Create email subscriptions, podcast lists, and integrations with news aggregators with your RSS feed URL.
An RSS feed is a tool for helping people access content from your site. News aggregators and feed readers, which collect posts from different blogs and websites into one location, pull content from RSS feeds. RSS feeds also enable people to access new episodes of your podcasts and receive email update notifications.
Squarespace websites have built-in RSS feeds for all blog, events, store, gallery, and album pages. When you publish content on one of those pages, its RSS feed automatically updates, creating the new content as an .xml file. Any external services that subscribe to the RSS feed will pull this new content.
Squarespace RSS feeds pull:
- The 20 most recent items, such as blog posts, products, or events.
- The 300 most recent podcasts.
This guide explains how to use RSS feeds with your Squarespace site.
Tip: The RSS URL for any page is the full URL including the page slug, followed by ?format=rss.
Before you begin
Other services can't see RSS feeds when you have a site-wide or page password. To enable RSS feed options, disable passwords.
Finding the RSS URL
Visitors can use RSS feed URLs to add your pages directly to their feed readers, and you'll use them in the options discussed below, such as email update notifications.
Each blog, events, store, gallery, and album page on your site has its own RSS URL, which you can find by adding ?format=rss to the end of the full URL, after the page slug.
Depending on whether you use the built-in domain or a custom domain, it will look like one of these:
https://www.yourdomain.com/pageslug?format=rss
https://sitename.squarespace.com/pageslug?format=rss
For detailed steps, visit Finding your RSS feed URL. That guide also explains how to create a filtered RSS feed URL by including tags or categories.
Tip: If you go to the URL for a page's RSS feed, you'll see the text for the .xml file, which computer systems use to pull your content.
Email subscriptions
You can use a third-party service to add a subscribe option to your RSS feeds. Subscribers receive email notifications when you publish new content.
To enable visitors to sign up for email updates for a specific page via Mailchimp:
- Create a new, empty list in Mailchimp.
- Add a newsletter block or form block to your Squarespace site.
- In the block's Storage tab, select Mailchimp and connect to the list you created. You'll use this list when setting up your RSS campaign (see below).
To set up emails that send automatically when you update content:
- Create an RSS Campaign on Mailchimp's Campaigns page, using the RSS feed URL for the page.
- Connect that campaign to an email list. If you created a list for the newsletter block or form block as described above, use that list.
For detailed steps, visit Adding email subscriptions to your blog.
RSS for blogs
One of the most common uses for RSS feeds is to allow visitors to subscribe to your blog via feed readers.
To encourage visitors to subscribe to your content, use the RSS Block to add a button to your site. We recommend setting it up this way:
- Add an RSS Block.
- Connect the RSS Block with FeedBurner. This opens the RSS feed within FeedBurner's interface, rather than taking your visitors to the .xml file.
You can also provide visitors with your RSS feed URL as text or a link, so they can add it to the feed reader they prefer, such as such as Feedly and Bloglovin'.
Your blog's appearance in Feedly
Feedly will display the 20 most recent posts with the following content:
| First image in the post | Feedly will use whichever image appears first in the post. This could be the first image block, first image in a gallery block, or a video block's thumbnail. |
| A text snippet | Feedly pulls the first 100 to 200 characters into a text snippet. Blog excerpts (added in the Options tab of the Post Editor) aren't used. |
| The post's author | The post's author in Squarespace will automatically display unless the post is in Feedly's Featured section for most recent posts. |
RSS for podcasts
For podcasting, you'll set up a special blog page that connects with Apple Podcasts using RSS tags and the RSS feed URL for your page.
For detailed steps, visit Podcasting with Squarespace.
See traffic from RSS feeds
With Squarespace analytics, you can view the total number of RSS subscribers to your blog or podcast and see referral sources to your site's content.
Note: Squarespace can provide general help with your blog's RSS feed. RSS readers are third-party services that fall outside of Squarespace support.
Troubleshooting
My RSS service isn't able to find my feed
If your feed reader or other third party product isn't able to find the feed for your page:
- Confirm you're using the correct RSS feed URL: the full URL including the page slug, followed by ?format=rss.
- Disable any page password set for that page, or site-wide passwords.
- Ensure the site is paid and your site is public.
- Ensure the page is enabled.
- If you're using a custom domain instead of the built-in URL, confirm that your domain is properly connected.
- RSS feed URLs only work for collection pages; they don't work for layout pages or cover pages.
- Try running your RSS feed URL through a feed validator. We recommend the W3C Feed Validation Service. If your feed isn't valid, the validator will suggest steps for fixing the issue. Often this is caused by invisible formatting in your content, which can happen when you paste from an outside source. You can cut and paste without formatting to resolve this issue.
Tip: If the validator says your feed is valid, it may suggest other improvements you can make to your feed. As long as your feed is valid, these improvements aren't necessary for connecting the feed to the RSS service.
My album, events, gallery, project, or store page feed isn't displaying enough information
Different page types have different properties, which can affect how their content looks when pulled from an RSS feed. For example, gallery page RSS feeds don't include metadata such as titles and descriptions. Some third-party products may have trouble with feeds for content that isn't date-stamped, such as store, album, and gallery feeds.
If an events pages is set to Calendar display, its RSS feed will only pull events for the current month. Set it to List view to enable the RSS feed to pull all upcoming events.
If any of your collection pages aren’t displaying in RSS the way you'd like them to, you can channel content from different collections through a hidden blog page to create a new RSS feed. This lets you add more content to each RSS item, by adding that content to a blog post, without it appearing on your site.
For example, to use a blog page to push event information to an RSS feed:
- Create a blog page.
- Move the page to your Not linked section.
- Publish a blog post containing event information and a text or content link to the event page.
- Share the RSS feed for your blog page with visitors.
Some blog posts aren't appearing in my RSS feed or RSS reader
Squarespace RSS feeds only pull the 20 most recent blog posts. Since RSS is designed to serve recently published content from a site, this limit avoids overwhelming readers with a full archive of posts.
I changed my primary domain
Changing your primary domain shouldn't affect the number of subscribers to your RSS feed, but it can affect the way that third-party services, such as Apple Podcasts or FeedBurner, connect to your feed.
If you used your primary custom domain for your RSS feed, then designated a new primary domain, we recommend updating your RSS feed URL in all connected services.
For a more reliable RSS feed, use your built-in URL.