Show the beginning excerpts of your posts so a reader can click the “Read More” tag to be directed to your full post.
You can truncate your blog entries so that only the first part of a posts is displayed on homepage, archive pages and in subscriber emails. When you do this, a link will be placed directly after your excerpt, pointing the reader to the full post. You can put this link anywhere in a post, and customize it to say whatever you want. Here’s how!
Adding and customizing the More Tag
1. Start a new post.
Add content to your post — text, images, anything.
2. Add the “Read More” tag somewhere in the post.
Place your cursor at the spot in the post where you want the More Tag to appear. In your Visual Editor’s toolbar, click on the the “Insert Read More tag” button. You can find the More Tag button in the first row:
Once you click it, you’ll see the split appear in your post.
3. Customize the “Read More” tag.
By default, “Continue Reading” will appear as the text for the link, but you can change this!
a) Click on the HTML tab in the upper right corner of the post editing area to open the HTML Editor, and look for <!--more-->
b) Add a space after “more” and then type in a custom message, like
<!--more Keep on reading!-->
This will insert a read more link that says “Keep on reading!” instead of the default message.
If you use the More Tag on multiple posts, you’ll need to customize the message for each post. You cannot set a global message that will take effect on each post of your blog that uses the More Tag — the More Tag will always default to “Continue reading” unless you specifically change it.
4. Publish.
Take a look on your home page (or Posts page, if you have chosen a Static Front Page) to see the excerpt of your post!
Because the More Tag only splits posts on your home page/Posts page and archives, you won’t see the split when you preview the post or are viewing the individual post page. You’ll only see the tag on your home page/Posts page and archives.
Using the More Tag with Content Options
If your theme supports Content Options for Blog Display, be sure to choose “Full post” if you’d like to add the More tag to posts manually.
Using the More Tag in Pages
The More Tag can be used in pages, but the split will only be visible in certain themes, for example those that display content from pages on the home page.
As an alternative for pages, you may want to consider using Pagination instead.
Formatting Issues
If the More Tag is inserted after writing a post, formatting errors can occur. The issue occurs when you insert the More Tag using the visual editor, but it is actually placed within another HTML tag. As an example:
<strong>Oh man, this post is messed up.<!--more--></strong>
Here, the More Tag is inside some HTML tags that make the text bold. This will cause the rest of the posts on the page to be formatted as bold, sometimes including your sidebar contents, and can also make the sidebar fall to the bottom of the page.
To fix the issue, just place the More Tag on the outside of any closing HTML tags, like so:
<strong>Oh man, this post is messed up.</strong><!--more-->
Make sure to go into the HTML view of the problematic post and move your More Tag to outside of any HTML tags (this includes div, strong, em, etc…).
Note: Copying and pasting content from rich text editors such as Microsoft Word often causes problems because a lot of extra HTML is used that can interfere with the More tag. Consider using a plain text editor, such as Notepad, instead or use the Paste as Text button.
