No matter what what industry you are a part of, providing high-value information to your site readers is vitally important. For example, if you provide health-related services, it’s a good idea to include information from the health department, such as news or updates on medical research, health and fitness advice, etc.
The problem with creating this type of information, however, is that it requires an enormous amount of work and expertise. You have to do a lot of data sifting, researching and organizing, checking the accuracy of your sources, writing and editing 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 lot of work but most of the information you are dealing with is entirely beyond your control.
Fortunately, there is a much simpler way to keep your site readers up-to-date with your information.
It’s called RSS …
(RSS is the simplest way to provide your blog subscribers with great information)
The Ultimate Guide To WordPress RSS
What You Need To Know About RSS
- RSS, which, according to some experts is short for RDF Site Summary, is more commonly known as Really Simple Syndication. It is often referred to as a “feed” or “newsfeed”.
- Once users subscribe to an RSS feed, they no longer have to manually check the website for content updates. Instead, their browser will constantly monitor the site and automatically keep subscribers updated.
- RSS feeds are also used to publish frequently updated information, such as new blog entries, news, music playlists, etc., which users can choose to subscribe to.
- Essentially, an RSS feed is a structured XML document that includes full or summarized text along with metadata such as date of publishing, feed author, etc. It allows people to subscribe to content on websites and then browse any updates posted on these sites using an RSS feed reader. Conversely, RSS feeds also enable publishers to syndicate information automatically.
- There are different kinds of feeds, read by different feed aggregators. 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 that feeds are compatible with different machines and programs.
- Many sites and software tools also allow you to combine many RSS feeds to aggregate news and updates from different sources.
In this detailed article, we explain how to find your WordPress RSS feed, how to syndicate your content online using feeds, and how to add content from other websites and blogs to your site via RSS.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds
Content syndication is a very powerful way of sharing content online. Feeds provide a simple way for web users to stay up-to-date with the latest information posted on different websites.
First, let’s take a look at syndication.
Media publications rely on content syndication to publish news from other news agencies all around the world.
Content syndication allows most news reporting agencies and popular online publications to deliver readers the most recent news and content of interest from all over the planet without having to send additional news writers to every place around the world …
(Online newspapers and many leading media publications rely heavily on content syndication to publish stories from news sources all around the planet.)
Syndication is a legitimate way of sharing newsworthy content. Content publishing agencies syndicate information using news feeds …
(Content syndication is a legitimate method of sharing content)
Most sites actually want you to syndicate their information. Syndicating content not only allows valuable information to be shared, but it also sends visitors back to the site that originally published the content being syndicated. This provides websites with new opportunities to generate additional web traffic.
Many content publishing agencies and major content sites include an RSS feed section (look for links in the navigation menu that say ”RSS”, “Syndication”, or “Newsfeeds” in them, or just search for “name of site/keyword + rss” – e.g. “nytimes rss”, “texas tribune rss”, “sydney morning herald rss”, etc.) …
(Most online newspapers and major content sites will have a feed section. Image Source: SMH RSS )
Clicking on a site’s RSS feeds link brings up a directory of RSS feeds for different content sections of the site …
(RSS directory. Image: nytimes.com)
Each of these RSS feed items allows you to access different areas of the site (e.g. business news, sports news, science news, etc.)
Feed sections can also contain further feed subdirectories …
(Feed sections can also include subcategories. Source: Los Angeles Times RSS)
Note: An RSS feed is only a URL. To use the feed, all you have to do is copy the URL and paste it into an application that can translate the feed code into something readable. We’ll cover this further below.
The Benefits Of Syndicating Content
Adding content from someone else’s website or blog on your website has some obvious benefits. It helps someone else’s site and helps your site by freeing you up from having to create the content …
(Syndicating Content Benefits Someone Else’s Website And Yours!)
While adding a 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 websites to use your content.
When other sites syndicate your content, this gives you the opportunity to gain more exposure online and drive new visitors …
(Consider trying to get other online users to syndicate content using your feed … it will help increase your exposure online!)
WordPress RSS – Overview
By default, WordPress automatically publishes a feed of your posts, allowing others to easily syndicate your content on their websites and blogs.
Depending on the WordPress theme you have installed, there are a number of ways to get your RSS feed:
1) If your theme allows the Meta widget to display in a navigation menu, scroll down to the Meta section and click on Entries RSS …
(WordPress Meta widget – Accessing your RSS feed)
2) You can also find links and/or buttons on certain WordPress themes that allow your visitors to copy your feed.
