How To Fix WordPress RSS Feed Errors

RSS feeds are published using the XML markup language. Therefore, a single, tiny mistake can make your RSS feed unreadable. Users will not get access to new content and this can make it look like your website is not publishing new content. Other apps also rely on updates from the WordPress RSS feed. Therefore, if there is a problem with your RSS, these won’t work either.

Very simple things can break the RSS feed on your WordPress website. Just a missing line break or an extra tab could be the cause. And while these are simple to put into place, they’re very hard to find unless you know what you’re looking for.

Luckily, you can get RSS error messages. They will look something like this:

XML Parsing Error: XML or text declaration not at start of entity
Location: http://example.com/feed
Line Number 4, Column 3:

Error messages might change, it does depend on your internet browser.

Poor formatting is going to be the most likely cause of the RSS error. Therefore, you need to open up your theme’s functions.php file. This can be done through a FTP program.

Check the closing PHP tag at the end of the file. Ensure there isn’t an extra space or a line break after it. The closing PHP tag isn’t really needed either so you can just remove it. This should actually solve the majority of the errors and your RSS feed should work again.

If the above has not worked, and you’re using a plugin that modifies the website’s RSS feed, then you should disable the plugin. If you’re not certain which plugin might be interacting with the WordPress RSS feed, then disable them all and reactive them one at a time until the RSS stops working again. The last one you activated before the RSS stopped working is the plugin that is the problem.

Sometimes the problem is the theme you’re using. Therefore, switch to a default theme and see if that makes a difference. If it does, then the theme was the initial problem.

If a theme or plugin is the cause of the problem, you should contact a member of the development team for the theme/plugin. They might be able to solve the problem for you and therefore you can continue to use the plugin/theme.

Otherwise, you might need to find another theme/plugin.