Have you ever wanted to turn off RSS feed capability in WordPress? While feeds are useful for many sites, you may want to disable RSS feeds to optimize performance and SEO.
In this guide, I‘ll show you two easy methods to disable RSS feeds in WordPress. I‘ve been working with WordPress for over 15 years, so I‘ll also provide my expert advice for the best approach based on your site needs.
Let‘s start with a quick background on RSS feeds…
Contents
A Brief History of RSS Feeds
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) emerged in the late 1990s as a way for websites to share updates. It allowed users to subscribe to blogs/sites to get new content delivered automatically.
Over the years, RSS evolved into a standard web feed format built on XML. It became popular for everything from blogs to news sites and podcasts.
WordPress automatically generates several RSS feeds using your content:
- Global feed with all posts
- Category, tag, and author-specific feeds
- Feeds for archives, searches, attachments, etc
These feeds can be useful, but also become bloated over time. Many sites don‘t need all the auto-generated feeds draining server resources.
That‘s where disabling RSS feeds can help…
Why Disable RSS Feeds?
Here are three key reasons you may want to disable RSS feeds:
1. Save Crawl Budget for Search Engines
Search bots like Googlebot allocate a crawl budget to index sites. This is a limit on how many pages they will crawl.
Unused RSS feeds waste crawl budget that could be better spent indexing important pages. I‘ve seen sites improve SEO by disabling feeds.
2. Optimize Site Performance
Generating dynamic RSS feeds uses extra processing power. Disabling unused feeds frees up server resources.
On large sites, this can have a measurable impact on performance and page load times.
3. Avoid Security Vulnerabilities
RSS feeds can potentially expose security issues to attackers. Disabling them reduces vulnerable surface area.
Of course, keeping WordPress and plugins updated is the best security practice. But limiting feeds provides extra protection.
Now let‘s go over your options for disabling WordPress RSS feeds…
Method #1: Use All in One SEO Plugin (Recommended)
My recommendation for most users is to disable RSS feeds using the All in One SEO (AIOSEO) plugin.
AIOSEO is the most popular WordPress SEO plugin, with over 3 million active installs.
The free version has all you need to disable feeds. Upgrading to Pro provides more powerful SEO tools.
Here‘s how to use AIOSEO to disable RSS feeds:
Step 1: Install and Activate AIOSEO
First, install and activate the AIOSEO plugin in your WordPress dashboard.
Upon activating, you‘ll see a setup wizard to configure the plugin.
Go to AIOSEO > Search Appearance > Advanced and scroll down to the ‘Crawl Cleanup‘ section.
Enable the toggle for Crawl Cleanup and you‘ll see a list of different RSS feed types.
Step 3: Toggle Off Unneeded Feeds
Flip the toggle for any auto-generated feeds you want to disable. Leave the main Global Feed enabled.
Step 4: Save Changes
Don‘t forget to click ‘Save Changes‘ to apply your feed settings.
AIOSEO makes it that easy to clean up and disable redundant RSS feeds!
Method #2: Manually Disable Feeds (Advanced)
The other option is to manually disable RSS feeds by adding code to your theme‘s functions.php file.
However, I don‘t recommend editing theme files directly. One mistake can crash your site.
That‘s why I suggest using a plugin like WPCode to safely add code snippets.
Disable Feeds with WPCode
Install and activate the WPCode plugin and go to Snippets > Add Snippet.
Search for ‘rss feed‘ and you‘ll find a ready-made snippet to disable feeds.
Click ‘Use Snippet‘ and toggle it active on the next screen.
This inserts code in functions.php to disable RSS feeds and show a custom message.
Pros and Cons of Manual Disabling
The benefit of manually adding code is full control over feed handling. But the risks outweigh this for beginners.
I only recommend manually disabling RSS feeds if you‘re an advanced WordPress developer. For most users, AIOSEO is a safer choice.
My Expert Recommendation
So in summary, here is my recommendation based on 15+ years working with WordPress:
For beginners, use the AIOSEO plugin to easily toggle off unused RSS feeds in a few clicks. This is the simplest option.
For advanced users who want complete control, manually disable feeds by adding code snippets with WPCode. But be cautious editing files.
I hope this guide has helped you learn how to disable unnecessary RSS feeds! Let me know if you have any other questions.
