Is your WordPress RSS feed switched off? One setting had removed ours

Image generated with AI. Art direction: Grafica.

Open a private window and type your blog’s address followed by /feed/. You should get your latest posts as plain code; depending on the browser, it may instead download a file or offer to open it in a reader. If you land on your home page instead, your feed is off, and nothing on the site will have told you.

<channel>
  <title>Grafica Blog</title>
  <item>
    <title>AI is the race car. Your websi…</title>
    <pubDate>Fri, 09 Oct 2026</pubDate>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>AI brief, October 2026: seven …</title>
    <pubDate>Thu, 08 Oct 2026</pubDate>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title>600+ websites in my career: wh…</title>
    <pubDate>Wed, 07 Oct 2026</pubDate>
  </item>

What we found on ours

On 9 October 2026, in an audit of this blog, the feed address answered with a redirect to the home page. No list, no posts.

The cause was one switch. Our SEO plugin, Yoast, has a screen called «Crawl optimization». On the version we run it carries 10 switches that remove feeds. All 10 were on. The first one, «Remove global feed», is the one that removes the main feed. It is offered as a way to save crawling. It removes the address that feed readers and automations depend on.

Yoast ships these switches off, so at some point something turned them on: a person, or a setup step. Nothing in our records says who, or when. That is the finding that matters: a switch like this is easy to turn on, and nothing on the site announces it.

We turned that one switch off and left the other 9 on. After the cache was cleared, the same address answered with 10 posts. From the save to the public answer took under 7 minutes.

The same address failing before the change and passing after it is what makes the result count. As a second control, the comments feed, which we left off on purpose, still redirected.

Why a feed still matters

A feed is how a site says «there is a new post» to anything that is not a person: a feed reader, a newsletter tool that mails new articles, the automation that posts them to your social accounts. When the feed goes, those stop quietly. The site shows no error. The posts do not arrive.

My position: a setting with «optimization» in its name is still a decision, and somebody should make it knowingly. The way to find out what a setting did is to read the site from outside, signed out, the way a visitor or a machine gets it. That read is part of how we maintain WordPress sites on Kinsta, and it is how this one was found.

Check yours in a minute

• Type your address followed by /feed/ in a private window. Your posts, as code, as a downloaded file or in a reader, is a pass. Your home page, or an error, is a fail.
• Open any post, view the page source and search for application/rss+xml. At least one line should carry it.
• On WordPress with Yoast: Yoast SEO, Settings, Advanced, Crawl optimization. Look at «Remove global feed», and at the other nine switches below it.
• After changing it, clear the cache and test the address again, signed out.

If the feed was off, ask who turned it off and why. If nobody can say, nobody decided.