No matter what service or product you provide, it’s important to provide high-value information to your site visitors. For example, if your business provides travel services, it’s a good idea to provide users with useful information from government departments and foreign travel offices, such as news and updates on travel warnings, tips from embassies, etc.
The problem with providing this kind of information, however, is that it is really time-consuming. You have to sort through, gather, and organize a ton of data, check your facts, write and edit content (or hire someone to do this for you), and then continually ensure that this information is kept up-to-date. As you can imagine, this not only involves a lot of work but most of the information you are dealing with is entirely beyond your control.
Fortunately, there is a simpler way to keep your users up-to-date with your information.
It’s called RSS …
(RSS - One of the easiest ways to provide your site visitors with up-to-date information)
The Ultimate Guide To WordPress RSS
What Does RSS Stand For?
- RSS, which, according to some definitions is short for Rich Site Summary, is more commonly referred to as Really Simple Syndication. It it is also called a “feed” or “news feed”.
- Once a user subscribes to an RSS feed, they no longer have to physically check the website for content updates. Instead, their web browser will continually monitor the feed and keep subscribers updated.
- Feeds are often used to publish information that is frequently updated, such as blog posts, news headlines, videos, etc., to which other users can then subscribe.
- RSS feeds can be viewed with software programs called feedreaders, or feed aggregators. Aggregators can be used to access new content published on websites and distribute this content (and any updates made to this content) to other sites.
- Feeds can be made available in different types and read by different feed readers. Some of these include RSS feeds, Atom 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 let you combine many RSS feeds to display news and updates sourced from many sites.
This detailed guide 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 add content from other sites to your site using RSS.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds
Content syndication is a very powerful and legitimate way of sharing content online. RSS Feeds provide web users with a simple and easy way to receive the latest information posted on sites they are interested in.
First, let’s look at content syndication.
Global media and news reporting agencies use content syndication to publish news and stories from news sources around the world.
Content syndication allows digital content publishers to deliver readers the most recent news items and newsworthy content from all around the planet without actually having to set up more content writers in every location around the world …
(News reporting agencies and many popular media publications rely heavily on content syndication to publish newsworthy items from other news agencies around the globe.)
Syndication is used to share content legitimately with other sites. Digital news agencies syndicate their newsworthy content using feeds …
(Syndication is a legitimate way of sharing content)
Most websites actually want you to share their information. Syndicating content not only allows information of great value to be shared, but it can also drive visitors back to the site that published the original content being syndicated. This creates new ways to drive traffic back to their site.
Many news reporting agencies and major content sites contain an RSS feed section (look for links in the navigation menu that say “RSS” or “Newsfeeds” in them, or just search for “name of site/keyword + rss” – e.g. “nytimes rss”, “chicago tribune rss”, “sydney morning herald rss”, etc.) …
(Major content sites have a feed section. Image Source: Sydney Morning Herald )
Clicking on a site’s RSS feeds link will bring up a directory of different RSS feed sections of the site …
(RSS feeds list. Source: nytimes.com)
gives you access to content from different areas of the site (e.g. business news, entertainment news, lifestyle magazine, etc.)
An RSS list can also contain further feed subdirectories …
(An RSS list can also include subcategory feeds. Image Source: Los Angeles Times)
Note: An RSS feed is simply a URL. All you need to do to use RSS 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.
Using RSS Feeds
Adding content from someone else’s site on your site has some obvious benefits. It not only gives additional exposure online to someone else’s site, it also adds value to your site without you having to create the content …
(Syndicating Content Benefits Someone Else’s Website And Yours!)
While adding 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 and blogs syndicate your content, this gives your business the opportunity to gain more exposure online and drive new visitors …
(Look for ways to get users to syndicate your RSS feed … it will help drive more traffic to your site!)
Your WordPress Feed
WordPress automatically publishes a feed of all your posts, allowing other online users to easily syndicate your content on their websites.
