How to Disable RSS Feeds in WordPress

Do you want to disable RSS feeds on your WordPress site?

RSS feeds allow users to subscribe to your blog posts. However, you may want to turn off the RSS feeds when building small static websites. By default, there is no option to remove RSS feeds in WordPress.

In this article, we will show you how to disable RSS feeds in WordPress.

What are RSS Feeds and Why Disable Them?

RSS is a type of web feed that helps users get real-time updates and content from your website. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. It allows your readers to automatically get new content in email newsletters, RSS feed readers, and other devices.

While RSS feeds are useful for your website, WordPress can add multiple feeds that might not be useful. For instance, there are taxonomy feeds, author feeds, individual post and page feeds, and more.

You can disable these RSS feeds and save search engines like Google from exhausting their website crawl quota. This way, search engine bots won’t crawl feeds that aren’t relevant to your site and instead index more important pages.

Plus, disabling RSS feeds makes sense if you’re not running a WordPress blog, but using WordPress more as a CMS (content management system) or simple website builder. It’s also perfect for eCommerce stores that don’t have a blog.

At WPBeginner, we have disabled several of the RSS feeds to help improve our SEO rankings.

That being said, let’s see how you can disable RSS feeds in WordPress.

Method 1: Disable RSS Feeds Using a Plugin

The easiest way of disabling RSS feeds is by using a WordPress plugin like All in One SEO (AIOSEO).

It’s the best SEO plugin for WordPress and lets you optimize your site for search engines without requiring technical knowledge or hiring an expert.

This method is easier and is recommended for beginners. We’ll use the AIOSEO Lite version for this tutorial because it allows you to disable RSS feeds in WordPress.

However, if you want to boost your search rankings, then you can use the AIOSEO Pro version to unlock more powerful features like XML sitemaps and redirection manager.

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the AIOSEO plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you’ll see the AIOSEO setup wizard. Simply click the ‘Let’s Get Started’ button and follow the onscreen instructions. For more details, please see our guide on how to set up All in One SEO in WordPress.

Next, you can go to All in One SEO » Search Appearance from your WordPress dashboard and head to the ‘Advanced’ tab.

After that, you can scroll to the ‘Crawl Cleanup’ option and click the toggle to enable it.

Once you’ve enabled the Crawl Cleanup option, simply scroll down to the RSS feeds you want to disable.

We recommend keeping the Global RSS Feed enabled because it allows your subscribed users to get the latest updates. Disabling this would mean people won’t be able to subscribe to your website, which could hurt your WordPress SEO.

On the other hand, you can disable other types of RSS feeds.

For example, you can switch off RSS feeds for authors, search, attachments, taxonomy, and more.

Don’t forget to click the ‘Save Changes’ button when you’re done.

Method 2: Manually Disable RSS Feeds in WordPress

Another way of disabling RSS feeds in WordPress is by adding code to your website theme’s functions.php file.

This method requires you to edit WordPress files, and you can use this method if you are comfortable pasting snippets from web into WordPress.

Note: We don’t recommend editing the functions.php file directly on your website because the slightest mistake can break your site.

You can also add this code in a site-specific plugin or in a code snippets plugin:

function wpb_disable_feed() {
wp_die( __('No feed available,please visit our <a href="'. get_bloginfo('url') .'">homepage</a>!') );
}

add_action('do_feed', 'wpb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rdf', 'wpb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss', 'wpb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss2', 'wpb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_atom', 'wpb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss2_comments', 'wpb_disable_feed', 1);
add_action('do_feed_atom_comments', 'wpb_disable_feed', 1);

Once the code is uploaded on your WordPress hosting server, you can try to request any RSS feed page.

To check, you can enter https://example.com/feed/ URL in your browser. Just make sure to replace ‘example.com’ with your website URL.

We hope this article helped you learn how to disable RSS feeds in WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on WooCommerce made simple and how to start a podcast using WordPress.

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