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    Home » How To Customize Your WordPress Themes

    Why we don't support the read more tag

    What does the read more tag do? It allows the writer to cut off content displayed in snippets at a specified point using the <!--more--> tag in a post, when that content is displayed on other pages (eg. homepage, category pages).

    The post excerpt has long contributed to confusion and technical issues, and as of 2019, we've dropped support for it.

    This is because:

    Jump to:
    • Unnecessary work
    • Difficult to navigate
    • No unique content
    • Bad for SEO
    • Alternative
    • What's changing? What do I need to do?
    • A Simpler Food Blogging Experience

    Unnecessary work

    This is because it adds an unnecessary workload to creating recipes - forcing food bloggers to think about how to structure the beginning of their post for brevity and be click-baity when the content appears on other pages of the site.

    But that's an outdated mental model of how food blogs work.

    90% of traffic to a food blog goes directly to recipe pages, from search engines and sites like Pinterest. People landing on your blog from these sites know exactly where they're going already - your post title and image (plus your post content) already tells them about this.

    Instead, recipe page content should be written in such a way that it provides value to the visitor, and a brief overview of that recipe.

    Difficult to navigate

    From the visitor's perspective, your title + featured image should provide enough detail about the recipe that an excerpt is unnecessary.

    Inserting the post content content/excerpt adds text that doesn't provide the reader with much valuable information, while making it hard to scan the page for recipes you're interested in. Especially on mobile.

    It's MUCH simpler to visually skim a home/category page with dozens of recipes, that doesn't have globs of text padding each one.

    No unique content

    The excerpt/content is duplicate to what's in the actual post. This leads to a false sense of having content on the page.

    The fact is that most homepages and category pages have zero unique content, and this is terrible for SEO. These are thin content pages, when they should be useful, content rich pages.

    Bad for SEO

    The read more tag violates Google's Webmaster Guidelines on anchor text: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en

    Using "Read More" (or any consistent verbage) as the anchor text to different posts/recipes is no longer appropriate, and should be removed.

    Alternative

    Instead of using the read more tag, we recommend selecting "no content" on the homepage "Featured Posts" widgets. This ensures that your excerpts are all roughly the same length, and works pretty much the same as the read more tag.

    The featured image and title for your post should be sufficient for the reader to figure out whether or not they want to proceed to that recipe. We no longer recommend showing excerpts/snippets at all.

    For category pages, we don't recommend displaying any post content or excerpt at all.

    What's changing? What do I need to do?

    Nothing.

    If you have the read more tag in your posts, you can leave it as is.

    We've just stopped recommending that new bloggers (any blogger, really) use this feature. It's a lot of work, and provides little-to-no benefit is actually negative signal.

    We've also stopped offering troubleshooting and support for it. If you run into an issue with the read more tag, we recommend you remove it.

    A Simpler Food Blogging Experience

    Food blogging already requires making hundreds of decisions about each recipe, and the workload is overwhelming. The read more tag offers very little benefit for the cost it imparts.

    We've seen food blogs naturally moving to not displaying content/excerpts from category pages for some time, and this helps set up new bloggers for success from the start.

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    Results not typical or guaranteed. Our themes and plugins are just a small part of the overall effort involved in running a food blog. Nothing on this website shall constitute legal or financial advice, always consult a local lawyer and accountant. Accessing this website and all transactions herein are under the laws and jurisdiction of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.