How to Find an RSS Feed
RSS feeds are a means of distributing the latest articles published by a website, like news on politics and sporting events. They're a great way to publish content that is regularly updated.
RSS stands for 'Rich Site Summary' or 'Really Simple Syndication', but most people don't bother with the long form. What matters to everyone is the simplicity of the RSS protocol and the ease with which you can distribute content as a web publisher, or aggregate it on your own website as a content curator.
A lot of prominent news organizations like Reuters and The Guardian publish multiple RSS feeds for various categories of content. Smaller news organizations that do not have the means to send correspondents to all corners of the world can simply curate content from these feeds, while explicitly including attribution to the original sources of news.
It is not hard to find RSS feeds published by websites, big and small. By default, WordPress sites have RSS feeds available unless they're manually removed by the site admins. So, here are a few ways to find them.
1. Browser RSS Autodiscovery
Most browsers either include an RSS auto-discovery tool by default or allow you to add extensions for it.
Firefox / Internet Explorer
If the website has an RSS Feed, you will see the RSS icon shown above the website in the address bar, as shown in the screenshot below. By clicking on the icon you’ll be redirected to the RSS feed’s URL which you can use in the WP RSS Aggregator feed source settings.
Chrome
When using the Chrome browser, you can search for third-party extensions that find the RSS feeds within websites for you. Start your search in the Chrome Extensions Web Store. One example is the Get RSS Feed URL extension.
2. Add /feed/ to the WordPress Site's Home URL
With WordPress powering a large portion of websites right now, many of your sources could have their RSS feed located at the following URL: https://www.sourcedomain.com /feed/, where "sourcedomain" can be replaced by the domain of your source.
WordPress Feeds for Categories, Tags & Authors
If you are looking for an RSS feed of a particular category of posts, a specific tag, or even a specific author, have a look at the other possible feed URLs you can find from the WordPress Codex.
3. Look for the RSS Symbol
When visiting any website you should look for the standard orange RSS feed logo. If you locate the icon, you can usually click on it and it will take you to the website’s RSS feed where you can obtain the URL for the feed source settings.
4. Look at the Page Source
Another easy way to get the RSS Feed’s URL, no matter what web browser you’re using, is to look at the HTML source of the website’s page. How you view it in your web browser will differ, but in most browsers, you’ll choose the Page Source or Source option under the View menu item at the top of the window. (It might be under a "Developer" option in the "View" menu".)
Once the Source window appears with the HTML for the website’s page, use the “Find” feature (Ctrl-F on PC, Command-F on Mac) and search for " RSS". This should take you to a line that reads like this (or similar):
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS Feed" href="https://www.sourcedomain.com/feed/" />
The RSS feed’s URL is found between the quotes after href=. In the above case, it would be https://www.sourcedomain.com/feed/.
Wondering how you can use RSS feeds today?
Many uninformed sources have alleged that RSS feeds and RSS technology are dying.
They can't be farther from the truth. We see more and more people coming our way to use RSS feeds for a multitude of uses. Have a look at some of the ideas (we are adding more over time) in our How To & Tutorials section.
WP RSS Aggregator is the most powerful tool out there to use RSS feeds with your WordPress site.