How to get your RSS feed working in WordPress

Ever had that annoying issue where you see this?

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If you haven’t then you probably won’t find this post very useful, if you have then continue reading for some great tips on getting your RSS feed working.

Your RSS feed is great for syndicating your content across the web. Some people read content almost exclusively from RSS feeds. With an RSS feed you can have your content display on twitter, facebook and even google plus (with a little help from tools like hootsuite). So let’s get started and see how we can get an RSS feed working on your WordPress site.

Add Theme Support

The most common problem with an RSS feed not showing is that the current theme does not support automatic feed links. Adding this support is very simple, quick and easy. You can even do it inside the Appearance > Editor section of WordPress. You will need to edit your themes functions.php file, either via ftp or Appearance > Editor and then select Theme Functions (functions.php) on the right hand side.

Inside your theme setup, usually located inside an add_action(‘after_theme_setup’,'{Insert theme function}’), you will want to add the following line of code.

add_theme_support( 'automatic-feed-links' );

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This will add a nice RSS feed link (https://epicwebs.co.uk/feed) to your WordPress site. Head on over to your sites’ feed url /feed/ to see if it is working. If your sites’ feed url is working then great go syndicate it!

Well Known Issues With RSS Feeds

Files or folders called ‘feed’ will conflict with the feed url. Take a look inside your WordPress root directory and check that there is not any files or folders called feed, feed.html, feed.php and so on.

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Another issue which can cause your feed url to not work correctly is permalinks. Make sure you have a good permalink structure which will show your feed url as /feed. If you need to keep your current permalink structure you can potentially find your feed url using the following structure: https://epicwebs.co.uk/?feed=rss

Good luck getting your feed to display correctly. If you have any further issues then please leave a comment below.

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