Beautify Your Home Page With Post Excerpts
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You’ve probably noticed that I don’t show the full text of every article on the home page of Site Sketch 101. If I did, the ten articles that I list on the front page would probably run down for about ten miles before you reached the end of the first page.
Actually, that is what it looks like. I actually see that all the time on blogs. But this is bad for several reasons.
- Annoyance of Scrolling: First, users will quickly get tired of scrolling to find what they’re looking for.
- Limited Page Views: Second, with the entire article on the homepage they can view 10 or so articles with one page view.
- Less Interaction: Third, when they finish reading the article they won’t be presented with the related articles, share buttons, comment section or anything else in the footer section of your post pages which will decrease interaction with all of these.
- Cluttered & Unprofessional Looking: Fourth, it looks cluttered which makes you look less professional than you really are.
It’s much better to show a few sentences or maybe a paragraph or two of text on the homepage rather than showing off the entire article.
Here’s a quick video from the WordPress website that explains a little bit more about this concept and it demonstrates how to make it happen on your website.
If your viewing this article in your RSS reader or in your email inbox then you may need to click through to the website to view this video.
Group Reflection
Do you use the excerpt on your home page or do you display the entire article? Why or why not?
Tony said:
Post excerpts are also good because mobile users don’t have to wait as long to load the home page on their devices. I use the plugin WP Touch iPhone Theme for mobile users.
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Helmi Asyraf @ Huzzer Magazine said:
Yes, WP Touch Iphone plugin is definitely a good idea to ensure that our site looks well in mobile for some bloggers.
However, I think it will defeat the purpose of why Apple created the internet browser that works great – you can easily zoom in or out and scroll the internet page.
But for me, I still prefer in not using the plugin as my readers can easily use the features of Apple’s internet browser to help themselves out in viewing my site.
Tony said:
I understand your point but mobile users have the option to switch back to the normal theme at any time. I like to follow the “Google” theory of having the fastest load time possible.
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Nicholas Cardot said:
I agree and I also use that same plugin that creates a mobile theme and I really like it. I actually just switched to it recently and I’ve already found it to be very useful.
Nicholas Cardot said:
Not everyone on a mobile device is using Apple. I use an Android system and even though it has a full browser, I prefer to view my own site using the Iphone plugin. It makes it load much faster and it allows me to focus in on the content without dealing with all of the sidebars and other stuff. Mobile users don’t need to be confronted with long load times and non-essential information.
Nicholas Cardot said:
That’s actually a great reasons why post excerpts are incredibly useful. They drastically speed up the load of the homepage and they really help to provide a faster browsing experience: faster to load, faster to browse, faster to peruse past articles.
Glen said:
I don’t use excerpts at this point.
I have looked at how this would work for what I write but since my stories are short it seemed unnecessary..
To be honest I often find that clicking on the title (or a more button) to continue reading an article to be annoying.
If you are planning to use this feature then it is critical that you formulate your article to make the person read more. You really need catchy headlines and a good lead in..
Often on sites I’ve visited this just isn’t the case..
Helmi Asyraf @ Huzzer Magazine said:
Hi Glen,
I think the best way of using except for our blog is to make a survey first on how well any action that will be taken is being accepted by our readers.
It is not necessarily to just throw the idea out if there are few persons that feel annoyed about the excerpt idea. At the same time, if the survey show opposite outcome, we should follow the need/demand by the majority then.
For me, there is no right or wrong answer on whether will excerpt make our readers’ experience better. It is because the feeling is theirs. Therefore, we should get the feedback from them first before make the final decision.
Cheers!
Nicholas Cardot said:
I strongly disagree. I’ve never seen a website that didn’t use excerpts that I believed shouldn’t use them. I highly recommend that every blog use excerpts on the home page of their websites. Not using them is a surefire way to chase away visitors who will become overcome with the massive size of your homepage. Shortening the homepage will result in faster load times, less scrolling, and much cleaner usability.
This is something that our readers shouldn’t even have to think about. We should simply provide for them such an easy navigation experience on our websites that they don’t even think about what would be better because nothing causes them to think about anything except for your content.
Derek Jensen said:
Additionally, to having post excerpts you need to not always ask your readers what they want.
It is your blog, you are in control, and if you end up asking readers what they would want you will find yourself always asking them which does not help your personal self out. Sure, you can take surveys but only for suggestions.
