Every “best RSS plugins” list gives you five options and zero pipeline. This is the other kind of post: one working RSS aggregator on WordPress, built end to end with one plugin, one review habit, and zero scraping nonsense.
The result is a curated hub for whatever niche you serve: feeds come in, filters trim them, drafts pile up, you approve the good stuff, and every published item credits its source. Automation does the collecting. You stay the editor.
Here’s the whole build.
Let’s jump right into it.
What this RSS aggregator build covers (and what it skips) 🗺️
The deliverable: a niche news hub that imports headlines and excerpts from sources you chose, queues them for your review, and publishes the winners with a link back. Think “industry briefing that assembles itself,” not “content farm.”
Two things this is not. It’s not a plugin roundup; if you want options, there’s a perfectly good RSS-to-post comparison and a guide to displaying multiple feeds on a page already on this site. And it’s not an autoblog in the spray-and-pray sense. Full-text scraping without permission is a copyright problem and a search-engine liability, and it has no part in this build.
The tool of choice is Feedzy, an RSS aggregator plugin whose feed-to-post feature does exactly what this build needs. Disclosure, once: Feedzy is made by ThemeIsle, the family WPShout belongs to.
The pipeline at a glance
Five stages: source feeds → keyword filters → imported drafts → your review → published with attribution. Every stage has one job, and the human gate in the middle is not optional. Skip it and you’ve built a splog with extra steps.
The build, step by step
1. Assemble a source list worth reading
Ten feeds you actually respect beats fifty you grabbed because they existed. Vet each source for a couple of weeks in a reader first: does it publish original reporting, does it publish at a sane cadence, does its feed include usable excerpts? Most WordPress sites expose their feed at /feed/ on the homepage, and the Feedzy docs have a full guide to finding a feed URL when it’s less obvious.
One legal-flavored note on source choice: some publishers state feed-use terms on their sites. Reading them takes minutes and beats a takedown email later.
2. Create the import project
Feedzy’s feed-to-post engine runs on import projects. The free version includes one project, and a single project can hold several sources, so you can genuinely pilot this build for $0. Multiple independent projects, each with its own schedule and rules, are the Pro feature.
The single most important setting in the whole build: import to draft, not publish. Everything lands in a queue where it can be reviewed, edited, or deleted before anyone sees it.
3. Filter hard, then filter again
Filters are what separate curation from a firehose. The free tier supports a single title-filter condition per project; Pro adds multiple conditions, so you can require “wordpress” AND exclude “deal” in the same breath. Start strict and loosen later. A queue with four great drafts a week is a resource; one with forty random ones is a chore you’ll abandon.
4. Do the taxonomy plumbing
Imported items arrive as ordinary posts, so give them a dedicated category from day one (“Industry News” or similar) to keep them visibly separate from your original work. The free version maps imports into your existing categories; automatically deriving categories from keywords in each item’s title is a Pro feature called Auto Categories Mapping:
While you’re plumbing: imported posts support canonical tags pointing back to the source, which tells search engines where the original lives. Turn that on. It’s the right thing for SEO hygiene and for the people you’re quoting.
5. Set the schedule, then check the cron
Imports run on a schedule you pick per project: hourly, daily, weekly, and so on, with custom intervals as a Pro feature. Weekly and daily suit curated hubs; hourly suits news tickers and people who enjoy regret.
Now the part everyone learns the hard way: WordPress scheduled tasks run on WP-Cron, which only fires when someone visits the site. On a low-traffic site, your “every hour” import can quietly become “whenever someone shows up.” The fix is a real system cron hitting wp-cron.php, which any decent host documents; note the schedule dropdown even carries externally created intervals for exactly this setup.
6. Run the review desk
Block a recurring slot, twice a week works for most niches, and process the drafts queue: keep, edit, delete. Add a sentence or two of your own framing to everything you keep. That commentary is the value your version adds over the raw feed, and it’s also what makes the page meaningfully yours.
