Working on our blog through WordPress, we have surely seen the RRS icon, but we do not know what it is, or we have never asked ourselves. We are going to give you a preview, RSS in WordPress is a good idea.
It is a tool that is many years old, but is still in force. And why have we made reference to the blog? Because this tool allows our users not to have to visit our WordPress site to read our articles.
A user only needs to add the RSS Feed of your site to an RSS reader, to show them the publications from the moment you publish them.
What Is RSS?
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or (Rich Site Summary), sometimes we can find it with the name feed or RSS feed, and as we have said before, it allows users and applications to receive regular updates from a website or blog of their choice through a standardized text file format.
This file is based on an XML structure, where the information is organized through labels that identify each element of the content; for example, the title, date and author of a blog post, or the text-summary of that post, among others.
Being in text format, this file can be read directly, but it is preferable to use an RSS reader, which makes it easier to read and follow, showing its content on screen in a visual format and graphic elements.
To give you an example, People subscribe to a YouTube channel because they want to receive notifications every time the channel publishes a new video. RSS Feed works in exactly the same way: notification of new posts.
Set Up RSS Feed For WordPress
Having our WordPress installation by default, without the need to add plugins, we can make WordPress generate an RSS Feed file with the latest entries from our blog.
When using the tool that WorPress offers us, which is quite limited, the configuration options are very limited, it only allows you to indicate the maximum number of entries and if it includes a summary or the full text of each publication.
We have to go to the Dashboard of our WordPress, Settings → Reading.
To access and download the RSS Feed file from a WordPress website, you only need to add the string “/ feed” to our web address. For example www.ourwebsite.com, the address of our feed will be www.ourwebsite.com/feed.
We will see the content in XML format by entering this web address in the browser. In this case, if we want to see the file formatted with a readable format, we must use an RSS reader, indicating this same address.
Benefits of RSS
The main advantage is that through RSS our users can subscribe to our blog and receive blog updates and content. All this without our subscribers having to remember the URL of our website.
All content also becomes portable, and subscribers can even take it with them to read offline.
This helps to always keep the readers of our website informed, in this way they can also share the content on social networks, since surely our readers have social networks where they can publicize our publications.
With the possibility of sorting the lists in categories and groups that feed readers offer us, which is a very important point when using RSS.
WordPress RSS Feed Plugins
The RSS Feed functionality that WordPress offers is quite limited, as we have already mentioned, it does not allow us to import and integrate RSS Feeds from external websites. In this case, we must use third-party plugins when we want to enrich our content with information from external publications.
In the following post we will see the best free RSS Feed plugins for WordPress, to take advantage of all the possibilities of RSS Feeds.
We hope we have made you think about using RSS on your blog.
If you still don’t have your blog and want to start, we recommend you read this our post Create Your Website With WordPress. If you want to start you page in Squarespace, take a look at How to Create a Website With Squarespace
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