PowerPress

A podcast is an RSS feed. The website is where listeners land from a search; the feed is what Apple Podcasts, Spotify and every app actually consume. PowerPress exists to generate that feed correctly from ordinary WordPress posts.

Once you hold that framing, the rest of the decisions follow — including the one that trips people up, which is where the audio files live.

What it does

• Adds a podcast section to the post editor where you attach an episode file.
• Generates a compliant podcast RSS feed, with the tags directories require.
• Provides a player embedded in the post.
• Supports multiple podcasts from one site, each with its own feed.
• Handles episode metadata — season, episode number, episode type, explicit flag, artwork.
• Offers subscribe links and a directory listing block.

Episodes are ordinary WordPress posts. That is a genuine advantage: your show notes are real content, indexable and editable like anything else, rather than living inside a closed platform.

Do not host the audio on your web server

The most consequential decision, and the one most often got wrong.

An episode is tens of megabytes. Every download is a full transfer from wherever the file lives. Serving them from your own hosting means:

• Bandwidth allowances exhausted quickly, and on some plans a suspended site.
• No download statistics, because your server log is not an analytics system and the directories do not report back.
• Slow delivery to distant listeners.
• Backups that become enormous, since the files sit in your uploads folder — see the WordPress media library.

Host audio with a podcast host or on object storage with a CDN, and point PowerPress at the file URL. The plugin is designed for exactly this: it does not need the file to be in WordPress.

If you are considering serving files yourself anyway, check the bandwidth allowance on your plan first — hosting services for WordPress covers what those numbers actually mean.

The feed is the product

Getting the feed right is most of the work. Directories are strict, and a feed that validates is not necessarily a feed that is accepted.

Worth checking before submitting anywhere:

• Artwork meeting the directories' size and format requirements. This is the single most common rejection reason.
• Category and language, set correctly.
• The owner email, which is how directories verify ownership — it must be an address you can read.
• The explicit flag, set honestly.
• Episode file URLs that resolve and return the right content type.
• Feed length, since a feed with a thousand episodes gets large and some hosts truncate it.

Validate the feed with a podcast feed validator, not just an RSS validator, and then submit the feed URL rather than your site URL.

Migrating a feed

If you are moving from another platform, this is the operation to do carefully, because your subscribers exist only as apps polling a URL.

1. Set up the new feed and confirm it validates and contains your full back catalogue.
2. Put a permanent redirect from the old feed URL to the new one, at the old host.
3. Where the format supports it, publish the new-feed-location tag in the old feed.
4. Keep the old URL redirecting indefinitely. Apps poll on their own schedule, and some are slow.
5. Watch download numbers on both for several weeks.

A feed move done badly loses subscribers silently, and there is no way to contact them — they are apps, not email addresses. The general redirect discipline is in how to fix WordPress 404 errors.

Statistics

PowerPress can integrate with its parent company's statistics service, and podcast hosts provide their own. Understand which numbers you are reading:

• Downloads are requests for the file, measured wherever the file is hosted.
• Website analytics measure visits to your show notes, which is a different and much smaller number.
• The two are not comparable and should not be added together.

If download numbers matter to you — for sponsors, for instance — they must come from where the audio is served, which is another reason not to serve it yourself.

Where it fits

A good fit for: a podcast that also wants a real website — show notes, transcripts, search visibility — under its own domain, with the feed under its own control.

A poor fit for: a podcast that only needs distribution, where a podcast host alone is simpler; and anyone unwilling to maintain a WordPress site alongside producing episodes.

The middle path many shows take is a podcast host for audio and statistics, and WordPress with PowerPress for the site and the feed. That keeps the feed under your domain, which is what makes the show portable between hosts later.

Common mistakes

• Audio in the WordPress uploads folder, and a bandwidth bill or a suspension.
• Submitting the website URL to a directory instead of the feed URL.
• Artwork that fails the size requirements, then a rejection nobody explains.
• An owner email nobody reads, so verification never completes.
• Changing the feed URL without a permanent redirect.
• Comparing website visits to downloads as if they measured the same thing.

Verify before submitting

Publish one episode, then check: the feed validates in a podcast-specific validator, the audio URL plays directly in a browser, the artwork meets the requirements, the episode appears in a podcast app when you add the feed by URL manually, and the post itself renders properly with the player. Only then submit to the directories — a rejection costs days of waiting to retry.