No matter what your business sells or what industry you belong to, it’s vitally important to provide quality information on your site or blog that educates, informs, and engages your visitors. For example, if your business provides insurance-related services, it’s a good idea to publish the latest information from government departments, such as news or updates on statistical findings, insurance tips, etc.
To create and publish this kind of information, however, is very time-consuming. You have to sift 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 ensure that this information is continually 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.
Thankfully, there is an easier way to regularly provide your users with expert, up-to-date information.
It’s called RSS …
(RSS - The easiest way to provide your site readers with great information)
The Ultimate Guide To WordPress RSS
What You Need To Know About RSS
- RSS stands for Rich Site Summary, or, as is more commonly referred, Really Simple Syndication. It is often called a “feed” or “news feed”.
- RSS allows content publishers to automatically syndicate their content to save readers time from having to keep revisiting their site to check for updates.
- Feeds are often used to publish frequently updated information, such as new blog entries, news headlines, audios, etc., which users can choose to subscribe to.
- RSS feed content can be viewed with a program called an RSS reader, or aggregator. Feedreaders are used to access content on all different kinds of topics and syndicate this content (and any updates made to this content) to other sites.
- There are different kinds of feeds, read by different feed aggregators. 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 machines and programs.
- Many sites and software tools also allow you to combine multiple RSS feeds to display news and updates sourced from a number of other websites.
This article explains where your RSS feed is located, 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.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds
Content syndication is a powerful (and legitimate) method used to share web content. Feeds provide web users with a simple way to stay up-to-date with the latest information published on sites and blogs they are interested in.
First, let’s look at syndication.
Global media and content agencies use syndication to publish stories from news agencies around the world.
Syndication allows most leading news reporting agencies to deliver readers the latest stories and news from all over the planet without actually having to set up more reporters and writers in every location in the world …
(News reporting agencies and highly-visited online media publications use syndication to publish newsworthy stories from other news agencies around the planet.)
Syndication is used to share information legitimately with other sites. online media publications syndicate their stories using feeds …
(Content syndication is used by digital news publishers to share content with other publications)
Most sites actually would like you to syndicate their content. Content syndication not only allows information of great value to be shared, but it can also send visitors back to the original site responsible for publishing the content being syndicated. This provides websites with new opportunities to generate significant web visitors.
Many news reporting agencies and major sites contain 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”, “express tribune rss”, “sydney morning herald rss”, etc.) …
(Many online newspapers and major online media publications have an RSS feed section. Image Source: smh.com.au )
Clicking on a site’s RSS feeds section brings up a list of RSS feeds for different areas of the site …
(A directory of different RSS feeds. Image: nytimes.com)
These feeds let readers source different areas of the site (e.g. business news, entertainment news, jobs, etc.)
An RSS directory can also include further feed subcategories …
(RSS Feed section. Source: LA Times)
Note: A feed is only a URL. All you need to do to use RSS feeds is to copy the URLs and paste these into software that can process the feed code into something readable. We’ll cover this further below.
Content Syndication – Benefits
Adding content from someone else’s site on your website has some obvious benefits. It not only gives someone else’s website additional exposure online, it also helps your site by freeing you up from having to create that content …
(Syndicating Content Has Many Benefits!)
While adding an RSS feed from another site is a great way to add content to your site that you don’t have to create, it’s worth keeping in mind that you also want other sites to use your content.
When other websites and blogs syndicate content using your feed, this gives your business the opportunity to gain increased exposure online and drive more web traffic …
(Try to get users to syndicate content using your feed … it will help to increase your exposure online!)
WordPress RSS – Overview
By default, WordPress automatically publishes a feed of your latest posts, allowing other online users to syndicate your content on their sites.
