No matter what your business sells or what industry you are in, it’s important to provide quality information on your site or blog that better educates, informs, and engages your readers. For example, if your business provides medical services, it’s a good idea to provide users with useful information from the health department, such as news and updates on medical research, health and fitness advice, etc.
To create and publish this type of information, however, is very time-consuming. You have to do a ton of information gathering, researching and organizing, fact-checking, content writing and editing (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 well beyond your control.
Thankfully, there is an easier way to continually provide your site visitors with expert, up-to-date information.
It’s called RSS …
(RSS - The easiest way to provide your readers with the latest information)
The Ultimate Guide To WordPress RSS
Basic Information About RSS
- RSS, which, according to some definitions stands for Rich Site Summary, is more commonly referred to now as Really Simple Syndication. It can also be called a “feed” or “web feed”.
- After a user subscribes to an RSS feed, they no longer have to manually check the website for updated content. Instead, their browser constantly monitors the content and keeps subscribers automatically updated.
- Feeds are also used to publish information that is frequently updated, such as blog entries, news headlines, videos, etc., which users can choose to subscribe to.
- Essentially, an RSS feed is an XML (Extensible Markup Language) document that includes full or summarized text along with other metadata like published date, author, etc. It allows people to subscribe to content on websites and then view 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 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 applications also let you combine many RSS feeds to display news and updates sourced from various different sites.
This guide explains how 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 sites to your site using their RSS feed.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds
Content syndication is a very powerful (and legitimate) method used for sharing web content. RSS Feeds provide an easy way for online users to receive the latest information published on websites they are interested in.
First, let’s take a look at how content syndication is used.
Global media and news reporting agencies rely on content syndication to publish stories from other news agencies all around the world.
Content syndication allows online newspapers and many leading online publications to deliver readers the latest news headlines from all over the globe without having to employ and send additional reporting agencies to every location around the world …
(Many online newspapers and popular online media publications use content syndication to publish newsworthy items from news sources around the globe.)
Syndication is a legitimate method of sharing information with other sites. online media publications syndicate their information using news feeds …
(Online newspapers syndicate their content using feeds)
Most websites actually would like you to share their content. Syndicating content not only allows information to be shared, but it also sends visitors back to the original site that created and published the content being syndicated. This creates links that can drive traffic back to their site.
Most leading online media publications will include an RSS 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”, “miami herald rss”, “sydney morning herald rss”, etc.) …
(Most online newspapers and major sites include an RSS feed section. Image Source: smh.com.au )
Clicking on a site’s RSS links section will bring up a list of different RSS feed sections …
(RSS Feeds. Image: nytimes.com)
These feeds allow readers to access different sections of the site (e.g. technology news, sports news, editorials, etc.)
An RSS feed directory can also contain further feed subdirectories …
(RSS Feed section. Image Source: latimes.com)
Note: A feed is just a URL. All you need to do to use the feed is copy the URL and paste it into software 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 site has some obvious benefits. It not only gives additional exposure online to someone else’s content, it also helps you by freeing you up from having to create the content …
(Using RSS Feeds - Benefits)
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 a great idea to try and get other sites to syndicate YOUR content.
When other sites syndicate your RSS feed, this gives you the opportunity to get increased exposure online and drive new web traffic …
(It’s worth trying to get other websites and blogs to syndicate your content … it will help increase your exposure online!)
WordPress RSS
By default, WordPress automatically publishes a feed of your posts, allowing other online users to syndicate your content on their sites.
Depending on the theme you have installed, there are a number of ways to access your RSS feed:
1) If your theme has been configured to display the Meta widget in a standard or custom menu …
(Your feed page will show as many recent items you have specified in your Reading Settings section)
Display Full Text Or Summary Of Posts In Your RSS Feed
The other setting in the WP Reading Settings section that affects your feeds is whether to display posts as full text, or just a summary …
(WP Reading Settings – Display ‘Full Text’ or ‘Summary’ for each article in your RSS feed)
Post Excerpts can also affect how the content in your feed appears …
(Post excerpts affect how a feed will display)
We have created a detailed tutorial on WordPress Post excerpts 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 can translate feeds into readable content for humans.
Let’s show you how this works.
First, find a website whose feed you want to syndicate and look for their RSS feed link using any of the methods described earlier …
(Look for an RSS feed button. Image source: http://www.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 your feed into a feed reader …
(Paste your feed URL into a feedreader to view the feed content. Image Source: http://feedreader.com/online)
Like feedreaders, WordPress has the ability to process RSS/XML feeds.
Adding Feeds To Your Site
In the example below, we’ll add content from another website’s RSS feeds to your site.
How To Add RSS Feeds To Your Sidebar
As mentioned earlier, no matter what industry your business is 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 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 RSS content to your sidebar …
(Let’s add an RSS feed to your sidebar)
First, Find a site containing content that you want to add to your site and copy its feed URL …
(Copy your feed URL to the clipboard)
Next, log into your wordPress Dashboard and go to Appearance > Widget paste the feed into an RSS widget …
(Widgets Panel – RSS Widget)
To learn more about adding content to sidebars using widgets, go here:
Load your site in your web browser. The content can now be seen on your sidebar (or wherever you have added the RSS widget – e.g. footer) …
(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 WordPress Posts
Can you add content from RSS feeds to WordPress posts? Yes, you can!
You can easily do this using plugins. Search on the WordPress plugin directory for RSS Post, RSS feed to post, etc.
(RSS plugins for WordPress)
Note: Most RSS plugins typically require configuration – visit the plugin sites for instructions, or contact us for help configuring plugins.
The plugins listed below are useful if you want to add feed content to posts, or “autoblog” (An auto blog 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 selected RSS/Atom feeds.
