Are you willing to display RSS feeds from other websites on your WordPress blog?
RSS makes it easy to automatically pull content from other sites and display it on yours. This can boost user engagement, grow website traffic, and increase page views.
In this article, we’ll show you how to display any RSS feed on your WordPress blog.
What is Rss Feed?
Contents
RSS is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. These feeds can, for example, allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator.
It stand for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, uses several standard web feed formats to publish content in a structured XML file for syndication. An XML file in this format is called an RSS Feed. This format allows automatic syndication of data and the XML file ensure compatibility across numerous machines and programs.
The data included in the feed usually includes any content that is regularly updated on blogs such as news headlines or media. RSS allows users to receive updates from their favorite sites automatically rather than having to manually check them. They can subscribe to a website’s feed using RSS feed readers.
Why Display Any RSS Feed on Your WordPress Blog?
All WordPress blogs come with built-in support for RSS feeds. This allows your users to receive regular updates from your website using an RSS feed reader, like Feedly.
You can even control your RSS feed integrations to send new post notifications to your users via email newsletters and push notifications.
Your blog’s RSS feed is simply the website’s address with /feed/ added at the end.
https://www.yoururl.com/feed/
What many people don’t know is that you can also use RSS to pull content from other websites into your own.
This lets you curate content from other websites and automatically display content from social media websites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. You can even use WordPress as a news aggregator.
Let’s take a look at how to display any RSS feed on your WordPress blog.
Methods to display any RSS feed on your WordPress
Displaying Any RSS Feed With a Widget
You can display an RSS feed on your WordPress blog using the built-in WordPress widget. Simply navigate to Appearance » Widgets and then click the blue block inserter button at the top of the screen.
Next, you need to locate the RSS widget and drag it onto your sidebar or other widget ready area. After that, you just need to type or paste the RSS feed that you wish to display.
Note that the default RSS widget comes with very basic features. For example, it doesn’t let you add thumbnails, social buttons, or other customizations. If you’d like to add those extra features, then it’s better to use a plugin.
Displaying Social Media Feeds With a Plugin
Adding social media feeds to your WordPress blog can help increase your followers, improve social engagement, and enrich your existing content.
Smash Balloon is the best social media feed plugin for WordPress and is trusted by over 1.75 million users.
It’s actually a combination of plugins that make it easy to create and display custom feeds from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube on your WordPress blog.
Adding a Facebook Social Media Feed in WordPress
You can add a Facebook feed to your site by installing and activating the Smash Balloon Custom Facebook Feed plugin.
There’s also a free version that lets you create basic Facebook feeds, but it doesn’t include all the advanced features like embedding photos, albums, and more.
Smash Balloon lets you combine feeds from multiple Facebook pages and customize your Facebook feed’s appearance without coding.
Adding an Instagram Social Media Feed in WordPress
Smash Balloon Instagram Feed is the best Instagram feed plugin for WordPress. A pro and free version of the plugin is available.
This plugin lets you display Instagram content by hashtag or account. You can also show comments and like counts, include lightbox popups, and more.
Adding a Twitter Social Media Feed in WordPress
Smash Balloon Custom Twitter Feeds is the best Twitter feed plugin for WordPress, and there are pro and free versions available.
The plugin lets you do things like display multiple Twitter feeds, respond, like, and retweet while staying on your website, and show full tweets in lightboxes.
Adding a YouTube Social Media Feed in WordPress
Feeds for YouTube by Smash Balloon is the best YouTube social media plugin available for WordPress, and there are pro and free versions of the plugin available.
The plugin lets you create a customizable gallery from all your channels, add live streaming, use advanced search queries to create custom feeds, and more.
You can also choose from different layout templates to change the appearance of your video feed.
Displaying Any RSS Feed Using Code
Using code, you can make use of a WordPress built-in function to display any RSS feed on your blog.
Simply paste the following code into any WordPress file that you choose. We recommend you create a custom page for this purpose.
<h2><?php _e( 'Recent news from Some-Other Blog:', 'my-text-domain' ); ?></h2>
<?php // Get RSS Feed(s)
include_once( ABSPATH . WPINC . '/feed.php' );
// Get a SimplePie feed object from the specified feed source.
$rss = fetch_feed( 'https://www.wpressbeginner.com/feed/' );
if ( ! is_wp_error( $rss ) ) : // Checks that the object is created correctly
// Figure out how many total items there are, but limit it to 5.
$maxitems = $rss->get_item_quantity( 5 );
// Build an array of all the items, starting with element 0 (first element).
$rss_items = $rss->get_items( 0, $maxitems );
endif;
?>
<ul>
<?php if ( $maxitems == 0 ) : ?>
<li><?php _e( 'No items', 'my-text-domain' ); ?></li>
<?php else : ?>
<?php // Loop through each feed item and display each item as a hyperlink. ?>
<?php foreach ( $rss_items as $item ) : ?>
<li>
<a href="<?php echo esc_url( $item->get_permalink() ); ?>"
title="<?php printf( __( 'Posted %s', 'my-text-domain' ), $item->get_date('j F Y | g:i a') ); ?>">
<?php echo esc_html( $item->get_title() ); ?>
</a>
</li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</ul>We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to display any RSS feed on your WordPress blog. You can use our comment session or join our delegate on Facebook to solve any issues related to WordPress and subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials.