WordPress Remove Blank Line From RSS Feed – wordpress error on line 2 at column 6: XML declaration allowed only at the start of the document

For whatever reason, once in a long while WordPress will just break the RSS feed. Why? God only knows.

Maybe it didn’t like a plugin you just added or it just doesn’t feel like working that day. Whatever the reason, your WordPress RSS feed has stopped working and all hell has broken loose! Many people are dependent on their RSS feed and heck, at the height of this website before the change I had a good 60 people following me on RSS! WOOT! I know that’s not many, but it sure as heck was a traffic kill when the RSS went down!

So if for some reason you get this error when loading your RSS feed in a browser (like Chrome):

wordpress error on line 2 at column 6: XML declaration allowed only at the start of the document

Or it fails to pass the ever vigilant W3C RSS Validator and gives an error such as:

Sorry

This feed does not validate.

line 1, column 1: Blank line before XML declaration [help]

DON’T PANIC!

There is a simple solution for this. It doesn’t require some crazy plugin. It doesn’t require hiring a super hacker geek to fix it AND it won’t require hours upon hours of Google’ing for the solution.

Now, if you want to try there are a few possible solutions. You can try:

Reading this helpful article on the RSS Validator site: http://feedvalidator.org/docs/error/WPBlankLine.html
Try the FIX RSS FEED plugin for WordPress (didn’t work for my clients site at all)
Paying someone lots of money [like me 🙂 ] to do it for you.

Or you can simply do this yourself. It’s REALLY really simply and only require one file upload and one line of code. I’ll guide you through the whole process.

1) FIRST. Download the following file. http://wejn.org/stuff/wejnswpwhitespacefix.php.

If you’re a geek you can check it for yourself, but I (Piotr Krzyzek) assure you this file is Virus free. If you don’t trust that file, you can download the exact same file from my server which I won’t change at all. So you can 100% rest assure that this file is safe from my server. You can get it HERE from my server. But if you download it from my server, rename the file from the “.ph” extension to “.php” so that it will work on your server too.

2) After downloading, upload the .PHP file into your WordPress site ROOT directory. This means wherever the wp-config.php file is. Do NOT upload it into the themes folder, NOR the plugins folder. Only the root directory.

If you don’t understand that, it’s ok. Leave a comment or poke me a twitter and I’ll explain it better.

3) EDIT your index.php file and add the following right after the first line:

include("wejnswpwhitespacefix.php");

So at the end, your index.php should look something like this:

<?php
include("wejnswpwhitespacefix.php");
define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);
require('./wp-blog-header.php');
?>

That’s of course a condensed version of the index.php file and your’s will probably have lots of comments and stuff in it. But the important thing is to add the include code right at the top.

After that, poof!

Reload the feed page and/or your site and it’ll magically work!

It did for us!