The fastest RSS feeds plugin for WordPress. Includes excerpt & thumbnail image. Use as a news aggregator, autoblog, or RSS parsing.
As of April 2026, RSS Feed Retriever is a WordPress rss feed plugin with 8.0K+ active installations and a 4.7/5 rating from 38 reviews. It has been downloaded 193K+ times in total. Requires WordPress 2.8+ and PHP false+. Available on WordPress.org since 2014. Last updated 3 years ago — may have compatibility concerns. Downloads are down 18% this week. Top alternative: Super RSS Reader – Add attractive RSS….
This plugin fetches an RSS feed, or multiple feeds, and displays them in an unordered list using shortcode.
Demo | Video Tutorial | PRO Version
Simply copy and paste the example code below to wherever you would like to display your RSS feed. Replace the url and other properties as needed. (See FAQ section below to use in Gutenberg blocks, widgets, and PHP)
[wp_rss_retriever url="http://feeds.feedburner.com/TechCrunch/" items="10" excerpt="50" read_more="true" credits="true" new_window="true" thumbnail="200" cache="12 hours"]
http://demo.thememason.com/rss/
Excellent works a dream – simple and efective
Be very handy if there was a default message to display if there is nothing on the RSS feed – rather than just displaying an error
Considering this plugin is free, I think it’s a great alternative to the many other RSS display plugins out there that charge money for displaying images.
Has not been updated for over 1 year and is not compatible with PHP 8.
The shortcode provided does an ample job of importing RSS feeds.
There are two things that would improve this plugin:
1) Make it clear the plugin alters your site’s RSS feed and adds thumbnails to it. Then offer an option to disable that function. Better yet, don’t mess with the site’s RSS feed at all as the purported purpose of this plugin is to display RSS feeds on the frontend of your site, not alter your site’s RSS feed. It took me awhile to track this down and now I’ve replaced the plugin entirely due to this.
2) Offer a Block to be used with the Block Editor
Finally Gutenberg users will get a good chunk of the functionality you need for bringing in RSS feeds through the Core RSS Feed block now provided in WP.
Does what it says, perfect for our needs – thanks
| WordPress | 2.8+ requiredTested up to 6.1.10 |
| PHP | false+ required |
Plugin data sourced from WordPress.org. Analysis and metrics by PluginSift.