As you can see, some of my posts have a ‘continue reading’ link in them. Those posts are summarized, which means only the top part of the post is shown. If you want to read the rest of it, click the ‘continue reading’ link. You will be taken to the post permalink where you can continue reading.

A permalink is the address of a blog post. No other posts will show there. The title of a post links to its permalink.

If your readers click on the ‘continue reading’ link in the post, they will go to its permalink, where the whole post is shown. The readers won’t see the ‘continue reading’ link in the post permalink.

In this post, you will learn why you should put the ‘read more’ link to your post, and how.

Why

Two main reasons you should summarize your post is to help the page load faster, and to keep the page from being too messy.

If your readers have a slow computer, long pages might slow down their computer. If you summarize a post, they can choose what they want to read instead of scrolling through long posts.

Also, the look of long posts might also keep the reader from reading it.

However, short posts do not need to be summarized. Readers can finish reading them quickly.

(Also, modify your reading options so that your blog pages show at most less than 10 posts – /wp-admin/options-reading.php. Longer pages slows down computers.)

How

And now, I am going to show you how to hide the rest of the post that you do not want to show in the blog pages, and add the ‘continue reading’ link.

All you need to do is paste this code to the place where the summary and the hidden part breaks up.

<!–more–>

Note: This only works if you paste it in HTML code.

After you pasted it, A ‘continue reading’ link will show where you pasted it. If your readers click the link, they will be taken to the permalink of the post. An anchor will bring the readers to the point where to post breaks up. Then, they can continue reading.

Avoid doing this for short posts. Because your readers wouldn’t like to go into and out of a post, as it creates hassle.

Conclusion

Summarizing posts is a great way for readers to choose whether they really want to read a certain post, or not. If they don’t, at least they don’t have to scroll through the whole post.

Also, if the readers see a long post, they probably won’t feel like reading it. If the readers read the first part and it’s interesting, they probably would click the ‘continue reading’ link to read the rest of the post.

I hope this information helps you to build a better blog. Another example of this would be TwiTip.