In the screenshot below, for example, a visitor can copy the feed URL by right-clicking and copying on the Subscribe to RSS link …
(Copy feed URLs to your clipboard from “subscribe to RSS” buttons)
3) On some sites and again, depending on the theme you have installed, you can find the RSS feed displayed in a Social Share, Link To Us, or Subscribe toolbar …
(Look for an RSS button in a a Link To Us, Follow Us, or Social Share toolbar)
4) You can also view your feed by typing your site’s URL into a browser and adding “/feed” after the URL, e.g.:
- http://www.yourdomain.com/feed
- http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/feed (if your website or blog has been installed in a subfolder, e.g. “blog”)
Using any of the above methods will bring up your RSS page …
(Feed items viewed on Firefox browser)
Note that your feed items will display differently depending on the web browser you are using …
(Feed entries viewed on Google Chrome)
Specify Number Of Items To Display On Your RSS Feed
To specify how many posts you would like displayed in your RSS section, go to your Reading Settings section and type in the number of items to show in the “Syndication feeds show the most recent” field …
(Reading Settings – Syndication feeds)
The feed section will show the number of items you have specified in the WordPress Reading Settings section …
(Your feed page will display the number of items you have specified in the Reading Settings section)
Display Full Text Or Summary Of Posts In Your RSS Feed
The other setting in the WordPress Reading Settings section that affects your feeds is whether to display each article as full text, or as a summary …
(Reading Settings – Display ‘Full Text’ or ‘Summary’ for articles in your feed)
Post Excerpts can also affect how your feed content appears …
(Post excerpts affect how a feed appears)
To learn more about using Post excerpts in WordPress, refer to this step-by-step tutorial:
View The Content Of Your RSS Feeds
As mentioned previously, all that’s required to view the content of a feed is to copy the feed’s URL and paste it into a feedreader, i.e. an application that can read and translate feeds into readable content.
Let’s show you how this works.
First, go to a website whose content you want to syndicate and look for their RSS feed section …
(Look for an RSS feed section. 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 feed contains by pasting the URL of your feed into a feedreader …
(Paste your feed URL into a feed reader to view the content. Source: http://feedreader.com/online)
Like feed readers, WordPress has the ability to process XML/RSS feeds and convert these into content that can be read by your subscribers.
Adding RSS Feeds To Your WP Site
Let’s show you how to add content from other websites to your WordPress site.
Adding Feeds To Your Sidebar
As mentioned earlier, no matter what industry your business is in, you could 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 feed. You can use RSS feeds to display a range of information on your WordPress site like 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 …
(Let’s add content from an RSS feed to the WordPress sidebar navigation menu)
First, Find a site containing content that you want to display on your site and copy the feed URL to your clipboard …
(Copy your feed URL)
Next, log into your wordPress Dashboard and go to Appearance > Widget paste the feed into a new RSS widget …
(RSS Widget)
To learn more about adding content to sidebars using widgets, go here:
Load your website in your web browser. The content from the RSS feed should appear on your sidebar …
(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 Feed Content To WordPress Posts
What if you want to add content from RSS feeds to posts instead of the sidebar?
You can easily do this using WordPress plugins. Just search inside the Plugins screen (Plugins > Add New) for RSS feed, RSS feed to post, etc.
(’Add Plugins’ screen)
Note: Most RSS plugins typically require configuration – visit the plugin sites for instructions, or contact us for assistance with plugin configuration.
The plugins below are useful for adding 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 RSS/Atom feeds that you choose.
You can manage all of your imported feeds and arrange them according to categories.
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 that offers a number of premium add-ons for extended functionality.
For example, the Feed to Post add-on for the WP RSS Aggregator plugin allows you to autoblog by importing RSS feeds directly into posts or any other custom post type.
For more details, go here:
RSS Post Importer
(RSS Post Importer WordPress Plugin)
The RSS Post Importer plugin lets you syndicate, import, curate, 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 the feed as a standalone post.
For more details, go here:
Powr RSS Feed
(Powr RSS Feed – WordPress Plugin)
With POWr RSS, you can automatically combine and display content from various RSS feeds.
This plugin also lets you display videos, images, and article content, adjust feed size and spacing, use custom colors, fonts, borders, and more. It is also mobile responsive and supports text in all languages.
The premium plugin version contains a number of additional features.
For more details, go here:
WP Pipes
(WP Pipes Plugin)
WP Pipes is a powerful data migration plugin that allows you to curate content from RSS feeds, Google News, and many other sources.
This plugin provides loads of features like CSV importing for posts/WooCommerce, RSS feed creator, auto blogging, auto post to LinkedIn/Twitter/Facebook, export posts as iTunes podcasts, create Google XML sitemaps, and more!
For more details, go here:
FeedWordPress
(FeedWordPress Plugin For WordPress)
FeedWordPress provides versatile syndication options 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 site (sites that bring together posts from different sources), or display all of your online activity in one place.
For more details, go here:
Autoblog
(Autoblog 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 your feed URL, name your feed (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)
RSS Includes Pages modifies the default WordPress RSS feed to include pages in addition to posts.
For more details, go here:
WordPress RSS Feeds – Useful Tips
Tip #1 – Comment RSS Feeds
WordPress displays RSS feeds of your post comments in addition to displaying RSS feeds of your latest posts.
You can view this feed by clicking on Comments RSS in your ‘Meta’ widget (note: your theme may not be configured to display this widget) …
(Comments RSS)
All the comments posted on your site by visitors can be seen in your Comments RSS page …
(RSS comments feed entries viewed on Firefox browser)
Like post entries, your comments feed page will display differently depending on the browser you are using …
(Comments feed entries seen using Google Chrome)
Again, you can check the feed content by pasting the URL of the feed into a feedreader …
(Paste your URL of your comments feed into a feedreader to view the feed content. Source: 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 WordPress installation is in a subdomain, e.g. “blog”)
Tip #2 – Displaying Specific Post RSS Feeds
Being able to use an RSS feed for an individual post item 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 displaying an RSS feed for a specific post item is shown below:
(Feed For Individual Post Item)
To create the above feed, copy the URL of your post, and add “/feed/?withoutcomments=1” to the end.
(Single Post RSS Feed)
Note: By default, if you only append “/feed” to the end of the post URI, WordPress will return the comments for your post, not actual post content itself.
Tip #3 – Post Category RSS Feeds
Some your site users may only want to syndicate content about certain categories. They may not want to subscribe to your entire site’s feed.
With WordPress, you can easily create category feeds.
All you have to do is use the format shown below:
(Use this format for WP post categories RSS feed)
Select and copy the category link address to your clipboard …
(Select and copy your category link address …)
Add “feed” to the end of it …
(RSS feed format for post categories)
Your category RSS feed now only contains content posted for 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 RSS Feeds List
You can set up your own RSS feeds page that allows readers to subscribe only to content in specific categories, just like the larger authoritative sites do …
(Set Up A List Of Feeds)
Link an RSS icon to a category feed and then create a table or a list of all your feeds on a separate page …
(RSS button image. Image: http://www.public-domain-photos.com/free-cliparts/computer/other/rss_button_roman_bertle_01-2522.htm)
For a detailed tutorial about inserting tables into WordPress pages and posts, go here:
WordPress RSS – Additional Notes
RSS feeds can be customized in various different ways, such as adding images to feeds, ads, etc. Some of these feed customizations require editing code.
WordPress allows you to configure different feed formats without touching code. Below are examples of some of the kinds of custom feeds you can use and how to format the feeds …
(WordPress RSS – Feed Types)
For your convenience, here are the feed types, descriptions, and feed examples listed in the image above:
- Feed Type: All Posts
- Description: Content feed – contains your latest posts
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/
- Feed Type: All Comments
- Description: Comments feed – Feed containing the latest comments published on your website
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/comments/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts
- Description: Feed for an individual post
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/post-title/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts Comments
- Description: Contains the latest comments made on a post
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/blog-post-title/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Day – Includes the latest items in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2012/03/17/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Month – Displays latest post entries in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2010/03/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Year – Feed containing latest entries in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2013/feed/
- Feed Type: Search Results
- Description: Displays latest post entries for a search query
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/search/term/feed/
- Feed Type: Custom Post Type
- Description: Feed displaying latest entries for a custom type (e.g. book)
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/?post_type=book
One last thing …
Remember to let your users know that they can subscribe to your feeds. Place a subscribe buttons in a visible location …
(Remember to make your feeds visible your RSS feeds!)
Keep in mind that other sites will only syndicate your content if you provide your subscribers with high-quality information that can add great value to their sites and benefit their visitors.
(Add someone else’s content and get other sites to share your content online using 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 Images – Visit a site like FeedIcons or search online (e.g. “free rss icons”, “RSS logo download”, etc.) for sites that allow you to download RSS images.
- RSSBoard.org – The RSS Advisory Board is an independent organization responsible for publishing RSS specifications, guiding developers who create RSS applications and helping the public to gain a better understanding of RSS.
- Wikipedia.org/RSS – Learn more about RSS feeds.
- WordPress.org/WordPress Feeds – WordPress documentation and information. Visit this site for additional information about using WordPress feeds.
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 add content from other sites to your site using RSS.
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To read more about using WordPress please click on links to visit other great articles and tutorials on this site.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group