Full Posts or Excerpts?

Are there benefits to having only excerpts on your blog home page or should you have the full post (or maybe a combination of both)?

I started thinking about this question from a marketing perspective (of course) and decided to do a little bit of research to find out if there were benefits to exerpts on the home page and if there were any serious disadvantages.

From all that I read, the only disadvantage I found was the user had to click to read more. But, if the post is interesting, clicking on the link is really not a deterent because if the user isn’t interested, they won’t read past the first paragraph anyway.

However, if you are like me and write posts that are around 600 words or more, this may be an option you may wish to consider.

Why?

• Eliminates duplicate content. Since blogs contain the main index, single post page and archives (both by category and by date), you may want to limit how many full posts are available to the search engines since search engines don’t think highly of duplicate content.
• Increases page views. Right now my analytics tell me that my bounce rate is pretty high (i.e. people come to the site and leave without viewing another page). I suspect that is because people are reading what they want and leaving without purusing other pages. By giving visitors only a taste of the post, you may get visitors to read more pages while they are on the site.
• Encourages comments. If the visitor is interested in the post, they need to click to the single post page, making the comment area very visible. I have found that people who find posts and view their single post page are more likely to comment than those who read the full post on the home page and depart when they are done because the comment area is not “in their face”.
• Enables scanning and offers more content in a smaller space. Fitting more headlines and first paragraphs on your blog homepage helps visitors determine if you have what they are interested in and whether they want to read more or not. Today’s readers prefer scanning content for gems rather than reading everything presented. Give your visitors more gems.

But, one of the drawbacks that kept me from using excerpts on the main index page is the fact that standard excerpts tend to be, well ugly. You can’t control the formatting to stay within your brand, they break at points you don’t necessarily want them to and formatting and images are stripped from the excerpt. There are plugins that make the excerpt more managable. I use one called Custom Excerpts by Sean Bluestone which allows me to set the length in words, change the excerpt link text and add html tags to format the excerpts more consistently with the rest of the site. But that still doesn’t solve the problem as most still require a set number of words or characters to function. And on the home page, you want control of what your visitors see.

Best of Both Worlds

In WordPress, you can create extended excerpts on your home page using the <!– more –> quick tag. You get to control where the excerpt breaks so that you can decide how much or how little you want on the main index page. And if your post is rather short, you don’t need to break it at all. Your choice!

To easily insert the tag:

• Position your cursor where you want the tag to be and click on the little icon in the top row of buttons in the WordPress visual editor that looks like the image to the right. If you hover over the button, “Insert More tag (Alt+Shift+T)” smart tag appears.
• If you use the HTML editor, position your cursor where you want the tag to be and click on the “more” quick tag button above your text.

This capability gives me the control I need to ensure the visitor gets enough varying content to ensure they stick around and read more.

So what do you think? Full posts or extended excerpts for your main index page of your blog?