Thanks to the Internet, there is a ton of news on a wide variety of topics. To help people filter through the mess of news that comes out every day, you can create a WordPress news aggregator website to collect and sort news from different sources in one easy-to-find location – your own content aggregator.
What makes a good content aggregation website?
Made famous in part by sites like The Drudge Report, content aggregation sites are part of the daily browsing habits of many web users.
However , content aggregation sites aren’t just for blindly dumping content from an RSS feed.
To create a quality WordPress news aggregator website, you’ll want to consider these points:
- Have the con had is sortable. Make sure that any solution you use for aggregated news allows you to add categories to different news sources/articles so that readers can easily find what they are looking for.
- Add a variety of content. Make sure your site can successfully aggregate content from a variety of sources; otherwise, you won’t be offering as many benefits to your readers.
- Use a news-friendly theme. Choose a WordPress theme that allows visitors to quickly scan multiple articles to find one that interests them.
- Be sure to provide attribution. It goes without saying, but you should provide attribution to the original source so you don’t end up accidentally stealing content. li>
In the sections below, we will show you how to create a WordPress news aggregator website that meets the above conditions and is designed for success.
How to create a WordPress news aggregator website
Here are the steps you need to follow:
Step 1: Find a good WordPress host
If you plan to create an aggregator of content, you will need reliable hosting. Fortunately, for a low-maintenance project like a content aggregator, you can find a wide range of “starter” hosting plans that offer great flexibility and competitive pricing.
Ideally, choose a host that offers a free domain and SSL certificate (although you can find cheap or free SSL certificates as well). Beyond that, most cheap WordPress hosting plans will provide you with enough storage and bandwidth to start building a content aggregator.
If you decide to follow our Bluehost recommendation, be sure to follow one from our Bluehost links. Going through them will result in two things: (1) they are affiliate links, which means we get a small commission if you buy through them, (2) will unlock a price with a discount of $2.75 vs. $3.95 for you. You will not get this discount if you visit the Bluehost site any other way.
Step 2: Choosing a Theme for Your WordPress News Aggregator Website
To Create a Content Aggregator Site In WordPress, you’ll need a robust theme and an RSS plugin that can import feeds like headlines and/or full WordPress posts.
Your theme should be able to display multiple posts on the page. If you can’t handle this, then your news aggregator site will be eaten up by the competition.
Take Techmeme as an example and how the three column structure gives them the opportunity to display ~12 headlines over the fold. If you go to the final section you will see another 13 headlines organized in a two-column structure. Suitability for a WordPress news aggregator website means that a theme can display a lot of headlines.
All those headlines means that a good content aggregator site has a lot of headlines. information. This makes navigation options the second “make or break” criteria. Whether your aggregator site organizes content by source or category, you’ll need to make things easy for your readers.
Notice how Metacritic offers multiple options for navigation through the page.
With this is in mind, you should use a theme that arranges content within a grid, such as Oblique. It’s a free newsmagazine theme, which means it’s set up to display multiple articles on a single page clearly.
I also like the look of Readable as a content aggregator site because it has a grid nice setup with a good menu option at the top of the screen.
You can also check out Gather, which is another great theme for content aggregation because it has multiple layout options. built-in layout Choose from one to four column masonry layout options for the best content sharing options.
Step 3: Install a WordPress RSS Aggregator Plugin
Then , after the theme is set up, the next thing you need is to select a plugin that can help you collect and post the articles to your feed.The best option for this is an RSS aggregator plugin, for two reasons:
- Firstly, you can set it up once and then let everything automate.
- Secondly, you will be able to import the sources as actual WordPress posts.
For this, we recommend Feedzy: the Pro version. Or, if you can fix Using them with a little less features, you can also get the free version of Feedzy here:
Start by installing Feedzy me like any other plugin.
Step 4: Finding feeds for aggregation
Once you have installed and activated the plugin, you are ready to get the feeds for your WordPress news aggregator website.
For WordPress blogs, it’s almost always a matter of adding /feed to the end of the site URL. Here’s what you’ll see:
For On any other page, you can look for the RSS feed icon, such as the one from The Economist:
When you find a feed that interests you, click on it to see a screen similar to the screen for old WordPress source. The page URL will be the feed URL you need for your content aggregator site to collect data.
You can view a site’s source code with any browser’s developer tools and CTRL F and search “rss”:
In this case, everything that follows “ href=” is gold font for a content aggregation site.
You can also add YouTube RSS feeds to your site. Just go to the YouTube Subscription Manager. You can export the RSS feed of any YouTube channel you are subscribed to. After exporting the file, simply open it and you can copy and paste the channel feed URL and make your WordPress news aggregator website really stand out.
Step 5: Adding feeds to your aggregator site WordPress
We are going to use Oblique to set up a WordPress video aggregator site. Using the method above, I collected a bunch of RSS feeds from YouTube.
Login to your WordPress site’s control panel and click on Feedzy → Feed Categories: p>
Click on Add Category to get started. Give the Category a name and paste all your feeds into the Category Feeds editor.
Once you’ve entered the URLs, hit publish to have your first category up and running.
To start adding feeds to your site, you will need to grab the slug from the category page.
Then click Import Posts in the Feedzy menu and click New Import to open the Import Setup Wizard. Give the posts a name and paste the slug into the Power Supplies field.
If you are adding content using a large RSS feed, you can use Feedzy’s feed filters option to narrow down the posts. Simply enter the keywords to include or exclude in the field.
Now you can start assigning the values to your feed imports to make your site functional. You’ll see quite a few options, but for a content aggregator site, you’ll need to select ‘publish’ from the menu.
For the second step, you will need to set the appropriate category for each of the posts. It’s important to follow the rules to create useful categories.
This step should be pretty simple, but if you’re setting up exclusions, you might want to set posts to draft.This will give you the option to review before anything is posted.
One of Feedzy’s best qualities is the provided shortcodes, which will help you automate the naming and attribution processes.
You can also configure Feedzy to use the original article’s publication date or its own publication. Fortunately, Feedzy provides all the codes, you just need to select according to your preference.
When it comes to content, you have quite a few options. However, for a good aggregator site, an excerpt and the URL back to the original site are best.
You can also choose to include the blog’s featured image or video. This, again, should depend on your preference. Note, however, that a post without images will allow you to add more headlines.
Once you are happy with your choices, click ‘Save