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I have an interesting problem that requires a bit of creativity to solve.

We have a website where we are creating a video narrative about our son who was born with Down syndrome. We do a daily post that has a one minute video with it. On the home page I'm showing several recent blog posts with a read more link a few paragraphs into the post which someone would click to go to the single post.

I have always made the posts where the video is at the top of the post (which is where the our readers have come to expect to find it now) but on the home page there could be 5 -8 videos that show up, which slows my page down as it waits to get the video info from youtube for all of those videos.

I'm not sure what the best way to do this would be. I'd like to find a way to make the home page post have an image up top (maybe the featured image from the post?) and the first few paragraphs of the post, followed by the read more tag, which will take them to the single post...and the single post being the same as it always was. (which loads much faster since there's only one video on that page.) Make sense?

I'm sure there are some creative ways I could do this that I'm not even thinking about yet.

Any thoughts / advice you could give to help me with this and speed up the loading time of the home page would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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I would suggest utilizing the built-in excerpt functionality. An excerpt is basically a teaser for the rest of your post.

To utilize it: simply take the first couple paragraphs and copy them into the excerpt box on your post edit screen.

Depending on how your theme is built, you might not have to do anything to the code. However, if you try putting in an excerpt and the main content is still being displayed you will have to get your hands dirty and open up the template file that is calling the_content() on your blog listing page. Replace the_content() with the_excerpt() and you should be good to go!

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  • Hey thanks. I've never used the excerpt feature before. Is that better than using the more tag? (Out of curiosity why would a person choose one or the other?) And will the excerpt allow you to add a full length image?
    – Rick Smith
    Commented Jul 6, 2012 at 22:44
  • It's different from the more tag, because it shows different content. I.e. you could write a summary or an excerpt instead of just the first 55 characters. Excerpt is just text, therefore you cannot add images or formatting.
    – Tyrun
    Commented Jul 7, 2012 at 1:51
  • You mind looking at my site and seeing if I did it correctly? What would happen if I just copied a few paragraphs and made it look the same as if there was a more tag? It's not going to cause duplicate content or anything is it?
    – Rick Smith
    Commented Jul 7, 2012 at 2:30
  • Re: Images - take a look here: wordpress.stackexchange.com/a/17653/12615
    – brasofilo
    Commented Jul 7, 2012 at 5:34
  • @brasofilo Thanks! I checked out that link, but not really sure how it applies here. Am I missing something?
    – Rick Smith
    Commented Jul 7, 2012 at 13:40

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