What is my website’s RSS feed?

What is the URL to my website’s RSS feed?

If you’re using WordPress, your website RSS feed under WordPress will look like this…

Once your site is ‘live’ with your new domain, (after we have pointed your domain to your new website), your RSS feed will be:

http://yourdomain.com/blog/feed/

When Using the WP-No-Category-Base Plugin

We often use a plugin called ‘wp-no-category-base‘ which removes the ‘blog’ preface before our post titles (we sometimes feel it doesn’t add any value to have the word ‘blog’ in there). In that case your RSS feed would look like this (without ‘/blog/’):

http://yourdomain.com/feed/

Category Tricks for Your RSS Feed

What if you wanted to pull from only one single particular category for your RSS feed?

http://sitesubscribe.com/yourdomain/blog/feed?cat=2

(Replace the number 2 at the end with your desired Category ID.)

Using your category title and then ‘/feed/’ at the end should also work:

http://sitesubscribe.com/yourdomain/blog/my-category-title/feed/

If you want to exclude a category from your RSS feed:

http://sitesubscribe.com/yourdomain/blog/feed?cat=-2

If you want to pull from only one single particular category (category ID 2) AND exclude a category from your RSS feed (category ID 4):

http://sitesubscribe.com/yourdomain/blog/feed?cat=2&cat=-4

Test Your RSS Feed

One way you can be sure if you have the right web address for your RSS feed it you can test your RSS feed to make sure it is working correctly by entering your URL at FeedValidator.org.

By testing your RSS feed at FeedValidator.org you will know if you have the right URL for your RSS feed, and if it is working or not.

If the feed doesn’t validate try removing the ‘/blog/’ from the RSS URL.

We recommend setting up a Feedburner feed.

We recommend you set up an RSS feed with Feedburner, a free Google service which will enable analytics and other features for your RSS feed.

You can redirect your normal RSS feed (http://yourdomain.com/feed/) to go through Feedburner, which will then make your RSS feed look like this:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourdomain
(note the RSS feed through Feedburner does not have the “.com” after it)

By having a Feedburner RSS feed rather than just a standard WordPress RSS feed, you gain the benefit of built-in analytics, including how many subscribers you have to your RSS feed and how many clicks on your RSS content there have been. There are also many optimization and enhancement features available through Feedburner should you care to take advantage of them. Another advantage of Feedburner is that if you have multiple RSS feeds (from several blogs/websites that you own) you can aggregate all of your RSS feeds under one Feedburner account (each feed remains separate but can be managed separately).

Your regular WordPress RSS feed will still work once you set up Feedburner, but by giving out your Feedburner URL as your primary RSS feed you gain insight into analytics. So you should try to give out your Feedburner feed rather than your site’s RSS feed, and point your site’s RSS feed to Feedburner.

Once your Feedburner is set up you might want to run your Feedburner URL through FeedValidator.org again to make sure it is working.

Let us know if you need help setting up a Feedburner feed, or if you set up a Feedburner account for your feed so we can make sure we are tracking it within your website.

Notes

We use ‘pretty permalinks’ under WordPress, which is why your RSS feed looks like http://yourdomain.com/blog/feed/

It’s ok to set up a Feedburner feed at any time either before or after we point the domain to your new website.

Note that while your site is under development, before we point your domain to your new website, your temporary RSS feed will look like this:

http://sitesubscribe.com/yourdomain/blog/feed/

or with the wp-no-category-base plugin activated:

http://sitesubscribe.com/yourdomain/feed/