WordPress’ powerful blogging tools are what most people are familiar with. People use RSS feeds to subscribe to your new content and feed third-party reader programs like Feedly. This allows them to read your new material on the go. However, RSS feeds are no longer as popular as they were a decade ago, although many still use them regularly. The ability of social media platforms to share new content cannot be compared to RSS. Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have almost completely replaced the requirement to use the RSS feed.
We all get RSS feed functionality by default when we install WordPress, but not all of us need it. There are many legitimate reasons why you might want to disable the RSS feed on your WordPress website. Not everyone uses WordPress’ blogging feature, and some organizations may want to completely disable RSS feeds in WordPress. That’s one more problem for them to worry about.
In this article, we’ll point out some of the reasons you might want to disable the RSS feed and show you how to do it in the easiest way possible. Stay tuned to read more about:
RSS is a web feed format that allows people to get real-time updates and articles, news and other types of content from your site. “RSS” stands for RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. It allows subscribers to your email newsletters, RSS feed readers and other platforms to receive new information automatically.
The purpose of RSS feeds becomes questionable given that almost every website has a social media account that notifies all of its followers when new content is posted on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Why protect it if it serves no purpose or provides any advantage?
Plus, While usually RSS feeds can be useful for your website, WordPress includes a few feeds that you may never need. For example, there are feeds for authors, taxonomies, specific posts and pages, and more.
By turning off these RSS feeds, you can prevent search engines like Google from using all website crawling resources. By doing this, search engine bots index the more important pages on your site instead of crawling posts that are irrelevant to your website.
But remember that If you are not actively using social media sites, the RSS feed can be very advantageous for your site.. This also applies if your social media profiles don’t have a significant number of followers. Whether an RSS feed is valuable to you is primarily determined by the way you design your online presence.
Now let’s look at how to disable RSS feeds in WordPress.
Using a free plugin like Disable Feeds It is one of the simplest ways to turn off the WordPress RSS feed. Disable Feeds is a reliable plugin used by over 20,000 users. This tool blocks all RSS/Atom feeds on your WordPress website by redirecting all requests. Additionally, it can be used to disable bbPress forum feeds and BuddyPress group feeds.
Installing Disable Feeds is no different than installing any other WordPress plugin. If you have any concerns, feel free to jump into our detailed guide on installing WordPress plugins.
To adjust the plugin settings, go to Reading in Clipboard settings. The plugin redirects requests to the relevant HTML content. This means, for example, that visitors accessing a category RSS feed will be sent to the category archive page. Additionally, you can decide whether to disable the public feed and the public comment feed, or just display a 404 error instead.
Note that only the feeds themselves are disabled by the plugin; Sidebar and footer widgets that link to your RSS feeds should still be disabled in your WordPress theme options.
You can also disable RSS feeds in WordPress by adding code to your site theme’s functions.php file. If you don’t want to add another plugin to your website, the code approach is for you. It’s a good idea to back up your website as you will be replacing files in the backend and some functionality may be lost. In case of an error, you will be able to use the backup to revert to the state before editing PHP.
If you’re confident in editing WordPress files and site content, you can use this option, but if you’ve never pasted snippets from the web to WordPress, you may want to ask your developer to assist you. Even the slightest mistake can cause your website to crash, so we do not recommend modifying the functions.php file directly on your website.
Additionally, you can include the following code in a snippets plugin or a site-specific plugin:
function qode_disable_feed() {
wp_die( __( 'No feed available,please visit our <a href="'. esc_url( home_url( '/' ) ) .'">text</a>!' ) );
}
add_action('do_feed', 'qode_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rdf', 'qode_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss', 'qode_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss2', 'qode_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_atom', 'qode_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss2_comments', 'qode_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_atom_comments', 'qode_disable_feed', 1);
As a result
Turning off the RSS feed is usually a smart move because RSS is no longer as popular as it used to be, and more importantly, it can jeopardize the user experience and SEO of your site. Here are a few approaches you can take. If you are not used to coding and accessing necessary files, we recommend using the plugin approach. This process is also faster and simpler to perform.
However, the coding approach does the job flawlessly, and it’s definitely a better option if you’re comfortable using it and don’t want any other plugins on your site.
