HostPapa Knowledge Base

If you experience errors when trying to access your WordPress site’s RSS feed, it’s usually due to a formatting issues. Note that not all web browsers support the native viewing of RSS feeds, so your first step is to ensure that you’re accessing the feed using a supported RSS client.

WordPress renders RSS feeds in a language called XML. Missing line breaks or additional tabs in the XML code can cause errors to occur. Typical error messages include:

XML Parsing Error: XML or text declaration not at start of entity
 Location: http://mysite.com/feed
 Line Number 4, Column 1:

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at 
/home/xyz/mysite.com/wp-content/themes/twentyseventeen/functions.php:428) in 
/home/xyz/mysite.com/wp-includes/feed.php on line 67

If you’ve recently made manual changes to your theme’s functions.php file, then there may be a code formatting issue creating the error. Open the functions.php file in the WordPress Editor (Appearance > Editor > Theme Functions) and, if there is a closing php tag at the end the file, make sure that there is no extra space or line breaks after it. A closing php tag is not required in this file, so it may be better to delete it.

If this does not work, you can install a plugin called Fix My Feed RSS Repair to try to diagnose and resolve the issue.

Install and activate the plugin from the WordPress administration dashboard, then head to Tools > Rss Feed Fix.

Click the Fix Feed button to resolve the issue. Once the plugin has diagnosed the issue, try visiting your feed in a browser window or test it with a feed validator.

For further questions, or if you need help, please open a support ticket from your HostPapa Dashboard. Follow this link to learn how.