In the age of Kindle and iPad, it might seem like authors and designers no longer have much control over when their readers turn the page, so to speak. One place you can still have that kind of control over your content is your website. WordPress provides two methods for this: more tags and excerpts, which both can be used to customize the read more links readers will click to reach the rest of your article. You might be about to encounter one right now! The question is, how best to set them up?
Well, it depends. More tags provide more control (how appropriate), while excerpts are a little easier to use (to further complicate matters, excerpts can be inserted automatically or manually). But let’s cut to the chase: the more tag is going to let you best pick how you want your site to look by selecting exactly when the reader needs to click a link to get to the rest of the content. By using the more tag along with a fixed-width theme, you can control precisely how the articles on your site are going to appear in your index of posts. Therefore, the more tag is recommended.
Here’s how to add a Read More link to a WordPress post
While creating a post, the “insert more tag” button is situated right between the “insert link” buttons and spellchecker in the Visual editor. It appears as two rectangles divided by a dotted line. Once you’ve inserted the tag, you can click on and highlight it as you would the rest of your text. This makes it easy to move or delete if needed. When in HTML view, the tag looks like this:
<!–more–>
By adding more tags to your content you’re determining what readers will see when they come to your site and view your posts, categories, and search results, so it’s rather important. Take control over your content with the click of a more button.