How to Create a WordPress News Aggregator Website (Beginner's Guide)

The internet is loud. Maybe louder than it’s ever been. News flies in from all directions…blogs, big media, tiny updates buried in niche corners. So, how about aggregating it on your site for your people to see?

In this guide, I’ll show you how to build a WordPress news aggregator site that does just that. It pulls in updates from other websites using RSS feeds and displays them on your own site. You won’t need to go to those sites manually or chase sources. You’ll just set up the system, and it brings the content to you.

I’m walking through everything: what tools to use, how to install them, and how to get your site running. No guesswork, just the steps to make it work.

How to create a news aggregator site on #WordPress 🗞️ step by step

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What makes a good content aggregator website? 🤔

Made famous, in part, by sites like The Drudge Report (but there are other examples of such sites out there that have been fairly successful too), content aggregator sites are part of many web users’ daily browsing habits.

Content aggregator sites aren’t just about blindly throwing up content from an RSS feed, though.

To create a quality news aggregator site, you’ll want to consider these points:

Make content sortable. Ensure that whatever solution you use to aggregate news lets you add categories to different news sources/articles so that your readers can easily find what they want.
Aggregate a variety of content. Make sure that your site is able to successfully aggregate content from a variety of sources – otherwise, you’re not offering as much benefit to your readers.
Use a news-friendly theme. Choose a WordPress theme that lets visitors quickly scan multiple articles to find one that interests them.
Make sure you provide attribution. It should go without saying, but you need to provide attribution to the original source so that you don’t end up accidentally stealing content.

In the sections below, I’ll show you how to create a WordPress news aggregator website that meets the above conditions and is built for success.

How to create a WordPress news aggregator website 🏗️

Here are the steps you need to take:

Bonus: video tutorial 🎥

Step 1: Find a good WordPress host

If you are planning to build a content aggregator, then you will need reliable hosting. Fortunately, for a low-maintenance project like a content aggregator, you can find a wide range of ‘starter’ hosting plans which offer tremendous flexibility and competitive prices.

Ideally, you should choose a host that offers a free domain and an SSL certificate. Beyond that, most cheap WordPress hosting plans will provide you with enough storage and bandwidth to start building a content aggregator.

Don’t have time to search on your own? We’ve always recommended Bluehost – they’re a great balance of cheap entry-level pricing (for the first year) vs the features you get for that price (free domain name, WordPress pre-installed, and more).

Step 2: How to pick a theme for your WordPress news aggregator website

To build a content aggregator site on WordPress, you will need a solid theme and an RSS plugin which can import feeds as headlines and/or full WordPress posts (more on that later).

Your theme should be able to display multiple posts on the page. If it can’t handle this then your news aggregator site will be devoured by the competition.

Let’s take Techmeme as an example and how the three-column structure gives them an opportunity to display ~12 headlines above the fold. If you go to the final section you will see another 13 headlines organized in a two-column structure.

👉 In simple terms, suitability for a WordPress news aggregator website means a theme able to display a large number of headlines.

All those headlines mean that a good content aggregator site has a lot of information. This makes navigation options the second “make or break” criteria.

👉 Whether your aggregator site organizes content by source or category, you will need to make things easy for your readers.

Take a look at how Metacritic offers multiple navigation options through the page.

With this is mind, you should use a theme that is comfortable when it comes to organizing content inside a grid, like Neve is, for example.

It is a free news magazine theme of ours, which means it is set up to display multiple articles on a single page with clarity.

You can install the theme normally through the WordPress dashboard (Appearance → Themes). Just click on Add New Theme, and put “Neve” into the search box.

Step 3: Install a WordPress RSS aggregator plugin

So, after the theme is set up, the next thing you need is to select a plugin that can help you collect and post the articles to your feed. The best option for this is an “RSS feed plugin,” for two reasons:

Firstly, you can set it once and then leave everything to automation.
Secondly, you will be able to import the feeds as actual WordPress posts.

