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How to Display Any RSS Feed on Your WordPress Blog

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Are you looking to display RSS feeds from other websites on your WordPress blog?

RSS makes it easy to automatically pull content from other sites and display it on yours. This can boost user engagement, grow website traffic, and increase page views.

In this article, we will show you how to easily display any RSS feed on your WordPress blog.

How to Display Any RSS Feed on Your WordPress Blog

Why Display Any RSS Feed on Your WordPress Blog?

All WordPress blogs come with built-in support for RSS feeds. They allows your users to receive regular updates from your website using an RSS feed reader, like Feedly.

You can even use RSS feed integrations to send new post notifications to your users via email newsletters and push notifications.

Your blog’s RSS feed is simply the website’s address with /feed/ added at the end like this:

https://www.yourwebsite.com/feed/

However, what many people don’t know is that you can also use RSS to pull content from other websites into your own.

This lets you curate content from other websites and automatically display content from social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. You can even use WordPress as a news aggregator.

With that being said, let’s take a look at how to display any RSS feed on your WordPress blog. We will cover four methods:

Displaying Any RSS Feed With a Widget

You can easily display an RSS feed on your WordPress blog using the built-in WordPress widget. Keep in mind that this method is not available for block themes.

To do this, navigate to the Appearance » Widgets page from the WordPress dashboard and then click the ‘Add Block’ (+) button at the top of the screen.

The WordPress RSS Widget

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

For this tutorial, we’ll add WPBeginner’s RSS feed, which is located at https://wpbeginner.com/feed/. We’ll also add a title using a heading block.

Here’s how the RSS widget looks on our test WordPress website.

WordPress RSS Widget Preview

Note that the default RSS widget comes with very basic features. For example, it doesn’t let you add thumbnails, social buttons, or other customizations. If you’d like to add those extra features, then it’s better to use a plugin.

Displaying Any RSS Feed With a Plugin

WP RSS Aggregator is the best WordPress RSS feed plugin on the market.

It lets you display RSS feeds on your blog, and by purchasing premium add-ons, you can turn your website into a content aggregator without any coding.

First, you need to install and activate the free WP RSS Aggregator plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you will be asked to add your first RSS feed URL. For this tutorial, we’ll add https://wpbeginner.com/feed/. Once you’ve entered the feed URL, click the ‘Next’ button at the bottom of the page.

Enter the Feed URL into WP RSS Aggregator's Settings

On the next page, you will see the latest feed items from the RSS feed you linked to.

You can then 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.

Click the 'Create Draft Page' Button to Preview the RSS Feed

For this tutorial, we will click the ‘Create Draft Page’ button.

Upon doing that, the page will be created automatically, and the button text will change to ‘Preview the Page’.

You can now click on that button to preview the RSS feed on your website. This is a screenshot from our demo website.

WP RSS Aggregator Feed Preview

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

WP RSS Aggregator plugin becomes a real powerhouse when you use their premium add-ons. These allow you to create separate posts for each RSS item and import the full text of each post.

Others allow keyword filtering of RSS items, the ability to categorize each item, and much more.

WP RSS Aggregator screenshots

Using these add-ons, this plugin can be used for auto-blogging. However, you should be careful when doing that because scraping full content from third-party websites may lead to copyright violations and legal trouble.

Displaying Social Media Feeds With a Plugin

Adding social media feeds to your WordPress blog can help increase your followers, improve social engagement, and enrich your existing content.

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

It’s actually a combination of plugins that make it easy to create and display custom feeds from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube on your WordPress blog.

Adding a Facebook Social Media Feed in WordPress

You can add a Facebook feed to your site by installing and activating the Smash Balloon Facebook Feed plugin.

There’s also a free version that lets you create basic Facebook feeds, but it doesn’t include all the advanced features like embedding photos, albums, and more.

Smash Balloon lets you combine feeds from multiple Facebook pages and customize your Facebook feed’s appearance without coding.

The Smash Balloon Facebook Feed Plugin

For more details, see our guide on how to create a custom Facebook feed in WordPress.

Adding an Instagram Social Media Feed in WordPress

Smash Balloon Instagram Feed is the best Instagram plugin for WordPress.

It even has a free plan that you can use to embed Instagram feeds on your website.

This plugin lets you display Instagram content by hashtag or account. You can also show comments and like counts, include lightbox popups, and more.

The Smash Balloon Instagram Feed Plugin

You can learn how to use the plugin in our detailed guide on how to create a custom Instagram feed in WordPress.

Adding a Twitter Social Media Feed in WordPress

Smash Balloon Custom Twitter Feeds is the best Twitter feed plugin for WordPress.

The plugin lets you do things like display multiple Twitter feeds, respond, like, and retweet while staying on your website, and show full tweets in lightboxes.

It even has a free version that you can use if you are on a budget.

The Smash Balloon Custom Twitter Feeds Plugin

For more instructions on adding a Twitter feed to WordPress using this plugin, see our guide on how to embed tweets in WordPress.

Adding a YouTube Social Media Feed in WordPress

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

The plugin lets you create a customizable gallery from all your channels, add live streaming, use advanced search queries to create custom feeds, and more.

You can also choose from different layout templates to change the appearance of your video feed.

The Feeds for YouTube by Smash Balloon Plugin

For more detailed instructions, see our guide on creating a YouTube gallery in WordPress.

Displaying Any RSS Feed Using Code

Using code, you can make use of a WordPress built-in function to display any RSS feed on your blog.

Simply paste the following code into any WordPress file that you choose. We recommend you create a custom page for this purpose:

<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.wpbeginner.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>

You can customize this code 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 like.

