Typically (and by default), a WordPress blog displays up to 10 blog posts on the main blog page and on any other page that is a compilation of blog posts (e.g., category archives, tag archives, and date archives).
If your blog posts are on the longish side, this can pose a bit of a problem. Namely, these compilation (or archive) pages are long – requiring lots of vertical scrolling – and your older blog posts can get lost down the page.
You’ve probably visited blogs that suffer from this problem.
Thankfully, the WordPress more tag comes to the rescue!
By inserting the WordPress more tag near the top of your blog posts, WordPress will know to display only that portion of your post that comes before the “more” tag on archive pages.
Here’s how:
In Visual Editor mode: Find the place in your post where you want the cutoff and place your cursor there (black arrow). Then click on the “Insert More Tag” toolbar button”.
Voila! Here’s what WordPress does:
And here’s what the more tag looks like in the HTML editor (you could, alternatively, type this straight into the HTML editor):
And now (actually, after you update the post, here’s what the post looks like when displayed on an archive page:
Update: The WordPress more quicktag has a cousin — the nextpage (aka page) quicktag.
If you are wanting to paginate a long post into two or more pages, you want to use the page quicktag.
Here is what the WordPress documentation says about the page quicktag:
WordPress tag similar to the more tag, except it can be used any number of times in a post, and each insert will “break” and paginate the post at that location.
How to do it:
For some unknown reason, WordPress removed the toolbar icon for the page quicktag from the post editor many versions ago. In order to insert this quicktag in your posts, you must go into HTML editing mode and enter the following wherever you want a page break:
<!--nextpage-->
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