To make everything work as you’re expecting it to work, you’ll need the Feedzy Pro version. Actually, you’ll need both the free and the pro version installed on your site (since Feedzy pro functions as an add-on to the free Feedzy).

To install them:

For Feedzy free, go to Plugins → Add New and the pick “Feedzy” from the search box.
For Feedzy Pro, you’ll get a ZIP archive with the plugin. Then, go to Plugins → Add New and click on Upload.

Once you have both plugins ready, go to Feedzy → Settings (the General tab) and enable your Feedzy Pro license (you can find your license key in your Themeisle account).

Step 4: How to find feeds for aggregation

Now you are ready to get the feeds for your fresh and shiny WordPress news aggregator website.

If you’re wondering how to find a valid address of an RSS feed, here are some tips:

For WordPress blogs, you can almost always append /feed to the end of a URL to get the RSS feed.
Many sites with RSS feeds display the RSS feed icon (you can see an example of the RSS icon in the Feedzy graphic from the previous section).
You can view a site’s source code with your browser’s developer tools and search for “rss” in the code.

When you find a feed that interests you, click on it to see a screen similar to the example below (this is a feed with NBA news from Yahoo Sports):

What you can see there in the address bar is a valid feed URL. You can use it for importing content to your news aggregator site. This is what we’ll do next.

Step 5: How to add feeds to your WordPress aggregator site

What we’re going to be doing here is creating new blog posts based on content imported from the RSS feeds.

Once you have the feed(s) that you’d like to import, head to Feedzy → Import Posts and click on New Import:

You can name the import in some way that makes sense to you. For this build, I’m going to stick to my NBA news example. The RSS Feed sources field is where you can put the feeds you’d like to aggregate; when adding more than one, separate with commas:

You should be able to see your feeds on the list (see my list of feeds above).

The import would work like so with the rest of the settings on the page untouched, but I guess you want to filter through some of the content to make your aggregation more optimized.

Feedzy has a really great filtering mechanism. With it, you can basically:

Only import posts that include certain keywords
Import all posts EXCEPT those that contain certain keywords

I’m going to use the keyword “lakers” there so that I only import news related to the LA Lakers:

Next, let’s map the imported content to specific content types. In most cases, you’ll want to pick “post” as the Post Type:

Then, you can select the categories to be used when saving the content. If you want Feedzy to help you out, you can keep the default value there, which will assign the categories automatically. What you can also do here is pick the status that should be used for all imported content – best use Draft so that the content doesn’t get published before you get to verify it:

The next sections allow for even deeper customization. You can customize the way in which Feedzy will create the titles, the dates it’ll assign to the content and also tweak the body of the content itself if needed.

Notice the variable tags that are available here. For example, you can add any number of details to your post titles: things like the original title, author, publication date, and more:

For example, you could do something like this:

This will add a quick note before the body of the content.

The final section on the page allows you to really tailor the import to match your site’s needs. You can find things like duplicate prevention here, auto-deletion (for old content), and more.

I’m just going to show you the screenshot that handles all those features so you can get an idea of what’s possible.

Click to see all the feed settings available:

All you need to do at this point is save your import and see your news aggregator site being populated automatically.

Click on Save & Activate Importing:

Go to Feedzy → Import Posts and see your import there. You can force it to run or wait a while for Feedzy to fetch content on its own:

Let’s click on the Run Now button and see what happens:

Okay, so far so good. We have 5 posts that have been imported in total.

Let’s see them. Go into Posts:

Per the settings I’ve set, these are all saved as drafts.

The only thing left to do now is change the status from draft to published.

This is it. You’ve just built a news aggregator website on WordPress! 👍

Wrapping things up 🎁

Thanks to WordPress’ ease of use and extensibility, it’s easy to create news aggregator websites like that. You won’t need to code anything yourself, which is great(!), all you’ll need to do is find the RSS feeds for the websites that you want to aggregate content from and then put them through Feedzy so they can be fetched to your site.

How to create a news aggregator site on #WordPress 🗞️ step by step

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Remember – here’s everything that you need to build a news aggregator website on WordPress: