How to Delay Posts From Appearing in WordPress RSS Feed

Delaying posts in the RSS feed allows you to control when your content goes live. However, when you publish a new post in WordPress, it appears in your site’s RSS feed immediately.

While quick sharing is useful, you may want extra time for last-minute edits, fixing typos, or preventing unfinished drafts from reaching subscribers. Plus, content scrapers could steal your work before search engines index it, which can hurt your SEO.

With the right plugin and a few simple settings, you can easily adjust the timing to ensure your posts are ready and polished before appearing in the feed. Based on our research, WPCode is one of the best plugins for the job.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through simple steps to delay posts from appearing in your RSS feed, helping you better manage your content’s timing.

Why Delay Your RSS Feed in WordPress?

Sometimes you may publish something on your WordPress blog with a typo that you just didn’t see. The mistake is then distributed to your RSS feed and all of your subscribers. If you have email subscriptions on your WordPress blog, then those subscribers will get it as well.

By adding a delay between your RSS feed and your live site, you can give yourself a small window of time to catch an error on a live site and fix it.

RSS feeds are also used by content-scraping websites. They use it to monitor your content and copy your posts as soon as they appear live. If you have a new website with little authority, then a lot of times, these content scrapers may end up beating you in the search results.

By delaying an article in your feed, you can give search engines enough time to crawl and index your content first.

With that in mind, we’re going to show you how to easily delay posts from appearing in WordPress website’s RSS feed. Here’s a quick overview of all the things we’ll cover in this guide:

Let’s jump right in!

How to Delay Posts in Your WordPress RSS Feed

To begin with, we recommend using WPCode to delay posts from appearing in your site’s feed. WPCode lets you add custom code to WordPress safely and easily without worrying about your site breaking.

For advanced users, you can copy/paste the following code into your theme’s functions.php file instead. You’ll need to modify the code to change the time interval.

For details, see our article on how to paste code snippets from the web into WordPress.

function wpb_snippet_publish_later_on_feed( $where ) {

	global $wpdb;

	if ( is_feed() ) {
		// Timestamp in WP-format.
		$now = gmdate( 'Y-m-d H:i:s' );

		// Number of unit to wait
		$wait = '10'; // integer.

		// Choose time unit.
		$unit = 'MINUTE'; // MINUTE, HOUR, DAY, WEEK, MONTH, YEAR.

		// Add SQL-sytax to default $where. By default 10 minutes.
		$where .= " AND TIMESTAMPDIFF($unit, $wpdb->posts.post_date_gmt, '$now') > $wait ";
	}

	return $where;
}

add_filter( 'posts_where', 'wpb_snippet_publish_later_on_feed' );

Now, we’ll show you how to do this easily with WPCode.

First, you will need to install and activate the free WPCode plugin. For details, you can follow our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress Plugin.

Upon activation, you can navigate to Code Snippets » Add Snippet. After that, simply search for ‘RSS’ or scroll down to the ‘RSS Feeds’ category.

Then, just hover your mouse over ‘Delay Posts in RSS Feeds’ in the results and simply click on ‘Use snippet.’

Next, you will be taken to the ‘Edit Snippet’ screen, where WPCode has pre-configured the snippet settings for you.

By default, your posts will be delayed from appearing in your RSS feed by 10 minutes from the time it’s published.

If that delay is good for you, then all you have to do is click on the switch to change it to ‘Active’ and press the ‘Update’ button.

If you want to alter the length of the delay, you can change the number on line 10 and the unit of time on Line 13.

For example, you can delay the post by one hour if you replace $wait = '10'; and $unit = 'MINUTE' with $wait = '1' and $unit = 'HOUR'.

If you need to adjust the delay again, repeat those steps. And if you want the posts to return to hitting the feed immediately, toggle the switch back to ‘Inactive’ and press ‘Update.’

Bonus Tip: Check Out the WPCode Snippet Library

WPCode comes with a huge collection of other code snippets, too. You can see what’s there by navigating to Code Snippets » Library from your admin dashboard.

You may be able to replace some single-use plugins on your site by simply activating snippets you find in the library.

For example, you can find snippets that will let you:

• Disable automatic updates
• Allow SVG uploads
• Set a minimum word count for posts, and much more.

We hope this article helped you learn how to easily delay posts from appearing in the WordPress RSS feed. Next up, you might want to check out our guides on how to add RSS subscription for tags and custom taxonomy archives and how to add an RSS sitemap in WordPress.

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