What Is a Feed in WordPress?

A feed gives readers a way to follow your latest posts without visiting your site. WordPress generates feeds for every site automatically. The main one lists your most recent posts, not your whole archive, and feed readers check it on a schedule to pick up anything new.

Feeds, RSS, and Atom

In WordPress, "feed" almost always means the RSS or Atom syndication feed: an XML file written for software rather than for people. Out of the box, WordPress builds five, according to the WordPress Advanced Administration Handbook (updated July 7, 2025): RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0 (RDF), RSS 2.0, and Atom feeds of your posts, plus an RSS 2.0 feed of your comments.

RSS 2.0 and Atom are two dialects of the same idea: an XML file listing your latest posts. RSS 2.0 (Really Simple Syndication) is the best known of the formats; its specification, hosted at Harvard Law's Berkman Center, describes the format as of fall 2002. Atom is the younger standard, published by the IETF as RFC 4287 in December 2005. For a WordPress site the choice is low-stakes, since WordPress produces both from the same posts. Share your default /feed/ URL, which serves RSS 2.0, unless a service you're connecting to specifically asks for Atom; point it to yourdomain.com/feed/atom/ instead.

Where to find your feed URLs

You don't create these feeds; WordPress already has. With permalinks enabled, add /feed/ to almost any address on your site:

• Main feed (RSS 2.0): yourdomain.com/feed/
• Atom feed: yourdomain.com/feed/atom/
• Comments feed: yourdomain.com/comments/feed/
• Category feed: yourdomain.com/category/italy/feed/ for, say, the Italy section of a travel blog
• Tag feed: yourdomain.com/tag/tuscany/feed/

Date archives, author pages, and search results follow the same pattern, per Perishable Press's feed URL reference (updated January 8, 2025): append /feed/ and WordPress serves one.

What feeds are used for

Feeds let people and software subscribe to you. A reader who adds your feed to a feed reader app gets every new post delivered there, with no need to check back. Email marketing tools watch the feed to send automatic new-post newsletters. Other sites and apps read it to aggregate or republish your content.

None of that works if nobody can find the URL, so link your /feed/ address in your site's footer or sidebar where subscribers expect it.

How many posts a feed shows

Two settings in Settings → Reading control the volume, and they govern different surfaces. "Blog pages show at most" sets how many posts your on-site blog listing displays per page. "Syndication feeds show the most recent" sets how many items the feed carries. Ten works as a starting point for both, but let your publishing pace set the feed number: raise it if you post several times a day, so subscribers whose readers sync infrequently still catch everything, and lower it if long full-text posts are making the file heavy for every reader that polls it. Keep the blog page count modest too, since a page that lists dozens of posts loads slowly. When you've picked your numbers, open Settings → Reading, set both fields, and click Save Changes.

When your feed breaks

Three failures cover most broken feeds, and each has a first move:

• The feed URL returns a 404: the rewrite rules that map /feed/ addresses have usually gone stale. Open Settings → Permalinks and click Save Changes. You don't have to change anything; saving rebuilds the rules, and it's the usual first fix in WordPress's support forums.
• The feed loads but new posts are missing: check the item count under Settings → Reading, then clear any caching plugin or CDN, since a stored copy of the feed can keep serving after you publish. Feed readers also poll on their own schedule; RSS 2.0 even includes a ttl (time to live) element telling readers how many minutes they may cache a feed before refreshing, so a new post can take a while to reach subscribers even when the feed itself is current.
• A feed reader rejects the feed as invalid: something is corrupting the XML, typically a plugin or theme writing stray output into it. Deactivate plugins one at a time and reload the feed after each until it recovers. If no plugin is the culprit, test briefly with a default theme.

Full text vs. excerpt in your feed

The same screen sets how much of each post the feed includes. "For each article in a feed, show" offers two choices, per the WordPress.org Settings Reading documentation: Full text or Excerpt. Full text gives subscribers whole posts inside their reader, the better reading experience, and it may mean fewer clicks through to your site. Excerpt sends a short summary (see excerpt), so anyone who wants the rest has to visit, and the documentation notes it could save bandwidth. Neither choice is scraper protection: your posts are public, so a scraper can copy them from your pages either way. Our rule of thumb: choose Excerpt when visits to your site matter most, and Full text when being read matters more than where. Set it under Settings → Reading and save.