Show Only The First Paragraph on Your Home Page

Have you ever visited a blog and found that it seemed like the homepage went on forever?  I mean, you could read the last 10 posts in its entirety (which has its benefits!), but the page was huge!

If you’re a blog owner, you may want your readers to get a snippet of what you’re talking about and then click through for the rest of the post rather than reading everything from one page—and you can do that in WordPress by using the “more” tag.

HTML Directive

WordPress can do a lot of things in the process of posting an article, and one of the features that is built into every installation is the ability to split the post, so that you only see part of it on the home page.

This tag is represented in the HTML view like so:

<!—more—>

It’s an HTML comment, so on the full post it won’t show in your text, but it tells WordPress to stop showing the whole post at that point and put up a link to read the rest of the entry.

From the Visual Editor

However, there’s an easier way to put it into your text.  When you’re using the visual editor, there’s a special button to put the “more tag” into your post:

I’ve circled the button in red.  Pressing that button will put in the light gray line that I’ve circled in blue.  The blue line represents where the post will be broken when it displays on the home page.

So, all you have to do is to put your cursor on the location where you want the break, push the button and you have a handy break in your post.

From Windows Live Writer

For me, I like using Windows Live Writer to authoring my posts.  In there, the “More tag” is hidden, but I’ll show you where they keep it!

If you go to the Insert Tab, you will find the same type of button, allowing you to split the post.  This does the same thing as the button in the Visual Editor.