Ultimately, everyone should either use post excerpts or the read more feature to get the most variety of content on the homepage when scrolling.
Think about you visiting a site and see the first article that sort of interests you, but not entirely. Well, how long do you allow yourself to continue to explore that site?
Deepika said:
You are right Nick… Showing entire article in the home page make readers boring. Just we want to create an attractive first paragraph. This will make readers to go to that page and read the entire article. Post expert is very nice to use.
Using post expert we can present more articles in your home page. This also makes our readers to read our old articles.
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Nicholas Cardot said:
Just look at Site Sketch 101. I draw a lot of readers in with a crisp, beautiful image and a couple sentences introducing the article… And it works.
Eric B. said:
I have always used excerpts on my blog. One advantage of using excerpts is that if you have tons of images, videos, etc. it won’t take as long if all of those need to be loaded on one page.
When I first created the theme for my blog, I didn’t know about the <!–more–> tag, so I just put the_excerpt() directly into my theme. So I’ve just stuck to that ever since. An advantage I guess would be that I can occasionally customize the excerpt, using the Custom Excerpt field in the editor.
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Helmi Asyraf @ Huzzer Magazine said:
Hi Eric,
What is actually the tag? It would be great if you can briefly explain what is it and it can be used.
I will definitely help me to blog better in future.
Cheers!
Helmi Asyraf @ Huzzer Magazine said:
Ok, I got the answer of my own question
I replied to your comment before watching the above video.
Nicholas Cardot said:
I use the_excerpt() in my theme as well just because it makes life so much simpler. It’s a great feature and I love using it. I use that same WordPress tag on my search page and category pages.
Gordie said:
I also favour and use excerpts on the front page. People have covered the reasons above, the main being loading speed.
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Helmi Asyraf @ Huzzer Magazine said:
Hi Nich,
For me personally, I prefer towards the idea of using excerpts for the homepage in my blog – Huzzer Magazine.
It is because basically most of my posts are long and sometimes the major portion of my posts are image as I am blogging about WordPress. Without excerpt feature, it will definitely make the home page in mess.
However,depending on our readers, excerpt not necessarily a good idea. It will only a good idea if the readers love it.
I think for the valid argument why some bloggers are using excerpt and some are not is because it depends on how they ‘see’ their blog – it is a basic blog or magazine or newspaper based blog.
For example, I am sure that you see SiteSketch as an online magazine. Therefore, with that perspective, the usage of excerpt will be in favoured as it is like a standard feature for online magazine and newspaper.
What do you think, Nich?
Nicholas Cardot said:
I have honestly never seen a blog that posted their full articles on their homepage where I thought it was the best use of design. It’s inherently cripples usability and chases away visitors that don’t feel like scrolling all the way through 10 of your recent articles to get to the bottom of the page.
Keith said:
Thanks for this one, I often wrestle with which way is better, and I think there are arguments for both sides but I think I agree with this way, just went and changed the look of my site…..
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Nicholas Cardot said:
Having to scroll too much turns users away. The most popular site in the world requires no scrolling at all…Google. And their listings for sites and content provide a sentence or two of content linking to a site.
Davor Gasparevic @ Cheap internet marketing ebooks blog said:
Hmmm, I never thought about this in this way.
I generally can’t put myself in the visitor’s/reader’s position easily.
That is why I never did something like this.
Now when I look at my last post, I should really do something like that, shorter post are still fine to be displayed fully, but longer ones could definitely be shortened.
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Nicholas Cardot said:
The idea is that a new user, or even a current subscriber, may not want to read every word of every article. Using excerpts allows your visitors to view all of your recent articles and it lets them focus in on the one’s that are the most relevant to their needs.
Casey Brazeal (North and Clark) said:
I really like this format and use it. furthermore, I would never have found it if it wasn’t for Nick showing me how it’s done. Thanks buddy!
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Nicholas Cardot said:
Thanks Casey. As you can tell, I use them on the home page of this site and on all of the category and search pages. It’s too overwhelming to run a search or to browse a category and to get bombarded with dozens of full length articles that you have to scroll through.
Angela said:
I like this idea! As soon as I get my wordpress.com converted to godaddy hosted wordpress.org I’ll have to try this out. At first I was turned off by it when I saw that you do it, but your articles are interesting enough to click to view the rest of the article. And I guess if your article wasn’t interesting in the first place it wouldn’t matter if people click or not… they are going to exit anyway. I like it!!
