Still a newbie here – I’m looking to setup an rss feed and track stats for a WordPress site. Any recommendations? Most of the plugins I’m seeing in the search seem to be about importing rss feed displays into my site rather than tracking use of the feed elsewhere. The documentation I’ve seen so far is confusing me.
And I’m taking it the rss feed for the site is the url plus /feed ? Or am I haring in the wrong direction?
Thanks.
You are totally heading in the right direction! Here is a super brief overview of RSS feeds in WordPress: https://wordpress.org/support/article/wordpress-feeds/#finding-your-feed-url. It mentions combining a custom permalink that you can create with your feed’s URL. I never thought to do that, myself, but it is a great suggestion, I think, to make a simple and obvious custom URL to share.
Tracking feed subscribers is something I’ve not done myself. I searched around a bit and my sense is this will require setting up some form of web analytics (e.g., google analytics) and/or installing a WordPress plugin built for this purpose. I saw Jetpack mentioned often, so you might start researching there.
There are rudimentary web analytics built into cPanel/DoOO. You can poke around with the stuff within the ‘Metrics’ box of your cPanel to see what’s offered there.
One of the things I like best about WordPress is the way syndication is built-in. Most of my experience with it involves building ‘course hubs’ to aggregate student work into a single site. But I’m curious about using RSS as you intend to. Please follow up with what you learn!
Thanks for the website. I’ve plugged one of the rss feeds in and will see how it plays out. I do have Google Analytics set up and will check into Jetpack. Much as I’d like to see a spike in subscribers, I’m not expecting much in the immediate future. More making long term plans and arrangements. If I do get any insights, though, I’m happy to share.
Feedburner was the defacto way to do this back in the day. Not sure if I’d rely on Google keeping it up if I was super-serious about this.
It’s harder to track RSS subscriptions which is one of the reasons people focused on ads have been killing them off.