Depending on your WordPress theme, there are a few ways to access your WordPress RSS feed:
1) If your theme has been configured to display the Meta widget in a standard or custom menu …
(The feed page will display the number of items you have specified in the WordPress Reading Settings section)
Display Full Text Or Summary Of Posts In Your RSS Feed
The other setting in the Reading Settings section that affects your feeds is whether to display each article as full text, or just as a summary …
(Settings – Reading Settings – ’For each article in a feed show’ options)
Post Excerpts can also affect how the content in your feed displays …
(Post excerpts can affect how a feed appears)
For a detailed step-by-step tutorial on using excerpts in WordPress Posts, go here:
View The Content Of Your RSS Feeds
As mentioned earlier, to view a feed’s content, you have to copy the feed’s URL to your clipboard and paste it into a feedreader, i.e. an application that translates feeds into readable content for humans.
Let’s take a look at how this works.
First, find a website or blog and look for a ’subscribe to feed’ button …
(Search for an RSS feed link. Image source: http://www.yourcoffeeguru.com)
Next, copy the feed URL to your clipboard …
(Copy your feed URL)
If you want, you can check what the RSS feed contains by pasting the URL of your feed into a feed reader …
(Paste the feed URL into a feed reader to view the feed content. Image Source: Feedreader)
Like feedreaders, WordPress has the ability to process RSS/XML feeds.
Adding A Feed To WordPress
Let’s show you how to add content sourced from another website or blog to yours.
How To Add Feeds To Your Sidebar
As mentioned earlier, no matter what industry your business is a part of, you could easily display on your site the latest content from an industry-related government department or authoritative site in your industry simply by adding content from their RSS feed. You can use 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 your sidebar …
(Add content from an RSS feed to your sidebar)
copy the RSS feed from a website that publishes content that you want to display on your sidebar to your clipboard …
(Copy the URL of your feed)
Next, go to your WordPress Dashboard > Appearance > Widgets and paste the feed into a new RSS widget …
(Widgets Area – RSS Widget)
To learn more about adding content to sidebars using widgets, go here:
Load your site in your browser. The content from the RSS feed should appear in the 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 A Feed To WordPress Posts
What if you want to add content from RSS feeds to WordPress posts instead of a sidebar?
You can do this using plugins. Just search on the WordPress plugin directory for RSS, RSS feed to post, etc.
(RSS plugins)
Note: These plugins typically require configuration – visit the plugin sites for full instructions, or contact us if you need help with plugin configuration.
Here are some plugins that you can use to curate and add content from RSS feeds to your posts and pages:
WPeMatico
(WPeMatico Plugin)
WPeMatico is an easy to use auto blogging plugin that allows you to publish posts automatically from selected RSS/Atom feeds.
You can manage all of your imported feeds and arrange feeds according to categories.
For more details, go here:
WP RSS Aggregator
(WP RSS Aggregator)
WP RSS Aggregator is a comprehensive RSS feed importer and autoblogging plugin for WordPress that offers premium add-ons for additional functionality.
For example, the Feed to Post extension allows you to autoblog by importing RSS feeds directly into posts.
For more details, go here:
RSS Post Importer
(RSS Post Importer – WordPress Plugin)
RSS Post Importer lets you syndicate, curate, import, merge and display full text feeds (RSS, Atom, etc.) on your WordPress site.
The plugin will fetch an RSS feed and publish the full article 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)
The POWr RSS Feed plugin allows you to combine content from a number of different RSS feeds.
This plugin also lets you display videos, images, and articles, adjust the priority of different feeds, use custom borders, colors, fonts, and more. It also displays feeds correctly on all computers, phones, and tablets and supports text in any language.
The premium version of POWr contains many additional features.
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, autoblogging, 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 Atom/RSS syndication plugin for WordPress.
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 sites, or bring together all of your online activity (e.g. from your blog, Twitter, Flickr, or other online services, in one place.
For more details, go here:
Autoblog
(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. Just copy and paste in your feed URL, name your feed (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)
By default, WordPress only posts posts in your RSS feed. Use a plugin like RSS Includes Pages if you would like 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 makes available RSS feeds of comments posted on your site in addition to making RSS feeds of your posts available to online users.
