Why You Should Write Excerpt and/or Use More Tag in WordPress Posts

Posted on September 8, 2007
Filed Under WordPress Blogging, WordPress Configuration |

For each WP post, you can write an optional excerpt. You may also insert a “More Info” tag at certain point in the post. It is a <!–more–> tag in the code. That’s a little bit more work for a post writing, but there are several advantages that make you consider doing this:

1. Avoid over sized home page

Many WordPress templates display to 10 full articles of the most recent posts in the home page. If you have some very long posts, the home page will become over sized. That may cause performance problems.

2. Avoid duplicate contents

The default theme and many other WordPress themes display 10 full articles in home, page, category page, and monthly archive page. And of course, the article post itself display the full content. That’s a lot of duplicate contents from one site. As we all know, sites with duplicate contents could be punished by Google and other search engines. To avoid this problem, display only the excerpts or only up to the “More Info” tag of the article in home and other category pages.

3. Avoid unformated content

The theme I am using and many other themes display 10 article summaries in category and archive pages. Without excerpt or “more” tag, the summary is the first 55 words of the article but all formats such as href link are removed. If the article has some links at beginning, the summary looks ugly. To avoid this, write an excerpt.

4. Avoid poor readibility

If you use “more” tag to cut long articles and use excerpt to better summarize an article in the home page and category page, you provide improved readibility.

More about excerpt can be found in WordPress documentation The Excerpt Basics.

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