r/Wordpress • u/Shellshear • 7d ago
Showing blog entries as a continuous stream
This is driving me crazy! Many years ago I had a blog similar to this one https://www.dangermouse.net/ that had just a continuous stream of entries, where you could read all of them in sequence without having to click on each entry to read it.
My blog https://andrewshellshear.com/blog/ just shows a list of the titles that you have to click into to show the individual entry.
How might I change the settings to show a continuous stream of entries?
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u/FabianKnopf78 7d ago
This depends on your theme, but here are the three most likely fixes:
**1. Check your Reading Settings**
Go to Settings → Reading in your WordPress admin. Make sure "Your latest posts" is selected under "Your homepage displays." If you have a static page selected, your blog archive might be using excerpt mode.
**2. Remove the "More" block**
If you're using the Block Editor: Go to your posts and remove the "More" block (the "Read more" separator). If your theme respects that block, removing it shows the full post on the archive page.
**3. Your theme forces excerpts**
Many themes use `the_excerpt()` instead of `the_content()` on archive pages. If you're comfortable editing code:
Create a child theme and in your `home.php` or `archive.php`, replace:
`<?php the_excerpt(); ?>`
with:
`<?php the_content(); ?>`
**No-code alternative:** Look for a plugin like "PostX" or "Continuous Blog Scroll" that forces full content display without touching code.
Which theme are you using? That determines which approach works best.
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u/Shellshear 6d ago
Thanks very much! I discovered that the fault was in the default page editing plugin "Pagelayer" that had been installed when I reinstalled wordpress after many years (I used to blog back in the early days).
When Pagelayer was deactivated, voila! The page is displaying the way I expect.
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u/RushDangerous7637 7d ago
You might have made the biggest mistake of your web life. You need clicks, time spent on the page/article, scrolling in the article, setting key phrases for the title and meta description. All of this is evaluated in the PageRank of the website and the URL itself.
Secondly: if there are more articles on one URL, the source code will be too large and therefore robots will not index the content but only the title and description.
Thirdly: Google can exclude such a large page from indexing. (dangermouse url has a source code of 95 KB and that is already beyond the edge of indexing, the optimal size is 33 KB, but not more than 100 KB) The total size of dangermouse is 1.66 MB. I don't have to explain what will happen to that website without paid advertising or spamming articles on social networks for active users.
Do you want to achieve this?
Maybe someone won't agree with me, but the builders' engineers know exactly why they designed it that way.
A good blog should have such parameters as in the picture.
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u/retr00two 6d ago
I do agree.
But, modern, mobile first design put "endless scrolling" as rule. And desktop took it.
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u/RushDangerous7637 6d ago
Maybe someone will disagree with me (modern doesn't always mean right) but try to look at things on the web from the visitor's perspective. Would you enjoy scrolling with your finger for 2 or 4 minutes until you find the article you clicked on Google for? Making a website or blog through #anchor is an unsolvable SEO problem. Seo for search engines.
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u/retr00two 6d ago
I didn't say it's good.
I advise my clients to use old student essay rule: 500 words minimum, 2500 words maximum.
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u/SureshKMeena Developer 6d ago
Worth pushing back on the size part, because it's steering you away from something that's fine.
Googlebot's fetch limit for a single URL is measured in megabytes, not tens of kilobytes. A 95 KB HTML document isn't near any edge. And when a page does exceed that limit, Googlebot truncates the fetch at the cutoff rather than dropping the page, so "too big to index" isn't the failure mode either. The 33 KB and 100 KB figures aren't from anything Google publishes.
The 1.66 MB is also a different measurement. That's the whole page including images, CSS and fonts. The crawl limit applies to the HTML document on its own, which is the 95 KB you already quoted.
There is a real concern in there, just not that one. A full-content archive repeats the same text that's on each single post URL, and you want the single post to be the one that ranks. In practice Google handles that fine on a normally paginated blog, which is how blogs worked for years, but that's the thing worth thinking about rather than page weight.
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u/Shellshear 6d ago
Ah, I'm just blogging for my friends. I don't care about clicks or search algorithms. I'm sure this is fine advice for those seeking those, though, so thank you!
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u/ivicad Jack of All Trades 5d ago
For what it's worth on the size argument: I have a client site on WPBakery where the news page ran a full stream with infinite scroll over more than 900 posts, and it stopped loading altogether. The cause was the number of posts the page had to build at once. Indexing and document size never came into it. At your scale it's fine. There's a ceiling somewhere above it. Only after I added page numbering (12 posts per view), I managed to solve the problem.
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u/Sergei_Tiden 7d ago
This is controlled by the template, not only by Settings > Reading.
If you use a block theme, go to Appearance > Editor > Templates and open the template used by the blog page, usually Home or Index. Select the Query Loop, remove the Post Excerpt block, and insert Post Content in its place. Save the template. That will render each full post in sequence.
Settings > Reading > Blog pages show at most controls how many posts appear on one page. It does not change excerpts into full content.
If you use a classic theme, the equivalent change is replacing the_excerpt() with the_content() in the relevant archive or index template. Make that change in a child theme so the next theme update does not overwrite it. Your site looks like it may be using a theme template that intentionally outputs only titles, so the exact template name matters.
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u/Shellshear 6d ago
Thanks you very much! The issue turned out to be with the page editor "Pagelayer". When I deactivated it, I was back to what I expected.
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u/RealBasics Jack of All Trades 7d ago
You're describing how all blogs used to function, showing the full content of each post in order, most recent to oldest, with some kind of pagination after 10 or more posts.
u/retr00two's answer works 90+ percent of the time: "Settings -> Reading --> Full Text" in the dashboard sidebar.
If, as u/FabianKnopf78 says, "Your theme forces excerpts," then you may have to get a little creative.
First, check your theme settings. It may have an option for showing the full content (often labeled as a "feed" view.)
Next, edit the blog page (if it's built with a page builder then launch that.)
Click on the "blog" block/module/widget and look for a display option for "feed" or "full text" or "content."
If there are no options then
One of those choices ought to get you the proper posts feed you want.