Why it’s better to show only a summary of the article on the front page
Blogs are everywhere so you must seen blogs who shows full posts on the blog front-page, and others who shows only a summary of the post and a link saying “Read more” or “Read the rest of this entry”.
There is a lot of debate on this subject, but the type of display depends of the type of your blog, the type of your visitors. For example, if all your blog posts are related one to each other, or if you are post them as a series, as capitols of a book there is no reason to show only summaries on the front page. Your readers will read all of them anyway so why to get them to do another click ?
If you post about a subject, but the article are not like a story and the are not related, and you also publish long posts it is a pain for visitors to show them the full post.
It is a pain to get trough a big article that don’t interest you to get to another. Most of readers will never get to the second article if they don’t find the first something that they want to read in that moment. The goal of the blog is to have quality content worth reading, but even if you are very specific, you will post something that some of your readers already know and they will skip it. If it is too big they will never get to the second that might be interesting for them.
Think about your visitors that comes for the first time on your blog, they see the first post, if it is not in their range of interest they will leave. But if they can see 2-3 headlines on the first page it is more likely that they will find something interesting. Even if they don’t find they can make a good idea what your blog is about, and they can bookmark it. But if they see only a post it is hard to take a conclusion about the blog subject or they will categorize it wrongly.
In wordpress is very simple to do this. When you publish a post, use the “More” tag in from the wordpress rich text editor. The content before the more tag will show on the front page, in archive pages, categories and tag pages.
You should leave your visitors to read what they want, not what you want.
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March 15th, 2010 at 12:06 pm
Absolutely agree with you. I’m sure many are already doing this (showing only summary on their home page); but in case someone isn’t, then it’s simply foolishness to overwhelm your first-time readers with complete blog posts and expect them not to bounce off!
March 15th, 2010 at 6:09 pm
I’ve seen that top bloggers are showing full posts, it can be a good habbit when their readers want to read all posts due to high engagement, but this is hard to do on technology related blogs.
February 26th, 2011 at 8:38 pm
I know there is a SEO impact with duplicate content if you show the whole article on the first page, and other pages, but still many blogs don’t respect that.