Blogs without the plugin: feeds and sitemaps

How Bloomtack reads Ghost, Shopify, Squarespace and other blogs through their RSS feed or sitemap, and how often it checks for new posts.

Video guide: Add your blog and bring in older posts (1:40, no sound).

You do not need a plugin to use Bloomtack. For any public blog, Bloomtack can read its RSS feed or its sitemap, the same files search engines and feed readers use.

How Bloomtack picks the source

When you press Check this blog, Bloomtack looks for:

1. An RSS or Atom feed. Most blogs have one: WordPress, Ghost, Shopify blogs, Squarespace, Blogger, Substack and many more.
2. A sitemap, when there is no feed. Bloomtack reads the addresses of your posts from it.

The blog's row on Blogs shows what it uses, for example "RSS feed", "Sitemap", "Ghost feed" or "Shopify feed".

How often it checks

Bloomtack checks each feed or sitemap for new posts every 15 minutes. If a blog cannot be reached, it tries again after an hour. You can also press Sync now on the blog to check at once.

When your feed does not carry the whole article, Bloomtack opens the post page and reads the title, description, headings, images and category, like a search engine would. It does this for every new post in the same import, so a first import is complete at once, and then for older posts that still have no headings, ten pages per run. It identifies itself as BloomtackBot and follows your robots.txt, reading at most one page per second so your blog is never slowed down.

If a post has no focus keyword, Bloomtack may suggest one from the keywords or tags the page itself lists. It shows on Posts as "Suggested: ...". Nothing uses it for pins until you press Use it, and you can type your own instead with Edit suggestion.

Older posts

A feed usually lists only your 10 to 20 newest posts. To bring in older posts, import them by address or from a CSV file. See Import posts by address and Import posts from a CSV file.

Feed or plugin?

On WordPress, the plugin is better: it sends new posts the moment you publish them and includes the focus keyword from your SEO plugin. A feed works well everywhere else. See Connect the WordPress plugin.

Good to know

• Bloomtack never reads private or password-protected pages, and never pages on private networks.
• Pages larger than 10 MB and pages that take longer than 10 seconds to load are skipped with a clear message.

Updated September 28, 2026.