How to customize the More Tag in Wordpress

The More tag is a extremely useful Wordpress feature, which allows us to select a “cut-off” point of a post, where only the text or content above this point will be shown on the homepage.

Why we use the more tag function?

Typically our homepage will have anything from 5 to 10 posts displayed at one time, which if we write 400 plus words per post will make our homepage very long.So readers may only see our first post on the first fold of the page (load up screen shot without scrolling) and will have scroll down quite far too find our second article, and we all know realistically readers will not scroll far. Meaning much of our content on the homepage will be lost for good.

By using the more tag, we can utilize the first fold of the page better and fit in possibly 3 or 4 posts and with a little scrolling fit in the entire home page which will greatly reduce the length of page and speed of loading time and at same time allow readers to browse the whole homepage.

What happens when we use the more tag?

The more tag will insert a “read more” link just after the excerpt, so the reader can click the link to read the rest of the post.

You can see that I have modified my words from the standard “read more”to a more customized wording.

So how can modify the words in the more tag?

The process is fairly simple:

1. Enter your Wordpress Control Panel > Presentation > followed by Theme Editor
2. Now you need to find the file that controls your homepage, typically called “Main Index Template” or index.php.
3. <?php the_content(__(’Read more’));?>
4. Now replace “Read more” with the text you prefer.
5. Finished.

More advanced modifications.

Add the title to a post.With a little more work you can even make the tag specific to each post. You may have noticed that I have modified mine to …Continue Reading the post called “The Title of The Post”. To accomplish this I replaced the line of code above with this:

<?php the_content(”…Continue reading the post called ” . get_the_title(”, ”, false)); ?>

In this example I have the words “Continue reading the post called” followed by the title of the post. You could replace this with whatever you want.

Amend for single Post Now we amended for all posts, but what if you like to amend just for one post? Here’s how to do it:

1. For this you first need to click the more tab as you would normally do.
2. Click the code tab to see your post with all the html code visible.
3. Where you see the <!-more-> modify to <!-more insert your text here->
   Let me show you two examples.
   <!–more Keep Reading My Post–>
   <!–more Interested? Click here to see more–>
4. Finished

These are just several ways to modify your “more tag”, with a little effort you can find many ways to encourage your readers to click through and read the rest of your posts.

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