Should You Disable RSS Feeds on Your WordPress Blog?

RSS feeds were once seen as the future of online publishing. Back in the early 2000s, people subscribed to blogs in feed readers and pulled in updates without ever visiting a site. That era has long passed. By 2025 hardly anybody uses RSS, yet WordPress still enables feeds by default on every blog.

So the question is, should you leave them on or turn them off?

What RSS Feeds Do in WordPress

WordPress automatically creates feeds for your posts, categories, tags, and comments. You will find them at URLs such as:

/feed/
/category/some-category/feed/
/tag/some-tag/feed/

Each feed delivers your content in XML format. It was designed for syndication, and it is very convenient for one group of “users”: scrapers and bots.

Why You Might Keep RSS Feeds

There are a few situations where RSS feeds are still useful:

• Some niche industries (finance, tech news) still use feeds internally.
• A handful of automation tools (Zapier, IFTTT, Mailchimp) can pull data from a feed.
• A tiny number of readers still use feed software.

For most site owners, none of these apply.

Why You Should Turn RSS Feeds Off

For a typical WordPress site, RSS feeds bring more problems than benefits:

• Content scraping: feeds hand your posts to scrapers in a neat package. They can re-publish your work automatically.
• Duplicate content in search: scrapers sometimes end up outranking the original article.
• Server load: bots hammer feed URLs over and over, often from AWS or OVH IP addresses.
• No SEO benefit: Google does not rely on RSS feeds. It indexes via links and sitemaps.
• Dead technology: consumer use of RSS has collapsed. Almost nobody reads blogs this way anymore.

How to Disable RSS Feeds in WordPress

There are several ways to stop feeds. You can choose the one that best fits your set-up.

Option A: Add a Code Snippet to functions.php

Open your theme’s functions.php and paste this at the bottom:

<?php
// Disable all RSS/Atom feeds
function disable_all_feeds() {
 status_header(403);
 wp_die( 'Feeds are disabled on this site. Please visit the homepage instead.' );
}
add_action('do_feed', 'disable_all_feeds', PHP_INT_MAX);
add_action('do_feed_rdf', 'disable_all_feeds', PHP_INT_MAX);
add_action('do_feed_rss', 'disable_all_feeds', PHP_INT_MAX);
add_action('do_feed_rss2', 'disable_all_feeds', PHP_INT_MAX);
add_action('do_feed_atom', 'disable_all_feeds', PHP_INT_MAX);
add_action('do_feed_rss2_comments', 'disable_all_feeds', PHP_INT_MAX);
add_action('do_feed_atom_comments', 'disable_all_feeds', PHP_INT_MAX);
?>

This will return a 403 Forbidden response on all feed URLs.

Option B: Create a Must-Use Plugin

If you want the change to survive theme switches, use a must-use plugin:

1. In /wp-content/, create a folder called mu-plugins if it does not already exist.
2. Inside it, create a file named disable-feeds.php.
3. Paste the same code from above.

WordPress will load it automatically.

Option C: Use robots.txt

You can politely tell search engines not to crawl feeds by adding this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /*/feed/

This does not stop scrapers, but it tells Google and Bing that feeds are irrelevant.

Option D: Block Feeds in .htaccess

If you want a hard block at server level, add this to your .htaccess:

# Block WordPress feed URLs
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/feed/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /feed/$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

This prevents feed URLs from being served at all.

What Happens After You Disable Feeds

• Google will continue to index your site from your sitemap and internal links.
• Readers will continue to browse normally.
• Bots trying to scrape your content through RSS will hit a dead end.
• Your server log will be a lot cleaner.

Conclusion

For 99% of WordPress blogs in 2025, RSS feeds are a liability. If you do not syndicate content or pipe it into automation tools, turn them off. You will protect your content, save server resources, and lose nothing.

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