Real Simple Syndication (RSS) enables site owners to automatically syndicate their content to readers in an easily digestible format. There are a number of WordPress plugins to help you manage your blog's RSS feed, track subscribers, and much more.

Below are 18 of our favorite WordPress plugins for RSS. While we think all of the options we've provided are extremely useful, we advise you to only download a few as more will impact your blog's response time.

Add your own thoughts about the plugins and recommend new ones in the comments.

Analytics & Tracking







BBU’s RSS Feed Campaign Tagger Plugin for WordPress - This plugin will tag the links in your RSS feeds so that you can track how those specific visitors interact with your site, what ads they click, and so on.

Feed Subscriber Stats - This plugin allows you to check how many subscribers you have via FeedBurner from the dashboard of your blog so that you don't have to go to their site or check the front page of your site.

Feedage Tracker - By adding the Feedage plugin to your blog, you'll get buttons so people can subscribe from your site, and Feedage will be notified of your RSS and track the total number of subscribers for you.

FeedBurner Widget - A quick and easy plugin for displaying your FeedBurner subscriber number in a widget on your sidebar.

FeedStats - Get valuable statistics about your readers that come from your RSS. You can set options such as seeing their time on a page, exclude specific IPs, limit which site users can see them, set the number of days to track information and more.

RSS Link Tagger for Google Analytics - This plugin will add a special code to your RSS feeds so Google Analytics can keep better track of how many of your readers come from RSS feed clicks.

Feed Insertion & Tweaks







Align RSS Images - When WordPress removed the "align" tag to be more compliant with Web standards, they ended up breaking the layout of images in your RSS feeds. While there is a way to correct this manually, this plugin will do it for you automatically so you don't have to do it manually for every image.

Extra Feed Links - Extra Feed Links allows you to create feeds for category pages, tag pages, search pages, author pages, and comment feeds for single articles and pages.

Feed Comments Number - Feed Comments Number will add an image to your posts in the feed that displays the number of comments the post has. The reason an image is preferable is that it will be updated dynamically in the feed faster than if it is text. If no comments have been left yet, it will display "Add a comment."

MediaRSS - With MediaRSS you can easily increase the types of media that you can embed in your posts for RSS consumption, such as videos.

RSS Atom Avatar - RSS standards allow you to add your site's favicon and an avatar to your feed, but it isn't always easy to figure out how to do this. RSS Atom Avatar will take care of this for you.

RSS Footer - RSS Footer gives you the ability to add text to posts in your feed that will not appear in your standard blog posts. This is an easy way to add a footer to your feeds to show your copyright or just add some extra content as a reward to your subscribers.

RSSupplement - RSSupplement lets you add more WordPress information to your feed such as Sociable buttons, post author credit, copyright notices and a few other little extras.

Special Feed Items - Have you ever wanted to draw special attention to a certain post in your feed? This plugin will allow you to insert a unicode heart before the title of that post so people will be more likely to notice it. It does not change anything on your actual site.

Management







Disable RSS - If you're using WordPress as a CMS, Disable RSS can be helpful to you in killing off all of your feeds as you won't be needing them.

Old Post Promoter - Old Post Promoter will choose posts at random from your published collection and change their publication dates so that they will appear on your front page and in your RSS feed. Note that this does not work if your permalink structure includes dates.

Private RSS - Private RSS allows you to create a separate RSS feed from your main one. While the main one could send out summaries, you could set the private one to do full posts. This would come in handy if you just want your friends to see full posts, or if you want to set up a subscription system for people to have the full feed.

SoJ Tag Feed - This handy little plugin will allow you to create a feed for any tag on your site, so say someone just wants to know when you write about "blogging," this will generate a feed just for that tag. Also allows you to insert copyright notices to help fight off feed scrapers.

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