Depending on your WordPress theme, there are a number of ways to get your RSS feed:
1) If your theme has been configured to display the Meta widget in your navigation menu …
(Your feed will show the number of items you have specified in your WordPress 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 each article in a feed as full text, or as a summary …
(WordPress Reading Settings – Show ‘Full Text’ or ‘Summary’ for articles in your feed)
Post Excerpts can also affect how your feed content appears …
(Post excerpts can affect how content in your feeds appear)
If you need help WordPress Post excerpts, see this tutorial:
View The Content Of Your RSS Feeds
As mentioned previously, all that’s required to view the content of an RSS feed is to copy the feed’s URL 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 search for an RSS feed link …
(Look for an RSS feed section. Image source: http://www.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 feed URL into a feedreader …
(Paste the feed URL into a feedreader to view the content. Image Source: http://feedreader.com/online)
Like feedreaders, WordPress also has the ability to process XML/RSS feeds.
Adding An RSS Feed To WordPress Sites
In the example below, we are going to add content from other website’s RSS feeds to yours.
How To Add Feeds To Your WordPress Sidebar
As mentioned earlier, no matter what industry you are part of, you could easily add to your site the latest news and updates from an industry-related government department or authoritative site in your industry by simply importing content from their feed. You can use 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 content sourced from an RSS feed to the WordPress sidebar navigation menu …
(Let’s add content from an RSS feed to your sidebar)
First, Go to a site containing content that you want to display on your site and copy the feed URL to your clipboard …
(Copy the feed URL)
Next, go to your Widgets screen and paste the feed into an RSS widget …
(RSS Widget)
To learn more about adding content to sidebars using widgets, go here:
Refresh your web browser. The content from the RSS feed should now appear in 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:
Adding Feed Content To Your Posts
Can content from an RSS feed be added to a post? It sure can!
You can do this using WordPress plugins. Just search inside your Plugins screen (Plugins > Add New) for RSS Post, RSS feed to post, etc.
(‘Add Plugins’ section – RSS plugins)
Note: Most RSS plugins typically require configuration – visit the plugin sites for full instructions, or contact us if you need assistance with plugin configuration.
Here are some auto blogging tools that allow you to create new with RSS feeds:
WPeMatico
(WPeMatico WP Plugin)
WPeMatico is an easy to use plugin that lets you publish posts automatically from RSS/Atom feeds that you select.
You can manage all the feeds you import and organize feeds into categories.
For more details, go here:
WP RSS Aggregator
(WP RSS Aggregator – WordPress Plugin)
WP RSS Aggregator is an RSS feed importer and auto blogging WordPress plugin that offers premium add-ons for additional functionality.
For example, the Feed to Post add-on allows you to autoblog by importing RSS feeds directly into posts.
For more details, go here:
RSS Post Importer
(RSS Post Importer Plugin)
RSS Post Importer allows you to import, curate, syndicate, merge and display full text feeds on your WordPress blog.
The plugin fetches an RSS feed and publishes the entire content of every item in your feed as a separate post.
For more details, go here:
Powr RSS Feed
(Powr RSS Feed Plugin For WordPress)
With POWr RSS, you can automatically combine and display content from various RSS feeds.
The POWr RSS Feed 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 version of POWr contains many additional features, such as the ability to display different feeds, manually accept or reject posts in your feed, 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 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, auto blogging, auto post to Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter, export posts as podcasts, create Google XML sitemaps, and more!
For more details, go here:
FeedWordPress
(FeedWordPress)
FeedWordPress is a flexible syndication plugin 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.
FeedWordPress can be used to create aggregator sites, or bring together all your online activity in one place.
For more details, go here:
Autoblog
(Autoblog by WPMUDev Plugin)
Autoblog is an easy-to-use plugin that can be set-up in minutes, with no coding required and no complicated instructions. Simply copy and paste in the URL of your feed, give it a name of your choosing (for admin purposes) and select a blog that you want it to post to.
