As a blogger who has been writing for the past 5 years or so, I was always confused about the Read More tag. This is a tag that you will find in your WordPress editor besides the Toolbar Toggle button.
Why would one want to insert their content with this tag? Wouldn’t it fill up your blog content with such intermediate tags and break the reader’s flow? Let’s go find out how to correctly use the Read More tag.
The 2015 theme has some beautiful typography, and it’s one column layout simplicity has gotten to me. It’s the perfect theme to use for a personal blog … with a bit of ads thrown in the middle ;-)
Unfortunately, the theme does not have any excerpt support! Which means that my entire content is loaded on the blog archive page. While this would be great for quickly consuming all content, however, it does slow down the home page’s loading time.
It also hits my page views, which I want to increase since I want people to keep reading more content on the site!
Read More to the rescue!
This is where the simple Read More tag starts shining through. Instead of putting in all my post content, I insert the Read More tag and the archive page shows only the content before the Read More tag. Anything after the Read More tag would have to be read by opening the post!
Although this has been around for some time, but the way this impacts your writing is pretty huge!
For one, it forces me to quickly contextualize the title to the topic! This means that the introductory paragraph has to be pretty crisp and to the point. No more meandering philosophies!
Since now I have a smart introduction, it helps me to put this as the default description of my post. Chalk up one more victory towards increasing my Click Through Rates!
Lastly, it solves my page load problems and gives me higher pages / session score for my home page / archive traffic.
Summary
- To quickly summarize this, use the Read More post as a Call to Action for users to read through your main content.
- Have the introduction passage (the content before the Read More tag) framed as the context setting or the hook of your post.
- The actual post itself would be to address one particular problem that would be mentioned in the title of the post or the introduction passage of the post.