Want to add RSS (really simple syndication) feeds to your WordPress website?
You can find RSS feeds for everything from blog posts to eCommerce products, job listings, YouTube videos, and more.
Then there are people who use feed readers like Feedly, Feedburner, and social media platforms.
Being able to display content from these RSS feeds opens up a whole new world for your WordPress site. You could build a news aggregator, create a content hub, aggregate job listings, plus a lot more.
But to set up all those use cases, you need a way to add RSS feeds to your WordPress website, which is what we’ll cover in this post.
First, we’ll discuss two different ways that you can go about adding RSS feeds to a WordPress website. Then, we’ll show you exactly what you need to use RSS feeds on WordPress and how to set everything up.
The Benefits of Adding an RSS Feed to Your WordPress Website
Adding an RSS feed to your WordPress page offers a multitude of advantages, making it a valuable tool for both content creators and their audiences:
- Audience Growth: RSS feeds can be a powerful tool for audience building. By making your blog more accessible through RSS, you attract a larger viewership. Current subscribers are more likely to share your content on social media, creating broader awareness and boosting traffic to your website.
- Streamlined Content Access: With RSS feeds, you eliminate the need to remember or bookmark numerous URLs. All updates from your favorite blogs and websites are consolidated in your feed reader, providing easy access to diverse content sources.
- Efficient Content Management: RSS feeds allow you to archive feed items for future reference. Your feed reader can store specific information until you have time to delve into it, ensuring you never miss out on important content.
- Improved Performance on Slow Connections: RSS feeds can be a lifesaver for those dealing with slow internet connections. Rather than struggling to load full web pages, feed readers efficiently deliver updates from various sources, saving time and bandwidth.
- Customized Content Tracking: RSS feeds enable you to follow and search for specific keywords or topics. You can filter your RSS feed to display only content related to your interests and even set up notifications for specific keywords, ensuring you never miss a relevant update.
Incorporating RSS feeds into your WordPress website enhances user experience, drives traffic, and simplifies content consumption for both you and your audience.
How RSS feeds work in WordPress
In WordPress, RSS feeds work by packaging your latest content into an organized XML document. This document contains your complete articles or concise summaries, along with essential metadata like dates, authors, and categories.
To read this data, you’ll need an RSS feed reader, widely available for various operating systems and devices.
The simplicity lies in the fact that every WordPress website inherently supports RSS feeds. Each webpage features a meta tag that directs users to your website’s RSS feed location, ensuring easy access to your latest updates. Before you decide to disable them, consider the practical advantages of RSS feeds for your content strategy.
2 Ways of Adding RSS Feeds to WordPress
There are two high-level ways that you can add RSS feeds to WordPress:
- You can list the most recent content from an RSS feed in a dynamic widget or layout using an RSS feed plugin. Your visitors can interact with the content, but the content isn’t permanently stored on your site. That is, once new feed items replace the older ones, those older items are gone for good.
- You can import RSS feed items as actual posts on your WordPress site with an RSS feed plugin. That is, the feed items will show up as actual posts in the WordPress dashboard, which you can edit if needed. Basically, your imported content will be there permanently (or until you have it deleted).
Neither approach is “better” than the other – it just depends on your specific needs.
If you just want to create a simple widget or layout that lets you display the latest feed items, you’ll probably be fine with the first approach. Let’s take a look at some of the best WordPress sites.
Personal Finance Blogs is an example of this first approach. It lists the latest blog posts from blogs in the personal finance space, but each list item just links directly to the source – each item is not permanently stored on the Personal Finance Blogs site:
On the other hand, if you want to create a content curation site, news aggregator, or other similar use cases, you’ll probably want the second approach.
Travel Blogger Community is an example of the second approach:
While it looks similar to Personal Finance Blogs at first, the key difference is that each item links to a single post that’s still on the Travel Blogger Community site. That page includes a brief excerpt as well as a link to the original source.
In more WordPress-specific terms, each feed item is an actual blog post on the Travel Blogger Community site (and stored in the database).
Add RSS Feeds to WordPress
Automatically share content from RSS feeds around the world as lists or blog posts directly on your WordPress site.
Get WP RSS Aggregator ProWhat You Need to Add RSS Feeds to WordPress
To effectively integrate RSS feeds into your WordPress site, a key component is the use of plugins. The primary reason for relying on a plugin for RSS feed integration is the simplicity and efficiency it brings to the process: the right plugin will handle the technical aspects of RSS feed integration, such as fetching, updating, and displaying content from various sources, without the need for manual coding.
When selecting a plugin for RSS feeds, it’s essential to consider factors like ease of use, customization options, and compatibility with your WordPress theme. Popular plugins offer features like automatic feed updates, customizable display options, and the ability to aggregate multiple feeds into a single stream. This versatility ensures that your website can display fresh, relevant content from various sources with minimal effort.
Enter the WP RSS Aggregator WordPress plugin, which lets you take any valid RSS feed and display it on your WordPress site in a number of different ways. Below, we’ll show you how to set it up and use it to add RSS feeds to your WordPress site.
