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You can only publish so much.
If you want your site to be a hub of activity with readers returning every day, an excellent tactic is to source content from other websites.
Including a news feed on your website is a great way to keep fresh content and also make your website feel more alive.
I’m sure you’ve been on websites that feel dead. With recent social media posts or news articles embedded on your site, your site will appear up-to-date and alive even when you’re not publishing new content.
To add a news feed to your site, consider these plugins first.
The best news feed plugins
The plugins listed here work in a variety of different ways.
Some of the plugins below will automatically publish stories as blog posts on your site. Some of them will keep an updated list of links that you can add to your sidebar with a widget. Others will do both.
Regardless, only plugins with high-ratings from their users made it into this collection.
Here are the best news feed plugins for WordPress.
1. Echo RSS Feed Post Generator
Plugin Description
This neat plugin allows you to create a news site powered by feeds. Given its versatility, there are a few ways you can use this plugin.
First, you can use this plugin to republish blog posts on your site. For example, you would configure a custom RSS feed, and then every time a new article shows up in that feed, a new post will be published on your site. This is effective if you want to make a simple blog powered by RSS feeds. You can also use the built-in article spinning tool to have the articles partially rewritten. This is sometimes called “auto-blogging.”
You can also use this plugin to create a simple feed meaning a list of links. Since you can get content from any sites you want, you can build an entirely custom feed that will automatically update with links to new content from around the web. You can publish the feed in a post or page, or in your sidebar using a widget. There are also options allowing you to get a short description for the article instead of the full article or only displaying the title.
Overall, Echo RSS Feed Post Generator is a really flexible solution for adding a news feed to your WordPress website.
2. Flow Flow
Plugin Description
Your first instinct might be to generate a news feed via RSS, but social media actually serves as a news feed for most internet users. That’s why you might want to consider the Flow Flow plugin which is the top WordPress plugin for embedding social media feeds in WordPress.
This social feed plugin works with all the top networks including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube. Plus, you can actually use it with traditional RSS too. What really sets this plugin apart is the design.
With Flow Flow, you can organize the news feed into a carousel gallery, masonry grid, a single-column “wall” layout, and more. Instead of outputting a simple list of blue links, it gets an image for every story allowing you to create a beautiful gallery of new articles. This styling will give your site a much more modern look than using a more traditional design.
3. Modern News Ticker
Plugin Description
Nothing will give your site more of a news vibe than adding a ticker across the top of the site. While there are numerous news ticker plugins to choose from, the Modern News Ticker plugin stands out as the best.
This news plugin has 15 different themes to pick from, plus customization options for the scrolling behavior and layout. If you run a newspaper website then you might want to make Modern News Ticker use your own posts. However, it can also use external content. You can give the plugin an RSS feed instead and it will automatically update with the content in the feed. Since you can create custom RSS feeds with a mashup of different sites, this allows you to link out to top stories from around the web on auto-pilot.
Modern News Ticker also has support for Twitter, so you could aggregate content on your Twitter account and then simply display those Tweets in the news ticker by connecting your account.
4. WordPress Automatic Plugin
Plugin Description
While this plugin isn’t exactly made for news feeds, you might appreciate its flexibility. Given how much it can do, there’s a chance that it will be the perfect plugin for your website.
The WordPress Automatic Plugin is designed specifically to publish new posts on your site with content fetched from external sources. If you wanted to create a separate feed alongside your normal posts, you could do that by using separate categories for the imported posts and the ones that you write.
Like the other plugins listed here, this can be done via RSS. What makes this plugin more advanced is the huge variety of platforms it integrates with. With this auto-blogging plugin, you can import content from sites like eBay, Amazon, Craiglist, Reddit, and Youtube. That may have given you some good ideas already, but you can also import content from all the most popular social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
5. Stock Market & Financial News Headlines
Plugin Description
If you want a really simple solution for a finance blog, grab a copy of the Stock Market & Financial News Headlines plugin.
This plugin comes pre-integrated with Yahoo Finance, Seeking Alpha, and Financial Content. It will automatically pull stories from these news sources and display them in a list complete with titles, excerpts, news source, and publication dates. It’s great for displaying the latest news in the sidebar of your blog, or perhaps on a dedicated news page.
While the pre-existing integrations make this plugin easier to set up, it also makes it much less flexible than the other plugins. If you want control over the news sources that are used to create your feed, you’d be better off with one of the other plugins listed here.
Which news feed plugin is best?
Echo RSS Feed Post Generator is extremely flexible and should be the first plugin you consider.
That said, Flow Flow could very well be the best news feed plugin for your site. It’s emphasis on social media feeds and slick design make it a more modern solution.
What did you think of these plugins?
If you have questions or feedback to leave about these news feed plugins then let us know in the comments below.
