The RSS Widget displays posts from any RSS feed. You might find this handy if you want to show off one of your other blogs, or one of your favorite blogs, in your sidebar.
Here’s an example of what it looks like:
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Themes that support the Site Editor do not use widgets, so you won’t see Appearance → Widgets in your dashboard. Instead, you can edit all of your site in one place at Appearance → Editor. Click here to learn how to use the Site Editor.
Using blocks, you can add the RSS block.
To add the widget to your site:
- In your dashboard, click on Appearance → Widgets.
- Choose the location where you’d like to place the widget on your site. Common options here include the Footer and Sidebar, but this may be different depending on your theme.
- Click either of the + block inserter buttons (see right) to see a list of all the available blocks and widgets.
- Scroll down to the Widgets section and click on the widget once to add it to your site.
For more general information, see this guide on working with widgets.
Once you add the widget to your sidebar, you’ll see a field to enter the RSS feed URL for the blog or website you would like to display in the sidebar:
Some RSS feed examples:
- https://wordpress.com/blog/feed/ – WordPress.com news feed
- http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Opinion.xml – New York Times Op-Ed headlines
- http://www.amazon.com/rss/tag/sci-fi/popular/ – Most popular Sci-fi products on Amazon
There are RSS feeds all over the web. To find the feed of a blog, Flickr stream, or whatever else, look for the standard feed icon, or the word “subscribe” or “feed”. Right click and copy the URL – usually by using the “copy link” or “copy link location” option available.
Once you’ve added the RSS feed URL, you can edit additional settings by selecting Show more settings from the Options submenu in the widget menu bar:
- Number of items: Sets the number of entries from the feed to show on your sidebar.
- Display author: Use this switch to show the author’s name, if available.
- Display date: Use this switch to show the date the post was published.
- Display excerpt: Use this switch to show a brief excerpt from the post in addition to its title.
- Feed URLs that start with “https://” will not work on our RSS Widget.
- Check the feed with a validation tool. If there is any error, contact the feed provider.
- Converting the original feed using FeedBurner may help solve the problem. For more information, visit their support documentation site.
