How to Display Any RSS Feed on Your WordPress Blog

How to Display Any RSS Feed on Your WordPress Blog

RSS helps in automatically pulling the content from other sites and displaying it on yours. This boosts user engagement, grows website traffic, and increases page views.

Why Display Any RSS Feed on Your WordPress Blog?

All WordPress blogs have built-in support for RSS feeds. This enables the users to receive regular updates from your website with the help of an RSS feed reader, like Feedly.

Using the RSS feed integrations allows you to send new post notifications to the users through email newsletters and push notifications.

The RSS feed of a blog is simply the website’s address with /feed/ added at the end.

https://www.webhostguru.com/feed/

RSS can also be used to pull content from other websites into your own.

This enables you to curate content from other websites and display content automatically from social media websites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. WordPress can also be used as a news aggregator.

There are Four methods for how to display any RSS feed on your WordPress blog as listed below:

      1) Displaying Any RSS Feed with a Widget.

      2) Displaying Any RSS Feed with a Plugin.

      3) Displaying Social Media Feeds with a Plugin.

      4) Displaying Any RSS Feed Using Code.

Method: 1 Displaying Any RSS Feed with a Widget.

Using the built-in WordPress widget, an RSS feed can be displayed on the WordPress blog. Go to Appearance » Widgets and then click the blue block inserter button at the top of the screen.

RSS feed

Next, find the RSS widget and drag it onto your sidebar or another widget-ready area. After that, type or paste the RSS feed that you wish to display.

Add Webhostguru’s RSS feed located at https://webhostguru.com/feed/. Also, add a title using a heading block.

Below is the image that shows how the RSS widget looks on our test WordPress blog.

Recent post

The default RSS widget consists of fundamental features. For example, it doesn’t allow adding thumbnails, social buttons, or other customizations. If you’d like to add those extra features, then you will have to use a plugin.

Method 2: Displaying Any RSS Feed with a Plugin

WP RSS Aggregator is a great WordPress RSS feed plugin. It allows you to display RSS feeds on your WordPress blog, and by purchasing premium add-ons, you can change your WordPress blog into a content aggregator without using any coding.

Install and activate the free WP RSS Aggregator plugin.

Once activated, you will be asked to add your first RSS feed URL. Once the feed has been entered in the URL, click the ‘Next’ button at the bottom of the page.

RSS Agrregator

On the next page, the latest feed items from the RSS feed you linked to is seen.

Click the ‘Create Draft Page’ button to add the feed to a new page draft, or use the shortcode on the right to add them to any post, page, or widget area.

wp-rss-aggrepator

Click the ‘Create Draft Page’ button. The page is automatically created, and the button text is changed to ‘Preview the Page’.

Click on that button to preview the RSS feed on your website.

The page shows a bulleted list of links to the latest three posts in the feed, consisting of information about the source, and the date the post was published.

This plugin works powerfully when you use their premium add-ons. These allow the creation of separate posts for each RSS item and import the full text of each post. Others allow keyword filtering of RSS items, the ability to organize each item, and much more.

Making use of these add-ons, this plugin can be used for auto-blogging. Scraping full content from third-party websites might lead to copyright issues and legal trouble.

Mehod: 3 Displaying Social Media Feeds with a Plugin

Adding social media feeds to your WordPress blog results inane increase in social media followers, improves social engagement, and enriches your existing content.

Smash Balloon is the best social media feed plugin for WordPress and is used by over 1.75 million users.

It is a combination of plugins that helps in the easy creation and display of custom feeds from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube on your WordPress blog.

Adding a Facebook Social Media Feed in WordPress

A Facebook feed can be added to your site by installing and activating the Smash Balloon Custom Facebook Feed plugin.

There’s also a free version available that allows you to create basic Facebook feeds, but advanced features like embedding photos, albums, and more are not included.

Smash Balloon allows you to access feeds from multiple Facebook pages and customize your Facebook feeds without coding.

create facebook rss feed

Adding an Instagram Social Media Feed in WordPress

Smash Balloon Instagram Feed is one of the best Instagram feed plugins for WordPress. Both pro and free version of the plugin is available.

This plugin allows displaying Instagram content by hashtag or account. Comments and like counts, including lightbox popups, and more can be shown.

instagram rss feed

Adding a Twitter Social Media Feed in WordPress

Smash Balloon Custom Twitter Feeds is the best Twitter feed plugin for WordPress, and both pro and free versions are available.

The plugin allows you to perform things like display multiple Twitter feeds, respond, like, and retweet while staying on your website, and displays full tweets in lightboxes.

twitter feed on wordpress

Adding a YouTube Social Media Feed in WordPress

Feeds for YouTube by Smash Balloon is a great YouTube social media plugin available for WordPress, and both pro and free versions of the plugin are available.

The plugin allows the creation of a customizable gallery from all your channels, adds live streaming, uses advanced search queries to create custom feeds, and more.

One can select from different layout templates to change the display of your video feed.

Adding youtube feed wordpress

Method 4: Displaying Any RSS Feed Using Code

With the help of code, you can use the WordPress built-in function to show any RSS feed on your blog.

Copy and paste the following code into any WordPress file that you have selected. It is recommended to create a custom page for this purpose.

This code can be customized by changing the title on Line 1, the feed’s URL on Line 7, the number of items to display on Line 12, and any other setting that you want.

				
					<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.webhostguru.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>