Simple Syndication. It is often called a “feed” or “web feed”.
- RSS allows content publishers to automatically syndicate their content to save users time from having to keep revisiting sites to check for updates.
- RSS feeds are often used to publish frequently updated information, such as new blog post items, news, videos, etc., which other users can choose to subscribe to.
- Essentially, an RSS feed is an XML (XML = Extensible Markup Language) document that includes full or summarized text along with metadata like date of publishing, author, etc. It allows people to subscribe to content on websites and then view any updates posted on these websites using an RSS feed reader. Conversely, RSS feeds also enable publishers to syndicate web content automatically.
- Feeds can be made available in different types and read by different aggregators. Some of these include RSS feeds, Atom Publishing Protocol) feeds and RDF (Resource Description Framework) 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 tools also allow you to combine many RSS feeds to aggregate news and updates sourced from various other sites.
In this detailed article, we will explain where your RSS feed is located, how to use your WordPress RSS feed to get your content syndicated online, and how to display content from other sites on your site via RSS feeds.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds
Content syndication is a powerful and legitimate method used for sharing web content. RSS Feeds provide an easy way for online users to keep up with the latest information posted on sites and blogs they are interested in.
First, let’s take a look at content syndication.
Most digital publishers use syndication to publish stories from content sources around the world.
Syndication allows online newspapers and popular media publications to deliver readers stories on all kinds of topics as well as the most recent news from around the globe without actually having to hire and set up additional reporting agencies all around the world …
(Online newspapers use content syndication to publish newsworthy items from other news agencies all around the planet.)
Syndication is used to share information legitimately with other sites. Online newspapers syndicate their content using feeds …
(Content syndication is used by global media publications to share information with other news publications)
Most sites actually want you to syndicate their content. Content syndication not only allows high-quality information to be shared, but it also drives visitors back to the original site responsible for publishing the content being syndicated. This can be an effective way to generate web traffic.
Major sites will have 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”, “star tribune rss”, “sydney morning herald rss”, etc.) …
(Major sites have an RSS feed section. Image: smh.com.au )
Clicking on a site’s RSS feeds link brings up a directory of RSS feeds for different content topics on the site …
(RSS feeds directory. Image: nytimes.com RSS feeds)
These RSS feeds let you access different sections of the website (e.g. business news, arts news, jobs, etc.)
A feed list can also contain subcategories …
(An RSS list can also include subcategory feeds. 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 translate the feed code into something readable. We’ll cover this further below.
Using RSS Feeds – Benefits
Syndicating content from someone else’s site on your website has some obvious benefits. It helps someone else’s website and adds value to your site without you having to create that content …
(Content Syndication - Benefits)
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 sites to use your content.
When other websites syndicate content using your feed, you have the opportunity to get increased exposure online and drive more web traffic …
(Get other sites to syndicate your RSS feed … it will help increase your exposure online!)
WordPress RSS – About
By default, WordPress automatically publishes a feed of all your posts, allowing others to syndicate your content on their websites and blogs.
Depending on your WP theme, there are a few ways to get your RSS feed:
1) If your theme has been configured to display the Meta widget in a standard or custom menu …
(The feed will display as many recent items you have specified in the Reading Settings section)
Display Full Text Or Summary Of Posts In Your RSS Feed
Another setting in the WordPress Reading Settings section that affects your feeds is whether to display each article as full text, or just as a summary …
(Reading Settings – Show ‘Full Text’ or ‘Summary’ for posts in your RSS feed)
Post Excerpts can also affect how the content in your feed appears …
(Post excerpts can affect how feeds display)
To learn more about Post excerpts, refer to this tutorial:
View The Content Of Your RSS Feeds
As mentioned earlier, to view the content of a feed, you have to copy the feed’s URL and paste it into an application that can translate feeds into readable content for humans.
Let’s take a look at how this works.