For more details, go here:
RSS Includes Pages
(RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types 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 – Comment RSS Feeds
In addition to giving online users access to feeds of your posts, WordPress also displays RSS feeds of your post comments.
You can access your comments feed by clicking on Comments RSS in your ‘Meta’ widget area (note: your theme may not be configured to display this widget) …
(WordPress Comments RSS)
All the comments posted on your site by visitors and users will appear in your Comments RSS page …
(RSS comments feed items seen on Firefox)
Like post entries, your comments feed content will display differently depending on the browser you are using …
(RSS comments feed content displayed on a Google Chrome browser)
Again, you can check what the RSS feed contains by pasting the feed URL into a feed reader …
(Paste your comments feed URL into a feedreader to view the content. Image: 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 WP site installation is in a subfolder, e.g. “blog”)
Tip #2 – Accessing Feeds For Specific Post Items
Being able to display an RSS feed for a specific post 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 using an RSS feed for a specific post item is shown below:
(Single Post Feed)
To create the above feed, copy the URI 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 a post address, WordPress will return the comments associated with your post, not the post content itself.
Tip #3 – Category Feeds
Some your site users may only be interested in subscribing to content from specific categories. They may not want to subscribe to your entire site’s feed.
If your website or blog contains content published under various categories, you can easily create a separate RSS feed for each different category.
All you need to do is use the format below:
(WordPress RSS feed format for post categories)
Select and copy the category URL …
(Copy the selected category URL …)
Add the word “feed” to the end of it …
(Format for WP category RSS feed)
The RSS feed will now only display content published under that particular 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 – Publish A Feeds List
You can provide a list of RSS feeds that allows your readers to subscribe to specific content, just like the larger authoritative sites do …
(Provide Your Own List Of RSS Feeds)
You can also link a button icon like the one shown below to the URL of your category feed and then create a table or a list of all your category feeds on a separate page …
(RSS icon. Source: http://www.public-domain-photos.com/free-cliparts/computer/other/rss_button_roman_bertle_01-2522.htm)
To learn more about adding tables to WordPress posts, refer to this step-by-step tutorial:
RSS Feeds – Notes
Feeds can be customized in a number of 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 editing code. For example, here are just some of the kinds of feed types you can use …
(Different Feed Formats You Can Create Using WordPress RSS)
Below are the feed types, descriptions, and feed examples listed 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 – RSS feed that displays the latest comments posted on your website or blog
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/comments/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts
- Description: RSS feed containing a post entry
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/post-title/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts Comments
- Description: Feed that includes the latest comments made on a specific post entry
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/post-title/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Day – Contains the latest post entries in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2014/09/13/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Month – Includes the latest posts in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2017/11/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Year – Includes latest entries in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2011/feed/
- Feed Type: Search Results
- Description: Includes the latest posts for a search query
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/search/term/feed/
- Feed Type: Custom Post Type
- Description: Contains the latest entries 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 promote your feed. Place a subscribe links somewhere visible …
(Encourage visitors to subscribe to your RSS feeds!)
Finally, keep in mind that other website owners will only want to subscribe to your content if you provide your subscribers with high-quality content that can add value to their sites and benefit their users.
(Easily add great content to your site and get others to syndicate your content online using 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 RSS feed 🙂
Resources:
- RSS Graphics – Visit a site like feedicons.com or search online (e.g. “free RSS icons”, “rss icon”, etc.) for sites that allow you to download RSS graphics.
- RSSBoard.org – The RSS Advisory Board provides useful information about RSS.
- Wikipedia/RSS – General information about using RSS feeds.
- WordPress Codex – Official WordPress documentation and information. Go here for more information about using RSS feeds in WordPress.
Congratulations! Now you know where your RSS feed is located, how to syndicate your content online using feeds, and how to display someone else’s content on your site using their RSS feed.
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other great content we have published on this site.
***
"Your training is the best in the world! It is simple, yet detailed, direct, understandable, memorable, and complete." Andrea Adams, FinancialJourney.org