For archive hygiene, Pro’s auto-delete can expire imported posts after a set age. News goes stale; your archive doesn’t have to show it.
7. Know what a sick feed looks like
Feeds fail in characteristic ways, and the plugin’s docs cover the usual suspects. A feed that suddenly stops importing is often invalid XML (a quick validation check answers it) or a bot-protection response: 403 means “we don’t like your user agent,” and 429 means “you’re asking too often.” The fixes are correspondingly dull: set an honest user agent, drop the import frequency, and if a publisher keeps fighting, take the hint and drop the source.
Build the habit of checking imports after any schedule change. A silent cron failure looks exactly like a quiet news week until you notice the timestamps.
Staying on the right side of it ⚖️
The rules that keep this build legitimate:
- Excerpts, not full text. Importing complete articles from third-party feeds is copyright territory and Google’s spam policies are unambiguous about scaled, unoriginal content. Feedzy’s Developer tier technically offers full-text imports; the sane use case is your own network of sites, where you own the content.
- Attribute every item. Source name, link, canonical tag. Non-negotiable.
- Add something. Commentary, context, a counterpoint. If the imported item reads fine without your site existing, your site isn’t adding value.
- Respect robots and terms. A publisher who blocks or asks you to stop gets removed, cheerfully and immediately.
For the syndication side of the street (your content going out to other places), there’s a separate guide to WordPress content syndication that pairs well with this one.
Monetizing the hub (carefully) 🧭
A curated hub makes money the way niche newsletters do: sponsorships once the audience exists, your own products or services in the sidebar, and affiliate links where they’re genuinely relevant. Feedzy Pro can append referral parameters to imported item URLs, which is the tidy way to handle the affiliate case.
The honest sequencing note: none of this works at launch. A brand-new aggregator with twelve imported excerpts earns nothing, because traffic follows curation quality, not the act of aggregating. Build the habit, grow the audience, monetize the trust. In that order.
Performance at scale 🗄️
One quiet side effect of a working aggregator: your post count grows on autopilot. Ten items a day is three hundred posts a month, and each one carries a featured image if you let it. Two habits keep that from becoming a problem. First, let Pro’s auto-delete retire stale imports on a schedule that matches your niche’s news cycle. Second, keep a normal page cache on the public side; unlike course checkouts or member dashboards, a news hub is all public content, so caching is safe and the site stays fast.
The point isn’t to scare you off volume. It’s that a three-month-old import about a product launch nobody remembers helps nobody, and pruning it is a feature, not a failure.
What the free tier buys, and where Pro starts 💳
The free version genuinely runs this pipeline: one import project, several sources inside it, one title-filter condition, display blocks and widgets thrown in. It holds a 4.6-out-of-5 rating across 360 ratings on 40,000+ active installs, for whatever social proof is worth to you.
Pro is where scale lives. Personal is $99/year introductory (renews at $199) for one site with unlimited projects and the full filter set. Developer, from $149/year introductory, adds the full-text import service, a built-in paraphrasing service, and AI rewriting hooks (bring your own OpenAI or OpenRouter key for the AI hooks; that’s a separate running cost). Agency, $399/year introductory, covers 50 sites and adds translation plus premium support. All renewals bill at full price, so plan against the renewal number, and there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee on the lot. Current tiers live on the Feedzy pricing page.
Straight talk on what to buy: nothing yet. Build the pilot on the free tier, and upgrade only when you hit the actual wall: needing a second project, wanting the multiple filters, or drowning in archive cleanup.
Last word 💬
A curated aggregator is one of the few content plays where the tooling is cheap, the workflow is an hour a week, and the output is genuinely useful to a niche. The catches are all editorial: pick good sources, filter hard, review everything, attribute always.
Running a curated hub already? What’s in your review queue workflow, and what would you tell someone starting one this week?
How to Speed Up Your WordPress Site
With some simple fixes, you can reduce your loading times by even 50-80% 🚀
By entering your email above, you're subscribing to our weekly newsletter. You can change your mind at any time. We respect your inbox and privacy.
