March 13

WordPress: Why You Need RSS Feed and How to Implement?

As website owners, you'll at some point of time need to distribute content. Luckily, there are various content distribution methods available to choose from, however, email marketing has been largely perceived as the best way for distributing content. But, if you're looking for an affordable yet ideal way to make your content accessible to users, then RSS feed is a viable option for you. Adding RSS feeds act as a driving force that stimulate your visitors to sign-up with your site, and is the best way to promote your content to readers. Fortunately, WordPress produces RSS Feeds for your site automatically. In fact, WordPress contains many different types of default feeds such as: post feeds, comment feeds, and many more.

But with the growth of your website, you may want to implement a particular feed type on your website. To succeed in fulfilling such an objective, a viable solution is to add the feed manually in your WordPress website. This post talks about the use and significance of RSS feeds. Additionally, it will throw light upon the technique of getting an RSS feed implemented.

Why You Need RSS Feed Anyway?

Let's have a peek at some benefits to know about the reasons that makes RSS Feeds so important for your website:

1. Makes Your Website Search Engine Optimized: One of the biggest benefit that you get by creating RSS feeds is that it helps to increase your site search engine ranking. Just as you know, search engine crawlers prefer to index sites having fresh and updated content. And, RSS feed exactly does the same job – it helps to make your website content remain up-to-date. Moreover, always using fresh and updated content will more likely stimulate users to share your content. As your content will be shared more by the users, your chances your chances to earn good ranking on search engines will also rise. 2. Increase Subscription Base: RSS feeds help attract readers to a website, as it allows them to keep track of their favorite blogging website updates all at one centralized location. This will spare you from visiting each blog on individual basis. Additionally, RSS feeds also provide users with new and updated content. All these factors will apparently convince readers to become subscribed users to your RSS feeds.

3. Better Content Accessibility: With the help of an RSS feed, users can receive updates directly from your WordPress blog or site in their browsers (except Google Chrome), and many other devices. And so, RSS Feed subscribers won't always need to remember your site URL, as they bring the content to a centralized location where they would like to keep all your website at once. This enables users to read your content, even in the offline reading mode. 4. Helps to Build Loyal Customer Base: Subscribers of your RSS feeds are more likely to share your website content within their social circles. This helps in increasing your website brand recognition among users. As more and more users will share your content and spread word about your site, your customer base will increase.

How You Can Implement RSS Feed Manually?

Even though, RSS feeds are auto-generated in a WordPress website, but you may stumble upon a situation, wanting you to implement some distinguishing feed type. This might happen as every WordPress theme doesn't necessarily contains all kinds of RSS feed types. Abiding by the following steps, however, will help you add a feed type in your site based on your need: Step 1: Get logged-in to your WordPress admin panel using your admin username and password. Step 2: Once you've logged in successfully, simply click on Appearance-> Editor available on your admin dashboard. Step 3: Now, browse through all the PHP files available for your WP site and determine the location of RSS codes. Have a look at the below screen-shot. You'll see a list of PHP files available towards the right side of the screen. Do note that the RSS feed code is usually stored in the sidebar.php or footer.php file.

Step 4: Now that you've found all the RSS feed codes, simply assign a feed type to this list. For instance, if you want to add RSS Feed for all the comments received for different posts published on your WordPress blog, then all you need to do is simply use the code displayed below:

Step 5: In order to update the changes, click on "Update File", and the RSS feed URL that you've added will be available. For example, you can view your website comments feed at "http://yoursitedomain.com/comments/feed."

Conclusion

WordPress auto-generates RSS feeds for your site, but still allows you to have control over them. You can optimize RSS feeds for yourself and your subscribers. For instance, you can manipulate your feeds by: adding more content to them, or add post thumbnail to RSS feeds, and so on. Hope that the post will provide you with good understanding about the significance and implementation of RSS Feeds in a WordPress website.

Author Bio:

Sophia Phillips is a WordPress developer working at WordPress website development company. And she also loves writing blog providing useful information about WordPress best practices and benefits it provides.