No matter what product or service your business sells, providing high-quality information on your site or blog is vitally important. For example, if your business provides health-related services, it’s not a bad idea to include information from the health department, such as news or updates on medical research, health and fitness advice, etc.

The problem with providing this kind of information, however, is that it is really time-consuming. You have to filter through, research, and organize a lot of information, check your facts, write and edit content (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 entirely beyond your control.

Thankfully, there is a much easier way to provide your users with great information.

It’s called RSS …

(RSS is one of the simplest ways to provide your users with great information)

The Ultimate Guide To WordPress RSS

RSS – What Does It Mean?

• RSS is an acronym for Rich Site Summary, or, as is more commonly known, Really Simple Syndication. It it is also called a “feed” or “news feed”.
• When a user subscribes to a website’s feed, they no longer have to physically check the website for content updates. Instead, their browser constantly monitors the content and keeps feed subscribers up-to-date.
• RSS feeds are typically used to publish information that is frequently updated, such as blog post items, news, audios, etc., to which other users can choose to subscribe.
• Essentially, an RSS feed is an XML (XML = Extensible Markup Language) document that includes full or summarized text along with other metadata such as date of publishing, author, etc. It allows people to subscribe to content on sites that publish feeds and then view any updates posted on these websites through an RSS feed reader. Conversely, RSS feeds also enable publishers to syndicate their web content automatically.
• There are different kinds of feeds, read by different feedreaders. Some of these include RSS feeds, Atom Publishing Protocol) feeds and RDF feeds. All of these formats, however, use a standard XML file format to ensure that feeds are compatible with different machines, readers, and programs.
• Many sites and software tools also let you combine multiple RSS feeds to receive news and updates sourced from different websites.

This guide shows you where your RSS feed is located, how to syndicate your content online using RSS, and how to add content from other sites to your site via their RSS feed.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds

Content syndication is a very powerful (and legitimate) method used to share content online. Feeds provide online users with a way to stay up-to-date with the latest information published on websites they are interested in.

First, let’s take a look at content syndication.

Global media publications rely on content syndication to publish news and stories from other news agencies all around the world.

Syndication allows leading news publishers to deliver readers stories on all kinds of topics and up-to-the-minute headlines from all over the planet without actually having to post additional reporting agencies everywhere around the world …

(Global media publications rely on content syndication to publish stories from news sources all around the world.)

Syndication is used to share content legitimately. Global media publications syndicate their news stories using news feeds …

(Digital news publishing agencies syndicate their news stories using news feeds)

Most sites actually want you to share their information. Syndicating content not only allows information to be shared, but it also drives visitors back to the original site that published the content being syndicated. This provides websites with new opportunities to generate additional web visitors.

Most news reporting agencies and leading online media publications will contain an RSS feed section (look for links in their navigation section that say “RSS” or “Newsfeeds” in them, or just search for “name of site/keyword + rss” – e.g. “nytimes rss”, “salt lake tribune rss”, “sydney morning herald rss”, etc.) …

(Many online newspapers and major content sites include an RSS feed section. Source: SMH RSS )

Clicking on a site’s RSS links section will bring up a list of different RSS feed sections of the site …

(RSS feeds list. Image Source: NY Times RSS)

These RSS feeds let readers source content from different sections of the website (e.g. business news, entertainment news, jobs, etc.)

An RSS feed list can also contain subcategory feeds …

(RSS Feed section. Image Source: latimes.com)

Note: An RSS feed is only a URL. All you need to do to use 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 Feeds

Syndicating someone else’s content on your site has some obvious benefits. It gives someone else’s business additional exposure online and helps your site by freeing you up from having to create this content …

(The Benefits Of Syndicating Content)

While adding RSS feeds from another site is a great way to add content to your site without having to create it, it’s worth keeping in mind that there are benefits in getting other sites to use your content.

When other websites and blogs syndicate your feed, this gives you the opportunity to gain more exposure online and drive new web traffic …

(Try to get other websites to syndicate content using your feed … it will help to increase your web traffic!)

Overview Of The WordPress RSS

By default, WordPress automatically publishes a feed of your latest posts, allowing others to syndicate your content on their websites and blogs.

Depending on your WP theme, there are a number of ways to get your WordPress RSS feed:

1) If your theme displays the Meta widget on the sidebar menu …

(Your feed page will show as many recent items you have specified in the 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 RSS feed is whether to display posts as full text, or just a summary …

(Reading Settings – Display ‘Full Text’ or ‘Summary’ for articles in your feed)

Post Excerpts can also affect how your feed content displays …

(Post excerpts affect how feeds will display)

We have created a detailed tutorial on Post excerpts here:

• A Basic Guide To Using Excerpts In WordPress Posts

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 can read and translate feeds into readable content for humans.

