Recently I started using the “Read More” feature. If you’re using WordPress you’ll see it in your composer, it’s a button with one white box on top, one white box on bottom, seperated by a dashed line.

A few people have commented on it, most saying they dislike it, and I wanted to let you know the reasons behind the change (and I’d like some feedback once you know why I did it).

1. Using the “click here to read more” option drives up my pageviews. Once you are working with advertising agencies that pay based on pageviews, this means more money (either because you are payed based on each click on your site, or because each click on your site makes you more advertising to advertisers so you can charge more (I belong to the latter group)). You see a lot of really big sites employing tactics like this, Perez for example.

2. Have you noticed a use a lot of pictures? Hello, that’s like my signature. And this often causes load time on the home page to lag, especially when I publish three picture heavy posts in a row, since without the truncation they all have to load at once. Shortening each post to just the first picture on the home page should make the www.thatwifeblog.com load a lot faster.

Now that you know the reasons, what do you think? This small change seems to have bumped by pageviews by around 15-20% (though that’s hard to calculate because pageviews vary based on how interesting my content is!) It is a change, but it’s small enough that if dozens and dozens of you spoke up and said it wasn’t worth it to you I would think about changing it back.

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