The RSS Feed Checklist: What to Verify Before You Publish

Run through this before you consider RSS feed actually done:

1. Keep the feed's item count reasonable (recent 20-50 items) rather than dumping the entire site history into one feed file.
2. Include a real, unique `description` per item rather than duplicating the full post body — most feed readers show it as a preview, not the whole article.
3. Set `pubDate` accurately and keep it updated only when content is genuinely new — backdating or bulk-touching every item's date confuses subscriber ordering.
4. Validate the feed's XML structure after generating it — a malformed feed silently fails in some readers while working in others, making the issue easy to miss.
5. Double-check this after any site migration or major redesign, not just at launch.

None of these individually take long. The value is in doing all of them, every time, instead of remembering most of them most of the time.

Pair this with the UTM tracking parameters checklist if you're doing a fuller pre-launch pass.

RSS Feed Generator runs through most of this automatically.

Everything in this guide runs directly in your browser — no signup, no install.