Let’s show you how this works.

First, find a website whose feed you want to subscribe to and search for a ’subscribe to feed’ link using any of the methods described earlier …

(Look for a ’subscribe to feed’ link or button. Image source: YourCoffeeGuru.com)

Next, copy the feed URL to your clipboard …

(Copy the feed URL to the clipboard)

If you want, you can check what the feed contains by pasting the URL of your feed into a feed reader …

(Paste the URL of your feed into a feedreader to view the content. Image: Feedreader)

Like feedreaders, WordPress has the ability to process RSS/XML feeds.

Adding An RSS Feed To Your WordPress Site

In the example below, we are going to add content from other websites to yours.

Adding An RSS Feed To Your Sidebar

As mentioned earlier, no matter what industry your business operates in, you could easily display on your site the latest updates from an industry-related government department or authoritative site in your industry by simply adding their feed. You can use feeds to display a range of information on your WordPress site such as news, social media comments, 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, Go to a site containing content that you want to display on your sidebar and copy the RSS feed to your clipboard …

(Copy the URL of your feed to the clipboard)

Next, paste the feed into a new RSS widget …

(Widgets Area – RSS Widget)

To learn more about using widgets, go here:

• How To Add WordPress Widgets To Your Website

Load your site in your browser. The content from the RSS feed can now be seen on your sidebar (or wherever the RSS widget has been added) …

(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 Set Up Webmaster Accounts

Adding RSS Feeds To Your Posts

Can you add content from an RSS feed to posts instead of the sidebar? You sure can!

You can easily do this using WordPress plugins. Just search inside your ’Add Plugins’ section for RSS Aggregator, RSS feed to post, etc.

(’Add Plugins’ search results)

Note: Most RSS plugins typically require configuration – visit the plugin sites for full instructions, or contact us for assistance configuring plugins.

Here are a number of auto blogging tools that let you create posts with RSS feeds:

WPeMatico

(WPeMatico)

WPeMatico is an auto blogging plugin that lets you publish posts automatically from RSS/Atom feeds that you select.

You can manage all of your imported feeds and organize them into campaigns and categories.

For more details, go here:

• WPeMatico Plugin For WordPress

WP RSS Aggregator

(WP RSS Aggregator Plugin)

WP RSS Aggregator is a comprehensive RSS feed importer and auto blogging plugin for WordPress with premium add-ons for additional functionality.

For example, the Feed to Post extension for the WP RSS Aggregator plugin allows you to add content to your site automatically by importing RSS feeds directly into your WordPress posts or any other custom post type.

For more details, go here:

• WP RSS Aggregator WordPress Plugin

RSS Post Importer

(RSS Post Importer Plugin For WordPress)

RSS Post Importer allows you to curate, syndicate, import, merge and display full-text feeds (RSS, Atom, etc.) on your WordPress blog.

RSS Post Importer fetches an RSS feed and publishes the full article content of each item in your feed as a separate post.

For more details, go here:

• RSS Post Importer Plugin For WordPress

Powr RSS Feed

(Powr RSS Feed)

POWr RSS combines and displays content from multiple RSS feeds.

The POWr RSS Feed plugin also lets you display videos, images, and articles, adjust feed size and spacing, use custom colors, fonts, backgrounds, and more. It is also mobile responsive and supports text in any language.

The premium version of POWr contains a number of additional features.

For more details, go here:

• Powr RSS Feed WP Plugin

WP Pipes

(WP Pipes – WordPress Plugin)

The WP Pipes plugin for WordPress is a powerful data migration plugin that allows you to create curate content from RSS feeds, Google News, and many other sources.

This plugin provides features like CSV importing for posts/WooCommerce, RSS feed creator, auto blogging, auto post to Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn, export WordPress posts as iTunes podcasts, create Google XML sitemaps, and more!

For more details, go here:

• WP Pipes Plugin

FeedWordPress

(FeedWordPress)

FeedWordPress is a versatile 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.

You can use this plugin to create aggregator site (sites that display posts from multiple sources), or bring together all your online activity in one place.

For more details, go here:

• FeedWordPress Plugin For WordPress

Autoblog by WPMUDev

(Autoblog by WPMUDev)

Autoblog is an easy-to-use plugin that can be set-up in minutes, without coding skills or complicated instructions. Just copy and paste in your feed URL, name your feed (for admin purposes) and select the blog that you want it to post to.

