How to create an RSS feed for a website that doesn't have one

Any public page that lists items — headlines, products, notices, episodes — can usually be turned into an RSS feed. The trick is to identify the repeating block (the "container") and the fields inside it: title, link, date, and thumbnail.

This guide walks through both paths: using a no-code tool, and doing it yourself with a script.

Step 1: Check whether the site already has a feed

Before building anything, look for the orange RSS icon or a link like /feed, /rss, /rss.xml, or /atom.xml. View the page source and search for application/rss+xml. Many sites hide a perfectly good feed.

If you find one, you are done — paste that URL into your reader.

Step 2: Pick the right page

The best page to convert is a listing page, not a single article. Good candidates:

• A news or blog index
• A category page or tag page
• A search result page that updates
• A "notices" or "press releases" page
• A YouTube channel, Reddit search, or forum listing

A single article page is a poor feed: there is only one item, so there is nothing to monitor.

Step 3: Turn the page into a feed (no code)

With RSSFlux:

1. Create a free account.
2. Paste the listing URL into Create Feed.
3. Let RSSFlux check for a native feed and then fall back to scraping.
4. Preview the detected items. If the title, link, date, or thumbnail is wrong, open the visual selector tool and click the correct elements.
5. Save the feed. It refreshes automatically on your plan's schedule: every 12 hours on Free, every 45 minutes on Hobby, every 15 minutes on Developer and Business.

The result is a normal RSS feed you can read anywhere, plus a public feed URL you can share.

Step 4: Do it yourself (code)

If you want to build a scraper yourself, the pattern is always the same:

1. Fetch the HTML.
2. Select the repeating container with CSS.
3. Extract the title, link, date, and image from each container.
4. Resolve relative links.
5. Emit RSS 2.0 XML.

A minimal Python sketch:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from urllib.parse import urljoin

HTML = requests.get("https://example.com/news", timeout=20).text
soup = BeautifulSoup(HTML, "lxml")

for card in soup.select("div.article-card"):
    title = card.select_one("h2 a").get_text(strip=True)
    link = urljoin("https://example.com", card.select_one("h2 a")["href"])
    date = card.select_one("time")["datetime"]
    print(title, link, date)

Then wrap the results in RSS. The hard parts are not the loop — they are handling pagination, relative URLs, lazy-loaded images, and sites that change their markup. A managed scraper handles that maintenance for you.

Common pitfalls

• JavaScript-rendered pages: the HTML you fetch may be an empty shell. You need a real browser or a scraping service that renders JavaScript. RSSFlux handles this with browser rendering when needed.
• Relative URLs: always resolve links and images against the page URL, not the site root.
• Dates in prose: "3 days ago" is not a timestamp. Parse it into a real date or leave it blank rather than guessing.
• Duplicate items: deduplicate by link, not by title.
• Dead links: some sites publish links to pages they do not host. A feed with 404s is worse than a shorter feed.

Choosing a plan

If you only need a few feeds, the free plan covers three. If you want faster refreshes, Cloudflare bypass, bots, and more feeds, Hobby is the next step. Developers who need API access and 15-minute refreshes should look at the Developer tier.

Once the feed exists, the next question is where it should go. Two useful next reads: Turn a Google Alert, Reddit search, or YouTube channel into RSS and Manage RSS feeds from Telegram.