Do we need RSS buttons?
Possible advantages of having visible feed links:
For visitors that know what feeds are:
- If they (currently) don’t use a user agent with feed autodiscovery¹, they still get informed that you offer feeds and which URLs they have.
- If they use a user agent with feed autodiscovery, they might not expect to find a feed on your site (and therefore don’t pay attention to the autodiscovery icon), or might not intend to subscribe to your feed. Stumbling upon the visible feed link could remind them or "convince" them to subscribe ("Ah, a feed … why not").
- Search engine users might try to find your feed by searching for "… feed". Having a link that contains this keyword helps here.
For visitors that don’t know what feeds are:
- They get the chance to learn about it.²
If you offer multiple feeds:
- Some user agents with feed autodiscovery only discover / allow accessing the first³ feed, so these users still have the chance to find your other feeds thanks to the visible links.
- It can be too complex to describe their meaning/differences in the
titleattributes. A separate page that links and describes all your feeds offers more clarity.
Possible disadvantages of having visible feed links:
- They need some space.
- The site design might not be suitable for adding them.
Only you (with your site and users in mind) can decide what’s more important.
¹ Feed autodiscovery works by using link (or a/area) elements with the alternate link type and the feed format in the type attribute (i.e., application/rss+xml or application/atom+xml).
² You’re one of today’s lucky 10000. ;-)
³ The HTML5 spec defines that the first one is the default feed:
The first […] must be treated as the default syndication feed for the purposes of feed autodiscovery.
N.B. This very question ("[icon] question feed") as well as the linked XKCD comic ("RSS Feed - Atom Feed") contain visible feed links.
I use RSS all the time, and I find RSS buttons on websites very useful. Simple, when I see them, I know website offer RSS, it is more intuitive way to find feeds than checking footer or something else. I usually expect RSS button to be next to social media icons/buttons, or a small/discreet icon with text somewhere in header.
I guess some websites do not offer links/icons to RSS because only small percent of users finds that useful. And people using RSS are usually a bit more advanced users who can find RSS by googling it or typing /rss after the website url.
So, from my point of view (as RSS user and web designer) I find RSS icons/links useful, but I could live without them.
My thoughts from an ecom+blog perspective: You do not need the button itself unless you want to offer something for a user using their eyes, without any helper tools alerting that RSS is available, to click into the feed.
IMO the preferred way to alert automation/tools/reader-plugins that a feed is available is to use rel="alternate" link in the <head> metas. This is helpful for both users as well as SEO in some circumstances.
So the feed route would look like this in <head>: <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Products On Sale Feed (Atom 1.0)" href="https://www.example.com/rss/onsale" />
In addition you can put a similar meta link in each category/archive/whatever listing just the entities within that scope: <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="A category feed (Atom 1.0)" href="https://www.example.com/rss/a-category"/>
It seems like all the helpful automation still finds it no problem, and constantly comes back to check for new content. Our logs are constantly filled with all the search bots (and others not-Google) hitting those feeds. Compared with the sitemap, there are about 4x as much interest in various feeds, especially on sale and latest content. As far as humans go, we have yet to have even 1 single person click the RSS button out of hundreds of thousands of visits to that area below the fold.
PS: Our #3 session affinity group is "technophiles" so it's not like they are unsure what RSS means.