Summarising your posts can affect a lot more than just your overall page look. In fact, by summarising your posts instead of having each article displayed in its entirety, you expose your visitor to about 4 to 5 article titles as soon as they open your page.

First this creates choice, in that if the reader doesn’t like the first post they might see the subsequent titles and therefore stay on your site as opposed to leaving if they can only see the first article.

Second, it also creates “Site Stickiness” which exposes the user to more content in the hopes that they immediately see another after they are done with one. The sticky factor is actually very important in that if you have enough quality content the user may bookmark your site as a great resource to check back on.

When building a user-base for a blog it’s important to not only focus on expanding your content to attract more visitors each day from search engines, but also to establish a permanent user-base that will check back on your blog by their own free will. These people are the only ones that will ever comment on your blog and start to form a community around your site.

Tutorial on Summarising Posts

 Here’s a quick and simple tutorial on how to summarise your posts in Wordpress. There are other means out there through the use of plugins, however this is by far the easiest.

 Type up your article and go to the coding tab. Select the point where you want the break to appear between your summary and your full article and select the “more” quick-tag at the top of the page.

You should take note on the use of images in your posts if they’re at the very top. They will still be included in the summary and if your summary is too short to engulf the picture it will look a bit out of proportion (as you can probably tell from my previous posts). After you know this though you can easily work around it.

If you have any trouble feel free to post in the comments section so I can help you out.