First, go to a website or blog and search for a ’subscribe to feed’ button …
(Look for a ’subscribe to feed’ link. Image source: YourCoffeeGuru.com)
Next, copy the feed URL to your clipboard …
(Copy your feed URL to the clipboard)
If you want, you can check the feed content by pasting the URL of the feed into an online feedreader …
(Paste your URL of your feed into a feed reader to view the content. Image: Feedreader)
Like feed readers, WordPress has the ability to process RSS/XML feeds and convert these into content that can be read by your subscribers.
Adding A Feed To WordPress Sites
In the example below, we are going to add RSS content from another site to yours.
Adding Feeds To Your WordPress Sidebar
As mentioned earlier, no matter what industry you are in, you can add to your site the latest news and updates from an industry-related government department or authoritative site in your industry by simply adding their feed. You can use RSS 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 …
(Let’s add content from an RSS feed to the WordPress sidebar)
First, Find a website or blog that publishes content that you want to display on your sidebar and copy its RSS feed URL …
(Copy the URL of your feed to your clipboard)
Next, log into your wordPress Dashboard and go to Appearance > Widget paste the feed into an RSS widget …
(Widgets Section – RSS Widget)
To learn more about using sidebar widgets, go here:
Refresh your browser. The content from the RSS feed should now appear on your sidebar (or wherever you have added the RSS widget – e.g. footer, custom menu, 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 Content From RSS Feeds To Your WordPress Posts
What if you want to add content from RSS feeds to WordPress posts instead of the sidebar?
You can easily do this using WordPress plugins. Just search inside your Plugins section (Plugins > Add New) for RSS feed, RSS feed to post, etc.
(‘Add Plugins’ screen – WordPress RSS plugins)
Note: Most RSS plugins typically require configuration – visit the plugin sites for full instructions, or contact us for help with plugin configuration.
The plugins listed below can be used to feed content to posts, or “auto blog” (An autoblog is a blog with content that is automatically gathered and compiled from RSS feeds):
WPeMatico
(WPeMatico)
WPeMatico is an autoblogging plugin that allows you to publish posts automatically from specific RSS/Atom feeds.
You can manage all the feeds you import and arrange them into campaigns.
For more details, go here:
WP RSS Aggregator
(WP RSS Aggregator WordPress Plugin)
WP RSS Aggregator is an RSS feed importer and autoblogging plugin for WordPress with premium add-ons for extended functionality.
For example, the Feed to Post extension allows you to add content to your site automatically by importing RSS feeds directly into your WordPress posts.
For more details, go here:
RSS Post Importer
(RSS Post Importer Plugin For WordPress)
RSS Post Importer can be used to curate, import, syndicate, merge and display full-text feeds on your WordPress site.
RSS Post Importer will fetch an RSS feed and publish the entire content of each item in your feed as a standalone 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 various content using RSS feeds.
The plugin also lets you display images, videos, and articles, adjust feed priority, use custom colors, fonts, borders, and more. It also has mobile-responsive design and supports text in every language.
The premium edition of POWr contains a number of additional features, such as the ability to display different feeds, manually accept or reject posts, and more.
For more details, go here:
WP Pipes
(WP Pipes WordPress Plugin)
WP Pipes is a powerful data migration plugin that allows you to create curate content from RSS feeds, Google News, and other sources.
This plugin provides loads of powerful features like CSV importing for posts/WooCommerce, RSS feed creator, autoblogging, auto post to Twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook, export posts as iTunes podcasts, create Google XML sitemaps, and more!
For more details, go here:
FeedWordPress
(FeedWordPress WordPress Plugin)
FeedWordPress is a flexible syndication plugin for WordPress site-generated content.
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 bring together all your online activity into a Lifestream.
For more details, go here:
Autoblog by WPMUDev
(Autoblog by WPMUDev – WordPress Plugin)
Autoblog is an easy-to-use plugin that can be set-up very quickly, with no coding required and no complicated instructions. Simply copy and paste in the URL of your feed, name your feed (for admin purposes) and select a blog to post content to.
For more details, go here:
RSS Includes Pages
(RSS Includes Pages)
By default, WordPress only posts posts in your RSS feed. Use the RSS Includes Pages plugin to include pages in your RSS feed and not just posts.