You can see your comments feed by clicking on Comments RSS in the ‘Meta’ section of your sidebar menu …
(WordPress Comments RSS)
Comments posted on your site by visitors can be seen in the Comments RSS page …
(Comments feed items displayed on Firefox)
Like post entries, your comments feed items will display differently depending on which web browser you are using …
(RSS comments feed content viewed on a Google Chrome web browser)
Again, you can check what the feed contains by pasting the feed URL into an online feed reader …
(Paste your URL of your comments feed into a feedreader to view the feed content. Image: Feedreader)
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 subdomain, e.g. “blog”)
Tip #2 – Displaying Specific Post Feeds
Being able to select an RSS feed for specific posts can be useful. For example, you may want to add feeds from specific posts to RSS directories, or you may have created a valuable resource that other online users will want to syndicate.
The formula for creating an RSS feed for individual posts is shown below:
(Feed For Single Post Item)
To create the above feed, copy the URI of your post, 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 for your post, not the post content itself.
Tip #3 – Post Category RSS Feeds
Some your site users may only be interested in syndicating content from specific categories. They may not want to subscribe to all of your site’s content.
With WordPress, you can create category feeds.
Just use the format shown below:
(WP category feed format)
Select and copy the category URL …
(Copy the selected category URL to your clipboard …)
Append “feed” to the end of it …
(Use this format for WordPress post categories RSS feed)
Your feed now only includes content published in that 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 – Set Up A Feeds Directory
You can set up your own feeds list that allows your readers to subscribe to specific content …
(Create Your Own Feeds List)
All you need to do is link an image to the URL of your feed and then create a table or a list of all your individual feeds on a separate page …
(RSS button graphic. Image: http://www.public-domain-photos.com/free-cliparts/computer/other/rss_button_roman_bertle_01-2522.htm)
We have written a detailed tutorial about creating tables in WordPress posts here:
WordPress RSS – Notes
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 several feed formats that do not require touching code. For example, here are some of the kinds of custom feeds you can display …
(WordPress RSS – Feed Types)
Below are the feed types, descriptions, and feed examples listed 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 – Feed that includes the latest comments posted on your blog
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/comments/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts
- Description: Feed that displays individual items
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/blog-post-title/feed/
- Feed Type: Individual Posts Comments
- Description: Contains the latest comments made on single items
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/blog-post-title/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Day – Contains the latest entries in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2013/03/06/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Month – Feed displaying the latest posts in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2011/10/feed/
- Feed Type: Archives
- Description: Year – Displays the latest items in each archive
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2015/feed/
- Feed Type: Search Results
- Description: Contains the latest post entries for a search query
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/search/term/feed/
- Feed Type: Custom Post Type
- Description: Displays the latest entries for a custom type (e.g. book)
- Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/?post_type=book
One last thing …
Remember to let visitors know that they can subscribe to your feeds. Place your subscribe button image somewhere visible …
(Remember to promote your feeds!)
Finally, keep in mind that online users will only want to syndicate your content if you provide your subscribers with high-quality information that will add value to their sites and benefit their users.
(Easily add great content from other sites and get other users to share your content online with RSS!)
If you need help coming up with content ideas subscribe to our FREE content creation course using the form below:
Also, don’t forget to subscribe to our feed 🙂
Additional Resources:
- RSS Feed Buttons – Visit www.iconspedia.com/search/rss or search online (e.g. “free RSS icons”, “rss logo”, etc.) for sites containing downloadable Free RSS graphics.
- RSSBoard.org – The RSS Advisory Board provides useful information and links to resources about RSS.
- Wikipedia.org/RSS – Learn more about using RSS.
- WordPress Codex – WordPress documentation. Go here for additional information about RSS feeds in WordPress.
Congratulations! Now you know 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 RSS feeds.
Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better business online. To read more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit 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