How to Display RSS feeds in Random Order in WordPress

WordPress provides an inbuilt widget using which we can display RSS feed in the sidebar or footer.

It is sufficient, to begin with, but it lacks features when compared to the features offered by other WordPress plugins.

Let’s say you want to display the RSS feed in random order. You can use the Super RSS Reader WordPress plugin to display the RSS feed and configure it to shuffle the feeds in random order.

Why display RSS feeds in Random Order

You might be surprised on why we even need to show RSS feeds in random order. The default way is chronological order. This order makes sense as the recent RSS feed item is shown first and the older ones following that.

The main drawback of this ordering is that users always see the RSS feed in the same order and look like static content.

When you select random order, the feeds are shown in a random order giving a sense of different lists of articles. This is also useful when the RSS feed does not update frequently.

Displaying RSS feed items in Random Order

To display the RSS feed in random order we will be using the Super RSS Reader plugin. It is a free plugin available in the WordPress plugins repository.

Search, Install and activate the plugin from the Plugins > Add new page.

Under the Widgets page, select and add the Super RSS Reader plugin to the sidebar.

Provide the RSS feed URL you want to display.

Now to change the order, switch to the “Content” tab and select “Random” for the “Order feed items by” option.

That’s it. Now the RSS feed will be ordered randomly whenever the page is seen by users.

Conclusion #

In this article, we used the Super RSS reader plugin to display any RSS feed in random order. If you have any comments, please share them in the comments section below.