For more details, go here:
Using RSS – Useful Tips
Tip #1 – WP Comment RSS Feeds
In addition to making RSS feeds of your posts available to online users, WordPress also makes available RSS feeds of comments posted on your site.
To access the comments in your feed, go to the ‘Meta’ widget area on your sidebar menu (note: your theme may not be configured to display this widget) and click on Comments RSS …
(Comments Feed)
Comments posted on your site by visitors display in the Comments RSS page …
(RSS comments feed content seen on Firefox)
Like post entries, your comments feed page will display differently depending on which browser you use …
(Comments feed items viewed with Google Chrome)
Again, you can check what the comments RSS feed contains by pasting the URL of the feed into a feed reader …
(Paste the comments 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 subdomain, e.g. “blog”)
Tip #2 – Single Item Feeds
Being able to select an RSS feed for a specific post can be useful. For example, you may want to add feeds from specific posts to RSS aggregator sites, or you may have created a valuable resource that other online users will want to syndicate.
The formula for using an RSS feed for individual posts is shown below:
(Feed For Single Post Item)
To create the above feed, copy the URL of your post, and add “/feed/?withoutcomments=1” to the end.
(Single Post Feed)
Note: By default, if you only append “/feed” to the end of your post URL, WordPress will return the comments associated with that post, not the content of the post itself.
Tip #3 – Displaying Category RSS Feeds
Some your site users may only want to subscribe to content from a specific category. They may not want to subscribe to your entire site’s feed.
If your site displays content published under multiple categories, you can easily create a separate RSS feed for each of your categories.
Just use the format below:
(WordPress category RSS feed format)
Select and copy the category link address …
(Copy the category link address …)
And append “feed” to the end of it …
(Format for WordPress post categories feed)
The feed now only displays content published under that category …
(Category-specific feed page)
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 List Of Feeds On Your Site
You can create a feeds list that allows your readers to subscribe to content in specific categories …
(Set Up A Page Of Feeds For Your Visitors)
You can also link an image to the URL of your feed and then create a table or a list of all your feeds on a new page …
(RSS image. Image Source: public-domain-photos.com)
For a detailed tutorial on creating tables in WordPress content, go here:
WordPress RSS – Notes
RSS feeds can be customized in several different ways, such as adding videos to feeds, ads, etc. Some of these customizations require editing code.
WordPress allows you to configure different feed formats that do not require code editing skills. Below are examples of some of the kinds of custom feed formats you can create …
(WordPress RSS – Custom Feeds)
For your convenience, here are the different feed types, descriptions, and feed examples listed in the diagram above:
- Feed Type: All Posts
- Description: Content feed – RSS feed that contains your latest entries
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/
- Feed Type: All Comments
- Description: Comments feed – RSS feed containing the latest comments left on your blog
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/comments/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts
- Description: Feed for individual post entries
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/title-of-your-blog-post/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts Comments
- Description: Feed that displays the latest comments made on a post entry
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/post-title/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Day – Includes the latest posts in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2015/01/14/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Month – Feed that includes latest post entries in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2014/07/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Year – Contains the latest post entries in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2012/feed/
- Feed Type: Search Results
- Description: Displays latest items for a search query
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/search/term/feed/
- Feed Type: Custom Post Type
- Description: Contains latest entries for a custom type (e.g. book)
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/?post_type=book
One last thing …
Remember to promote your feeds. Make sure you place your subscribe button or link somewhere visible …
(Promote your feeds!)
Also, keep in mind that other website owners will only 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 content from other sites and get visitors to subscribe to your content 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 RSS feed 🙂
RSS – Resources:
- RSS Feed Buttons – Visit Iconspedia or search online (e.g. “free RSS icons”, “rss icon”, etc.) for sites containing downloadable RSS icons.
- RSSBoard.org – The RSS Advisory Board provides useful information and resources about RSS.
- Wikipedia/RSS – Learn more about the history and benefits of using RSS feeds.
- WordPress.org/WordPress Feeds – Official WordPress documentation site. Go here for additional information about RSS 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 content from other sites to your site via RSS feeds.
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To read more about the benefits of using the WP web site management platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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