For more details, go here:

• Autoblog by WPMUDev

RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types

(RSS Includes Pages WP Plugin)

Use RSS Includes Pages to include pages in your RSS feed and not just posts (by default WordPress only includes posts in your RSS feed).

For more details, go here:

• RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types WordPress Plugin

Useful Tips

Tip #1 – WP Comment RSS Feeds

In addition to displaying RSS feeds of your posts, WordPress also displays RSS feeds of your post comments.

You can see this feed by clicking on Comments RSS in your ‘Meta’ section (note: this section may not be visible on some themes) …

(WordPress Comments RSS)

Comments posted on your site by visitors will appear in your Comments RSS page …

(RSS comments feed entries displayed on Firefox)

Like post entries, your comments feed content will display differently depending on the web browser you use …

(RSS comments feed content displayed using Google Chrome)

Again, you can check the feed content by pasting the feed URL into an online feed reader …

(Paste your feed URL into a feedreader to view the content. Image 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 website has been installed in a subfolder, e.g. “blog”)

Tip #2 – Individual 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 items to RSS directories, 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 post items 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 Feed)

Note: By default, if you only add “/feed” to the end of a post URL, WordPress will return the comments for that post, not actual post content itself.

Tip #3 – Displaying Post Category Feeds

Some your site users may only want to syndicate content from specific categories. They may not want to subscribe to your entire site’s feed.

If your website publishes content under different categories, you can easily offer visitors a separate feed for each different category.

Just use the format below:

(WP category RSS feed format)

Select and copy the category URL to your clipboard …

(Copy the category URL …)

Append “feed” to the end of it …

(WordPress post categories feed format)

Your RSS feed will now only display content assigned to this category …

(Category 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 An RSS Feeds List

You can set up your own list of feeds on your site that allows readers to subscribe to content in the categories that interest them …

(Set Up Your Own RSS Feeds Page)

All you need to do is link an icon like the one shown below to category feeds and then create a table or a list of all feeds on a separate page …

(RSS button. Source: public-domain-photos.com)

If you need help with creating tables in WordPress posts and pages, see this tutorial:

• How To Create And Insert Tables Into Your Content In WordPress

WordPress RSS – Additional Notes

Feeds can be customized in a number of ways, such as adding images and videos to feeds, ads, etc. Some of these customizations require editing code.

WordPress allows different RSS feed configurations without messing with code. Here are some examples of custom feeds you can create …

(WordPress RSS – Feed Types)

For your convenience, here are the different feed types, descriptions, and feed examples shown in the image above:

• Feed Type: All Posts
• Description: Content feed – Feed that displays your latest posts
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/

• Feed Type: All Comments
• Description: Comments feed – Feed that displays the latest comments left on your site
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/comments/feed/

• Feed Type: Individual Posts
• Description: Feed that displays an individual post entry
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/blog-post-title/feed/

• Feed Type: Individual Posts Comments
• Description: Displays the latest comments made on specific posts
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/blog-post-title/feed/

• Feed Type: Archives
• Description: Day – Feed that contains latest posts in each archive
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2015/12/17/feed/

• Feed Type: Archives
• Description: Month – Includes the latest post entries in each archive
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2016/03/feed/

• Feed Type: Archives
• Description: Year – Includes the latest posts in each archive
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2017/feed/

• Feed Type: Search Results
• Description: Contains latest items for a search query
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/search/term/feed/

• Feed Type: Custom Post Type
• Description: Feed displaying the latest items for a custom type (e.g. book)
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/?post_type=book

One last thing …

It’s a good idea to promote your feeds. Place your subscribe link in a visible location …

(Encourage your visitors to syndicate your RSS feeds!)

Finally, keep in mind that online users will only subscribe to your content if you provide your visitors with very high-quality content that can add great value to their sites and benefit their users.

(Add great content to your site and get others to share your content 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 feed 🙂

Additional Resources:

• Feed Buttons – Visit iconspedia.com/search/rss or search online (e.g. “free RSS icons”, “RSS buttons”, etc.) for sites that allow you to download RSS images.
• RSSBoard.org – The RSS Advisory Board is an independent organization with three primary duties: publishing RSS specifications, providing guidance to developers who create RSS applications and helping the general public gain a better understanding of RSS.
• Wikipedia/RSS – Learn more about using RSS feeds.
• WordPress Codex: RSS Feeds – WordPress software documentation and reference site. Go here for additional information about using feeds in WordPress.

Congratulations! Now you know how 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, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you expand your business online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit other great articles and tutorials on this site.

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