As a writer / content publisher for the web, you want to avoid drowning your loyal readers or new visitors with a full, lengthy article at the front of your website – the homepage. Tease your visitors with a small snippet, or a full paragraph of text that you can show and have them choose to read more or scan more of your posts. This tutorial walks you through, step by step, on how to use the “insert more tag” in your posts.

Homepage without the insert more tag

Let’s say you’ve already written a masterful review and noticed that it takes up the entire screen when someone visits your site, not good! Head back into your admin area and click on “Posts,” then the post title to go into editing mode. In the main body of text, click to move the blinking cursor to the point at which you would like the post to be “snipped.”

Move the blinking cursor

Click the “Insert More Tag” in the editing toolbar. It looks a lot like a page break that you would see in Microsoft Word. When you hover over it with your mouse, you will see the text “insert more tag” pop up next to your mouse arrow.

Once you’ve clicked the button, a thin line with a “More..” tag at the bottom right of the line shall appear. You have successfully inserted the tag! The last step is to save/update/publish your post for the changes to take effect on the site.

Update and Save

Once you’ve clicked “Update” or “Publish,” you can check your website’s homepage to see the change in your site’s look. You can always move the tag so you can allow more text / less text before the break. Just a reminder, any text before the tag is shown as a preview on your homepage. Any text after the tag is still viewable if the visitor opts to click the “read more” or “continue reading” link to view the full post.

Now, you can see in the example we looked at earlier, there is another post visible on the homepage, which was hidden in the first screenshot. You can condense your most recent posts using the tag so that small snippets or full paragraphs will be visible on the homepage. I would take the journalistic approach to selecting the break in your text. Entice the reader with grabbing copy that summarizes the topic. Leave them wanting more!