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to display any RSS feed on your WordPress blog. You may also want to see our comparison of the best domain name registrars or check out our list of proven ways to make money online blogging with WordPress.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

Disclosure: Our content is reader-supported. This means if you click on some of our links, then we may earn a commission. See how WPBeginner is funded, why it matters, and how you can support us. Here's our editorial process.

Editorial Staff

Editorial Staff at WPBeginner is a team of WordPress experts led by Syed Balkhi with over 16 years of experience in WordPress, Web Hosting, eCommerce, SEO, and Marketing. Started in 2009, WPBeginner is now the largest free WordPress resource site in the industry and is often referred to as the Wikipedia for WordPress.

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Reader Interactions

36 CommentsLeave a Reply

  1. Syed Balkhi says

    Hey WPBeginner readers,
    Did you know you can win exciting prizes by commenting on WPBeginner?
    Every month, our top blog commenters will win HUGE rewards, including premium WordPress plugin licenses and cash prizes.
    You can get more details about the contest from here.
    Start sharing your thoughts below to stand a chance to win!

  2. Jiří Vaněk says

    How does SEO specifically deal with duplication, for instance, if I display a channel across multiple websites as additional information that my website visitors can follow? Will Google view this negatively and affect my SERP rankings due to content duplication on the website?

    • WPBeginner Support says

      It heavily depends on how you are implementing the feeds. If you are linking back to a site with an RSS feed it should normally be treated as a backlink if you are only sharing a snippet and linking back to the site.

      Admin

      • Jiří Vaněk says

        Basically, I wanted to create a page on the topic of what I read, or what the reader of my website may also find interesting. The idea was to display an excerpt from another website based on RSS. That is, the title, the first few words and the whole thing to have defacto as a backlink to the given website. That is, not to display the entire content, but only an excerpt.

  3. Elizabeth says

    I have a wordpress site, and I started a new page and inserted the above in the ‘text’ screen. So I am new to this and the ‘visual’ part of the coe is showing as below. I have max items of 10. What do I do now?

    $rss_items = $rss->get_items( 0, $maxitems );

    endif;
    ?>

    get_permalink() ); ?>”
    title=””>

  4. Shekhar Yadav says

    Hello Sir ! Thank you so much for this code.. I’m also looking for same issue to implement feeds from external URL to my wordpress website. I have been successfully integrated all feeds from external URL to my website. But there is no thumbnail image is appearing with posts.. Can you please help me ?? I just want to show thumbnail image with feeds.

    Thanks in advance…

    • Rob says

      Let’s try that again… forget that my sample code would be executed :)
      The code should look something like this:
      <a href=”…” title=”…” target=”_blank”> … </a>

  5. Isabelle says

    Hi, thanks so much for this, very useful. I am trying to customise it to display the post summary as well as the title but not successful – is there an easy way to customise it for this? Thanks!

  6. Bryce says

    Is there a way to take only a certain category out of the feed and show that? I have a site where the client has the blog at a different URL. On certain pages, they want posts that are relevant. Thanks for any direction!

  7. Musadiq says

    Hi,

    How to add several RSS feeds from same (but different categories) or different websites with their thumbnail of feature image?

    Thanks in advance.

  8. michael C says

    Am also trying to add content, but a shortened version with html removed or integrated.

    I have just added get_content() ); ?> but the whole content is retrieved with untreated html markup.

    Have you got an easy way to set it up? like you’ve already written it down somewhere? :)

    and thanks a lot for sharing this script in the first place!

  9. Jesse Brockis says

    Thanks for the code, I added a few bits and pieces to fit my project namely (I’m no php lord so if I’ve done something crummy let me know):

    1. Excerpt
    2. Strip HTML tags and images from excerpt
    3. Add read more button

  10. Zach says

    I have tried this code and cant get it to work, does it only work on a wordpress.org site? we have set up a wordpress.com and I want to display the rss feed of a sport club on a specific page and not in a widget on all pages.

    Thanks in advance
    Zach

  11. sheddy sky says

    I want to display, the content(full article and picture) from a sport club to my website that will have forum where members can interact. I tried normal RSS feed code from the club site but it does not display enough content and no pictures.
    Please what can I use.

  12. nilesh says

    hi please help me I have an error on my wordpress site

    SimplePie reported: cURL error 28: Operation timed out after 10000 milliseconds with 0 bytes received

  13. rakesh kumar says

    I want to receive feeds from several sources and then i want to distribute that content into categories and subcategories. How can i do this in my wordpress blog. Do you have any idea?

  14. CY says

    Hello

    Is there any plugin or hack that I can use to display multiple RSS feeds on my WordPress site?

    For example, how do I display news excerpts from CNN, Reuters, NYT, etc?

    Possible to display specific feeds based on keywords? For example, Pinterest?

    Would be most grateful to get an answer as I have been searching high and low for the past week.

    Thanks in advance.

    • Editorial Staff says

      You can use a plugin called FeedWordPress (We used it a while ago). People are reporting that it is broken, but you can give it a try. Alternatively, use Yahoo Pipes to combine all of your feeds. Then use the pipes feed to display it on your blog.

      Admin

  15. Himanshu says

    What alterations in the code should i do in order to fetch the feed from multiple links?

    Thanks

    • Editorial Staff says

      Not sure if you can do that with this code alone. You would have to use something like Yahoo Pipes or another combine all the feeds into one. Then use it with this code. Alternatively, there are plugins like FeedWordPress that lets you do what you are talking about.

      Admin

  16. BdF says

    Yes but: discovering a feed depends on the server the feed emanates from. Since you will want to display several feeds from several different sites, if at some point ONE server is slow or down, the code will get stuck. This has been the weakness of many feeds plugins.

    • carlitos says

      Its good to show data from other websites, if you run a sports blog you can to a custom page or your own sidebars and title it like “Espn Headlines” or “FoxSports Last News”.

      Thanks for this code wpbeginner

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