You can manage all of your imported feeds and organize them according to campaigns and categories.
For more details, go here:
WP RSS Aggregator
(WP RSS Aggregator)
WP RSS Aggregator is a comprehensive RSS feed importer and autoblogging WordPress plugin with additional functionality with a number of premium extensions (add-ons).
For example, the Feed to Post extension is an advanced importer that lets you add content to your site automatically by importing RSS feeds directly into your posts or any other custom post type.
For more details, go here:
RSS Post Importer
(RSS Post Importer Plugin For WordPress)
The RSS Post Importer plugin allows you to syndicate, curate, import, merge and display full-text RSS feeds on your WordPress blog.
The plugin fetches an RSS feed and publishes the entire content of each feed item as a standalone post.
For more details, go here:
Powr RSS Feed
(Powr RSS Feed)
POWr RSS allows you to combine content from a number of different sources using RSS feeds.
This plugin also lets you display images, videos, and article content, adjust feed size and spacing, use custom borders, colors, fonts, and more. It also displays feeds correctly on any phone, computer, or tablet and supports text in every language.
The premium plugin version contains many 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 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 functionality like CSV importing for posts/WooCommerce, RSS feed creator, auto blogging, auto post to LinkedIn/Facebook/Twitter, export posts as podcasts, create Google XML sitemaps, and more!
For more details, go here:
FeedWordPress
(FeedWordPress Plugin)
FeedWordPress is a versatile 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 your online activity (e.g. from your blog, Twitter, YouTube, or other online services, into a Lifestream.
For more details, go here:
Autoblog
(Autoblog Plugin For WordPress)
Autoblog is an easy-to-use plugin that can be set-up very quickly, without coding skills or complicated instructions. Just copy and paste in your feed URL, give the feed a name of your choosing (for admin purposes) and select a blog to post content to.
For more details, go here:
RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types
(RSS Includes Pages Plugin For WordPress)
By default, WordPress only includes posts in your RSS feed. Use a plugin like RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types to include pages in your WordPress RSS feed and not just posts.
For more details, go here:
Useful Tips
Tip #1 – WordPress Comment RSS Feeds
WordPress displays RSS feeds of your latest post comments in addition to displaying feeds of your latest posts.
You can see the comments in your feed by clicking on Comments RSS in your ‘Meta’ section (note: this section may not be visible on some themes) …
(Comments Feed)
All the comments posted on your site by visitors and users can be seen in your Comments RSS page …
(RSS comments feed content displayed with a Firefox browser)
Like post entries, your comments feed page will display differently depending on which browser you are using …
(RSS comments feed content viewed on a Google Chrome browser)
Again, you can check the feed content by pasting the feed URL into an online feed reader …
(Paste the feed URL into a feed reader to view the feed content. Image: 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 – Using Single Item Feeds
Being able to select an RSS feed for a single post item 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 single post items is shown below:
(Feed For Specific Post)
To create the above feed, copy the post URI, and append “/feed/?withoutcomments=1” to the end.
(Single Post Feed)
Note: By default, if you only add “/feed” to the end of the URI of your post, WordPress will return the comments associated with that post, not the content of the post itself.
Tip #3 – Category RSS Feeds
Some your site visitors may only want to subscribe to content from one or two categories. They may not want to subscribe to all of your site’s content.
If your site displays content published under several categories, you can easily offer visitors a separate RSS feed for each different category.
All you need to do is use the format shown below:
(Use this format for WordPress category feed)
Select and copy the category URL to your clipboard …
(Copy the selected category URL …)
And add “feed” to the end of it …
(Feed format for post categories)
The category feed will now only display content specific to that particular category …
(Category-specific RSS 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 – Provide Your Own List Of RSS Feeds For Visitors
You can provide your own RSS feeds directory that allows your readers to subscribe only to content in the categories they are interested in …
(Set Up Your Own Feeds Page)
Link an image like the one shown below to each category feed and then create a table or a list of all your individual feeds on a separate page …
(RSS button graphic. Image: public-domain-photos.com)
We have created a detailed tutorial about creating tables in WordPress posts and pages here:
RSS – Additional Notes
You can customize feeds in a number of ways, such as adding images and videos to feeds, ads, etc. Some of these customizations require editing code.
WordPress allows various feed configurations that do not require editing code. Here are some examples of feed types you can use …
(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 – RSS feed that includes your latest entries
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/
- Feed Type: All Comments
- Description: Comments feed – RSS feed that contains the latest comments posted on your blog
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/comments/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts
- Description: Feed for a post
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/title-of-your-blog-post/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts Comments
- Description: Contains the latest comments made on single posts
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/blog-post-title/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Day – Displays the latest posts in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2014/03/26/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Month – Displays latest post entries in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2017/12/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Year – RSS feed containing the latest post entries in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2016/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: Displays the 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 let users know that they can subscribe to your RSS feed. Place your subscribe links somewhere visible …
(Remember to promote your feeds!)
Keep in mind that online users will only subscribe to your content if you provide your subscribers with very high-quality information that will add great value to their sites and benefit their users.
(Easily add great content to your site and get online users to subscribe to your content with 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 🙂
Additional Resources:
- Download RSS Feed Icons – Visit a site like FeedIcons.com or search online (e.g. “free rss icons”, “RSS logos”, etc.) for sites that allow you to download 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 – General information about RSS feeds.
- WordPress Codex – WordPress documentation. Go here to learn more about WordPress RSS feeds.
Congratulations! Now you know where to find your WordPress RSS feed, how to syndicate your content online using feeds, and how to add someone else’s content to 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 build a better business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now