How to Build a News Aggregator Website with WordPress. News aggregator websites are immensely useful, and there are so many niches that are completely untapped. By creating a news aggregator website catering to those niches, you can easily make money online by selling subscriptions, sponsorships, and advertisements.
The best part is that you’ll be curating the content, instead of creating your own original content. You would be able to offer highly useful information to your users from the top sources.
Let’s take a look at how to easily create your own news aggregator website step by step.
Step 1: Setting up Your News Aggregator Website
You can make a news aggregator website using other website builders or writing your own custom code. Both options are quite difficult for a beginner level user with no programming skills.
The easiest way to do this is by using WordPress.
There are two types of WordPress websites, WordPress.com and WordPress.org. You’ll need WordPress.org because it gives you full freedom and flexibility out of the box.
To learn more, see our guide on the difference between WordPress.com vs WordPress.org.
To start with WordPress.org, you’ll need a web hosting account and a domain name.
Normally, a domain name costs $14.99 / year and WordPress hosting plan costs $7.99 / month. And now since all websites need SSL, you can add an additional $69.99 / year to that total. This is quite a lot of money.
Luckily, Bluehost has agreed to offer our users discount on hosting with a free domain name + free SSL certificate. Basically you’ll be able to get started for just $2.75 / month.
Simply visit the Bluehost website to complete the purchase, and then head over to our guide on how to create a WordPress website for step by step setup instructions.
Step 2: Install and Activate WP RSS Aggregator Plugin
After you have setup your WordPress website, the next step is to install and activate the WP RSS Aggregator plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a plugin in WordPress.
WP RSS Aggregator is the best WordPress plugin to turn a WordPress website into a content aggregator. It allows you to import, merge, and display RSS feeds on your WordPress website without any coding.
Upon activation, visit RSS Aggregator » Settings from your dashboard to configure the plugin settings.
The default settings would work for most websites, however, you still need to review and change them if needed.
Step 3. Add Feed Sources to Import Feed Items
Now your website is ready to start displaying news feeds. You just need to add the sources that you want to display on your website.
WP RSS Aggregator can fetch and display content from any website that has an RSS feed. Most news and blog websites have an RSS feed.
First, go to RSS Aggregator » Feed Sources page from your dashboard, and then click on the Add New button.
After that, you can add your feed source. Enter the name of the feed source website, for example, WPBeginner.
Next, you need to enter the feed source URL. In most cases, you can simply enter the website URL.
You can click on the ‘Validate feed’ link below the URL field to test the RSS feed validity.
If the link is valid, then you can publish your feed source.
Once done, the plugin will immediately start to import feed items (depends on feed processing interval).
You can see the imported feed items by going to RSS Aggregator » Feed Items.
After that, repeat the process to add more feed sources to your website.
Step 4: Publish Your Content Aggregator Live
Now that you have feed items imported, you can publish your aggregated articles live on your website.
Create a new page or post to publish your content feed. Next, you will need to click on the Add New Block icon and choose the WP RSS Aggregator block under Widgets section.
Once done, the plugin will automatically load your WordPress feed.
Now you can publish your page, and view your content feed live. Here is how it looked on your demo website.
Step 5: Add More Features to Your WordPress Content Aggregator
WP RSS Aggregator lets you add more features to your WordPress content aggregator with its premium addons. You can view the available addons by going to RSS Aggregator » More Features from your dashboard.
Using these addons, you can import your feed items as WordPress posts, and make a news aggregator website with a lot more features. The Feed to Post addon lets you add that functionality making each feed item its own independent content.
You can also display post thumbnails and excerpts with feeds. To add this feature, you need to use the Excerpts & Thumbnails addon.
For a detailed guide on the advanced features of the plugin, see our complete guide on fetching feeds in WordPress using WP RSS Aggregator.
We hope this article helped you learn about the best news aggregator websites and how to build your own in WordPress. If you’re a content publisher, then you may also want to see our guide on optimizing your RSS feed. This will help you get more traffic from news aggregator websites displaying your feed.
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Source WPBEGINER
