If you are reading this you may very well be pulling your hair (or scratching your eyes) out by now trying to figure out what the bleeping’ heck your blog feed URL is.
You may have come across scary terms like “RSS” and “Atom” as well. You poor thing. I’ve been there. And I don’t want you to be there for one more minute! This article should fix you right up.
This article will explain:
- What is a Blog Feed?
- The Fastest Way to Find Your Blog Feed URL
- What Your Blog Feed Looks Like
- The “No Matter What!” Method to Get a Blog Feed URL
- Other methods for users of Wix, Hubspot and SquareSpace blogs
What is a Blog Feed?
A feed is simply a syndicated version of your blog posts that already exist and are in a special format so other services can grab them and distribute them for you. A feed is also sometimes called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or an Atom feed.
External services like MailChimp or Feedburner or Amazon author pages will ask for your blog feed URL (or blog feed address) so they can grab the syndicated content of your blog and do with it what they will (e.g. email the latest blog post to your subscribers). RSS Readers also use this URL to display blog content.
Fastest Way to Find Your Blog’s Feed URL
The most common URL for a blog’s feed is your regular blog URL with “feed” added to the end.
For example, this blog’s URL is:
http://stickyreaders.com
so, the feed URL is:
http://stickyreaders.com/feed
Go to your blog and add “/feed” to the end of it (unless your blog URL already has a slash at the end, in which case, just add “feed”) and hit RETURN.
What Does My Blog Feed Look Like?
Here I am, going to my Sticky Readers main page and adding “/feed” to the end of it. This is what it looks like just before hitting the RETURN button. (notice there is only one slash “/” before “feed”.
And here’s what it looks like after I hit the RETURN button.
It might look a little different for you since Sticky Readers is hooked up with Feedburner so the feed URL for this blog is also feeds.feedburner.com/StickyReaders.
Adding “/feed” came back with Page Not Found. Now What?
OK, I can’t explain why adding feed didn’t work for you. But you can still find out what your feed URL is. As God is my witness I will not forsake you! Read on.
Last Resort to Finding Blog Feed URL – View the Page Source
If all else fails, you can view the page source of your home page and search for the feed URL. Outlined below are the steps for finding the URL for two different web browsers: Safari and Firefox.
Find Blog Feed URL in Safari
While on your blog’s home page, click Develop in the menu bar at the top of your screen, then choose Show Page Source.
If you don’t see the Develop menu, click Safari in the menu bar, choose Preferences, then click Advanced. Select “Show Develop menu in menu bar.” (should be a checkbox option near the bottom).
A window will appear in the lower portion of the page. Enter rss+xml in the search bar.
The right pane below the search bar will display one or more lines of WTF code, but the last line in the display window (don’t scroll down!) should show your blog feed URL:
The example above shows the line of code like this:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Sticky Readers » Feed" href="https://www.stickyreaders.com/feed" />
The highlighted code between the quotes and after href= is your blog feed URL. My blog feed URL is https://www.stickyreaders.com/feed
Ta da!
Find Blog Feed URL in Firefox
While on your blog’s home page, right-click anywhere in the page and select View Page Source.
This will open up a new window with all kinds of crazy looking code in it.
Do a search on rss+xml. (or maybe you only need to eyeball it because it will be somewhat near the top – line 35 for me)
The example above shows the line of code like this:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Sticky Readers » Feed" href="https://www.stickyreaders.com/feed" />
The highlighted code between the quotes and after href= is your blog feed URL. My blog feed URL is https://www.stickyreaders.com/feed
Ta da!
Other Methods
Here are some other ways to find your blog feed’s URL you may find useful:
- Blog Feed URLs for Wix blogs are explained in What is My RSS Feed URL? (Wix, WordPress,etc.)
- SquareSpace: Finding your RSS feed URL
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Great info, something that every blogger should know.
Mine says this
Sorry, the page you were looking for in this blog does not exist.
What do I do now?
Hi Janel!
What URL did you try when you got that message?
Hi again,
If you tried simply adding “/feed” to the end, then yeah, it looks like that is not your feed URL.
That means you have to go to the next step of viewing your page source, which I just did on your blog. If you do the same thing, you will find that your RSS feed is actually this:
http://www.janelberchielli.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss
and because you have FeedBurner, your RSS feed is also available at:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/OgcKg
And your Atom feed, should you ever need that is:
https://www.blogger.com/feeds/2271147037500627435/posts/default