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Nicholas Cardot said:
I don’t do it to force another click. In fact, people who do things just to pump a statistic are really silly in my opinion. I do it so that anyone that visits my homepage can very quickly have an overview of what my blog is all about without very much scrolling. With minimal scrolling, you’ll be presented with my most recent video, ten of my most recent articles, five of my most popular articles, five articles for beginners and five of my favorite articles. So there’s a lot of options for users to dig through with very little scrolling. That’s my goal.
Ron Leyba said:
It depends of what kind of article I will be posting. If its too long, then Ill use the excerpt option, if not, I will display the whole thing.
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Nicholas Cardot said:
I guess it’s alright to choose between each article, but that ultimately becomes a lot of work. It will save a lot of hassle and make it much easier to navigate the site if the excerpts are short and allow for your readers to easily jump from one article to the next until they choose one the grabs their interest.
Eric said:
People want things quickly and want things as simple as possible. They just don’t want to have to scroll down a huge page or read a lot of boring information on one whole page.
If the information is appealing to them at all and they want to find out more they will simply be able to click read more and this will keep their interests just a bit more.
Nicholas Cardot said:
Exactly. Especially if your pages load quickly. Then they can click and within just a couple of seconds they can be engaging with your content.
Bryan J Zimmerman said:
I feel like a complete idiot, but cannot seem to get my head around the difference between an excerpt and the “read more” feature.
I tried adding an excerpt, and removing the read more tag, and when I updated my page, the entire article was visible.
Can someone possibly explain this in more detail? The video from WordPress TV was not very helpful.
Thanks Gang!
Regards,
Bryan
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Nicholas Cardot said:
The excerpt and the read more feature are essentially two ways to accomplish the exact same thing. If you use the excerpt feature then you have to have the the_excerpt tag built into the index page of your WordPress template. Your template doesn’t use that tag so be sure to use the read more feature to accomplish the same thing on your blog.
Bryan J Zimmerman said:
Sorry . .
forgot to check the “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” checkbox.
Bryan
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Nicholas Cardot said:
Ha ha. LOL. It’s good to know that you came back to get it done.
Kok Siong Chen said:
I use full article in my blog. I do not know how to put excerpt in my blog. Thanks for sharing!
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Don Gilbert said:
I generally use the more tag, rather than post excerpt. I don’t really know what the difference is there or if one is better than the other.
But my reasoning is the same as yours Nick – I HATE having pages a mile long. I would much rather have to click through to read a full post than have 3 to 10 full posts on my blog homepage. It just gets annoying.
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Nicholas Cardot said:
Don Gilbert » The more tag accomplishes the exact same thing. I should have mentioned that in the article. It’s a great way to allow users to see more of your content so they can hone in on the articles that are the most important to them.
Chad @ Tech201 said:
I used the full post and then the more tag for a while. I realized that the majority of my traffic lands on single post pages. Given than, I decided I could go with a more compact, site-at-a-glance, type of homepage.
I don’t know yet if it’s the way to go, but I’m a lot happier with it so far.
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Nicholas Cardot said:
Chad @ Tech201 » I think that it is the better way to go. I want my home page to embody everything that my site is so that people can have a quick and easy overview of the place. I think that it’s effective.
Gonzo the Great said:
Hi Nick,
Again a great article, cheers for sharing.
A couple of months ago I had the same decision to make, I choose for excerpts because of the points you’ve mentioned in your post.
But mainly I did this so the reader has to go to the next page (full content, with the ‘share this’-section) to read the article.
This way it’s even better for my webstats, keeping interested people on my site, boosting my visitor-count.
Cheers & Ciao …
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Nicholas Cardot said:
Gonzo the Great » I don’t do it to increase page views or to lead readers to interact with things, although those are great side effects. I do it because on my homepage I’m able to present my visitors with the ability to view and engage with a lot of articles so they can choose which ones are the most interesting to them.
Self Improvement said:
Nice post here and very helpful. It makes complete sense what you just said. I want to make my homepage much more dynamic…something that makes readers want to click. Any ideas?
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Eli said:
If the excerpts are well written and not just a cut out of the actual post, I like it this way.
But I’ve seen many sites, especially game-related sites stopping in the middle of the sentence and adding the “…”
Also some excerpts don’t really say anything useful about the article.
It depends on the writers ofcourse.
But I agree 100% with your points!
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