RSS Is Still Relevant: Why Publishers Should Care
RSS was supposed to have died years ago. Google killed Google Reader in 2013 and the obituaries were written. Podcasting quietly kept RSS alive as its distribution backbone, and a persistent community of readers, developers, and publishers never stopped using it. In 2026, RSS is not only not dead — for certain audiences and publishing contexts, it is more relevant than it has been in a decade.
What RSS Actually Is
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a standardized XML format for publishing frequently updated content. A website that publishes an RSS feed provides a machine-readable document listing recent content: titles, publication dates, summaries or full text, and links to the originals.
Feed readers — applications like NetNewsWire, Feedly, Reeder, Inoreader, and Miniflux — subscribe to these feeds and aggregate content from multiple sources into a unified reading interface. Instead of visiting twenty publications separately to check for new content, a reader checks one application that has already fetched everything.
The key characteristic of RSS is that it is platform-independent and publisher-controlled. A reader who subscribes to your RSS feed gets your content directly, without any algorithmic intermediary deciding what they see or how it is prioritized.
Why It Matters Now
The social media era was supposed to replace RSS. It did reduce its mainstream use. It also created algorithmic mediation of content distribution — your audience sees what the platform decides to show them, in an order determined by engagement optimization, not publication time or reader preference.
Publishers who built their distribution strategy entirely around social media have experienced this directly. Algorithm changes, account suspensions, reach throttling, and platform decline (Twitter/X being the most dramatic recent example) have repeatedly cut publishers off from audiences they spent years developing.
RSS is the opposite of this. A subscriber to your RSS feed sees every post you publish, in the order you published them, in a reader they control. There is no algorithm, no engagement optimization, no platform that can decide tomorrow to reduce your organic reach. The relationship between your publication and that reader is direct.
Who Uses RSS
The RSS audience is not large by social media standards. But it is a specific and valuable audience: technically literate, actively interested in following publications rather than passively scrolling, and typically more engaged with content than the average social media follower.
Developers, journalists, researchers, academics, and serious readers in every field disproportionately use RSS. For publications targeting these audiences — technology, science, finance, policy, professional media — an RSS feed is often the preferred consumption channel for a meaningful portion of the readership.
How to Add RSS to Your Site
Most CMSes generate RSS feeds automatically.
WordPress generates feeds at /feed/ by default. Every category, tag, and author also gets its own feed. No configuration required.
Hugo generates an RSS feed at /index.xml from any section with content. The feed is generated from Hugo’s built-in RSS template. To customize the feed output, override it with layouts/_default/rss.xml.
Ghost publishes a feed at /rss/. Each tag also gets its own feed at /tag/{tagname}/rss/.
Eleventy requires a template to generate a feed — the process is documented in the section on Eleventy setup. The @11ty/eleventy-plugin-rss package handles the date formatting filters.
Full Text vs. Summary Feeds
One configuration decision that affects your RSS audience: whether to include full article text in the feed or only summaries (with links to read the full post on your site).
Full-text feeds are strongly preferred by regular RSS readers. Requiring a click-through to read content is friction, and it signals a prioritization of web traffic metrics over reader experience.
The argument for summary-only feeds is analytics and advertising — full-text RSS readers do not generate pageviews. For publications where that matters, summary feeds are a reasonable tradeoff. For publications that prioritize reader relationships and do not depend on display advertising, full-text feeds build more reader goodwill.
JSON Feed
JSON Feed is a newer alternative to RSS and Atom that uses JSON instead of XML. It is easier to parse and produce programmatically and is supported by most modern feed readers. Publishing both RSS/Atom and JSON Feed is straightforward and covers all readers.
Hugo generates a JSON feed with the appropriate output configuration:
[outputs]
home = ["HTML", "RSS", "JSON"]
Surfacing Your Feed
RSS subscribers are not going to find your feed by accident. Make it discoverable:
- Include a feed link in your site’s
<head>:<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" href="/feed.xml"> - Add an RSS icon or link in your navigation or footer
- Mention it in your about page and newsletter
- Add it to RSS discovery services like FeedBin’s directory
The audience for RSS is opt-in by nature. Making the feed easy to find is the primary growth mechanism.
The Broader Point
RSS is one piece of a broader argument about publishing infrastructure: direct relationships with readers, through channels you control, are more durable than reach mediated by platforms. Email newsletters have made this argument loudly over the past decade. RSS is the quieter version of the same principle.
For any publication that cares about long-term reader relationships and distribution independence, maintaining a clean, full-text RSS feed is a low-cost and permanent commitment to the readers who prefer it.