If your site runs on WordPress, you already publish RSS feeds, probably more than you know. WordPress creates them automatically and keeps them updated every time you publish.
The feeds you have
| Feed | Address |
|---|---|
| Latest posts | /feed/ |
| Latest comments | /comments/feed/ |
| One category | /category/name/feed/ |
| One tag | /tag/name/feed/ |
| One author | /author/name/feed/ |
| Comments on one post | post address + feed/ |
| A search | /?s=word&feed=rss2 |
The main feed is RSS 2.0. Adding atom/ after /feed/ gives you the Atom version. If your category base is not the default, such as /topics/ on this site, the category feeds follow it.
Full text or summary
In Settings → Reading, the option “For each post in a feed, include” lets you choose full text or excerpt. Full text is friendlier to readers; we explain why it rarely costs you visits in our article about making money from feeds. The same screen sets how many items the feed shows; ten is the default, and 20 or so suits most blogs.
Featured images
By default, WordPress feeds do not include the featured image, so posts look bare in some readers. Many themes and SEO plugins add it, or you can add a few lines to your theme to put it at the start of each item.
Making the feed easy to find
WordPress already announces its feeds in the page code, so readers find them from your home page address. It does no harm to add a visible “RSS” link in the footer too, as we do.
Turning feeds off
Some sites disable feeds for privacy or because they do not want content copied. That also cuts off loyal readers, and scrapers have other ways to copy pages. If you do it, at least keep the main feed and disable the rest.
And if you want to check the result, the W3C validator will tell you whether your feed is well formed.