How to Set Up and Add RSS Feeds to WordPress
Below, we’ll take you through how to add RSS feeds to your WordPress page using WP RSS Aggregator. This will help you gain attention from bloggers who use feed readers like Feedly, Feedburner, or their favorite websites that make up a custom feed.
1. Find the RSS Feed URL
Before you can add an RSS feed to your WordPress blog, you first need to find the RSS feed(s) for your content source(s) if you haven’t done so already.
Struggling to find the URL in Google Chrome? Here are some tips to find a site’s RSS feed.
2. Configure WP RSS Aggregator
Once you have the URL for the RSS feed that you want to add to your WordPress RSS feed, you can use WP RSS Aggregator to import it to your site.
Again, there are two ways that you can add your RSS feed to your WordPress RSS feed:
- A list
- As actual WordPress posts
We’ll show you how to accomplish both methods…
How to Import RSS Feed Items as a List
To add RSS feed items as a list, you can use the WP RSS Aggregator plugin.
Once you install the WordPress RSS feed plugin, you can follow the simple start wizard or go to RSS Aggregator → Feed Sources → Add New to create your first RSS feed. We’ll show you the regular feed creation tool, as this is what you’ll use most of the time. This way you won’t have to edit your WordPress theme.
Either way, all you need to do is paste in the URL to your RSS feed. You can also configure a limit for feed items (older items beyond the limit will be permanently removed as newer items come in).
You can configure a few additional options if desired, but the defaults are normally fine. Then, click Publish Feed:
You should then see a list of the most recent items in the Feed Preview section, as well as a shortcode that you can use to display this feed:
To display content from this RSS feed on the front end of your site, you can use the shortcode.
Or, if you’re using the new WordPress block editor, Gutenberg, you can use the WP RSS Aggregator Feeds block to display your RSS widget.
In the Block settings, you’ll also be able to control how your feed displays, like adding pagination or choosing a different display template:
Once you publish a page with either the shortcode or block, visitors will be able to see the RSS feed content on the front end of your site, like on the home page and in Google:
If you want to change the front-end display of your RSS feed items for new content, you can create your own templates by visiting RSS Aggregator → Templates → Add New:
For more template customization options (like including image thumbnails), you can purchase the Templates add-on, which is also available as part of the Basic plan.
How to Import RSS Feed Items as WordPress Posts
If you want to add RSS feed items to your site as actual WordPress posts, you’ll also need WP RSS Aggregator’s Pro plan. This gets you access to other useful add-ons to help you force the full text of an RSS feed, filter feed items by keywords, and more things that help with your SEO.
Once you’ve installed the plugin, go to RSS Aggregator → Feed Sources → Add New to add your RSS feed.
Now, you’ll get several new settings areas to configure how your RSS feed-to-post functionality works.
For example, you’ll be able to:
- Choose which post type to use (e.g., blog posts vs a custom post type).
- Choose whether to publish feed items right away or hold them for manual action (save them as drafts or another post status).
- Assign taxonomies and authors to feed items.
- Prepend or append content to content from the feed (like adding a credit link to the source for a rich site summary).
- Remove certain content from the feed using Extraction Rules.
To learn more about how all of these settings work, you can consult the Feed to Post knowledge base or check out our complete guide to importing RSS feeds as WordPress posts.
Once you configure the settings and publish your feed, WP RSS Aggregator will start importing content according to your settings.
For example, if you import feed items as blog posts, they’ll show up in the Posts area of your WordPress dashboard.
If you chose to hold feed items as drafts (rather than publishing them immediately), you’d then need to go and manually publish new posts to make them live.
Start Adding RSS Feeds to WordPress Today
No matter whether you want to add a simple list of RSS feed items to WordPress or import feed items as actual WordPress posts, the WP RSS Aggregator plugin can help. We recommend opting for the Pro plan for $179 a year, as this is the most popular plan. With the pro plan, you’ll get access to:
- Keyword Filtering – use keywords to control what content you import (either by including or excluding feed items with certain keywords)
- Full Text RSS Feeds – import the full text of RSS feed items even if the source doesn’t include the full text in the feeds.
- Categories – divide RSS feed sources into different categories.
- Templates – create different layouts to display lists or grids of content anywhere on your site.
Add RSS Feeds to WordPress
Automatically share content from RSS feeds around the world as lists or blog posts directly on your WordPress site.
Get WP RSS Aggregator ProHave any questions about how to add RSS feeds to your WordPress site? Leave a comment!
4 Responses
Please provide a list of the syntax to use in the shortcode. How do I display a chosen RSS feed, in a chosen template, on a page or post? I assume the shortcode will need parameters from the feed source and the template, but I cannot find any sytax guide in your support documentation.
My guess is:
Is this correct? If so, where do I find the feed_name and my_template_name?
Hi Charlie, the shortcode parameters are documented here.
The parameters can be combined together, for example,
The template name can be found from the individual Edit Template page, as shown in 2b here.
The feed source name and ID are shown in the Edit Feed Source page right under the name up top.
If you need help with anything else, please feel free to reach out to support at any time.
Pagination not working. I have used the following shortcode.
Hey, please reach out to Mike in support using our contact form. We’ll help you figure out what’s going on and get that pagination working as soon as possible.