How to Setup Auto Discovery for Your WordPress RSS Feeds

Do you notice when you visit WPBeginner, on the URL bar there is a RSS Icon. Often you will see this icon on sites that have set their RSS Feeds on auto discovery. By setting auto-discovery you are encouraging your users to subscribe, and also you are informing those who don’t know to subscribe as well. Most themes ignore this feature which might be a single most important feature that you should have in your themes. In this tutorial, we will show you how you can setup auto discovery for your WordPress RSS Feeds.

Open your header.php and paste the following codes below the </head> code.

    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="<?php bloginfo(‘rss2_url’); ?>" />

    <link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS .92" href="<?php bloginfo(‘rss_url’); ?>" />

    <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom 0.3" href="<?php bloginfo(‘atom_url’); ?>" />

    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> RSS Comments Feed" href="<?php bloginfo(‘comments_rss2_url’); ?>" />

Many credible sites in the industry has taken this step to ensure that their readers subscribe to their sites. You should check if these codes are in your header file, if not then then you should add it. Don’t forget if you want to track your RSS Subscribers, then you should redirect your feeds to FeedBurner.