Time for another WordPress Wednesday! Weekly tips for new and established self-hosted WordPress users, designed to help you get the most out of your site from Sarah, a WordPress website developer.
Using the WordPress ‘Read More’ tag
Ever wondered how some WordPress bloggers get that nifty little ‘Read more…‘ tag to show up on their posts?
If your theme doesn’t display posts in full on the homepage then you’ll most likely have noticed a ‘read more’ tag encouraging users to click through and read the rest of the post.
Not all themes come with truncated posts as standard, and some people will prefer the look of having the full post on the screen. However, if you often write long blog posts or include a lot of photos in your posts it might be worth using the ‘Read More’ tag to keep your homepage from looking too cluttered and busy (plus it’ll help save your bandwidth allowance by not loading every photo for every visitor!)
It’s also helpful for your readers – if they’re not interested in a particular post it’ll make it easier for them to scroll past it to something they do want to read, rather than having to wade through reams and reams of photos first (wedding blogs can be particularly bad for this!)
So, how do you use it? It’s really easy – just click on the “Insert Read More tag” button on the top toolbar (if you only have one row on your toolbar make sure you check out my post on accessing the hidden features!)
Once you’ve clicked the button you’ll see a dashed grey line appeared in the editor, with MORE written in the middle. Anything you write above this line will show on the main page…
and anything you write below the line, will only be accessible beneath the ‘read more’ tag :)
If you’re editing the HTML directly, you’ll see this tag: <!–more–> Just remember – you won’t see a difference when you preview your posts, as the preview always shows the full post, not how it appears on the homepage.
Once you’ve published your post just go to the homepage to verify that it looks the way you want it to! :)
