Blogger category (label) pages can be very annoying to visitors if they have to wait very long while page with many articles loads. One remedy is to add &max-results=5 to your category links, however then many articles probably won't be read, because you can't realistically expect visitors to thumb through many pages. Probably this solution is also bad for search engine optimization (SEO), because it increases the distance between blog pages. In this post I present another solution which only displays the titles of the posts.
Here's a simple hack to change the show only titles In blog archive pages. Credits go to Divya Sai from bloggerstop.net.
From the blogger dashboard go to Layout -> Edit HTML. Make a backup, then check the expand widget templates box.
Search for this line:
Replace that line with this coding.
<b:if cond='data:blog.homepageUrl != data:blog.url'>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != "item"'>
<a expr:href='data:post.url'>
<data:post.title/></a><br/>
<b:else/>
<b:include data='post' name='post'/>
</b:if>
<b:else/>
<b:include data='post' name='post'/>
</b:if>
<!--ARCHIVE-TITLES-STOPS-->
Enjoy. Please leave a comment below for questions and suggestions.
Hi, is this mean if anyone click on the labels, then every titles under that label would be listed out? That is so nice as I remember blogger only allowed max post 20 in a search page. Correct me if I am wrong.
My blog have the same concept, but not title, just small boxes of titles plus first para of the content. Would you think that some visitors would hate to click and rather read a long page of articles without clicking every single one of them?
Very good questions, Emily, thanks for your comment. The maximum of posts per page is much higher. I think the maximum for blogger is much higher, I remember reading about a limit of 500 posts. I just tried to show over 150 posts on a page of my test blog and it worked.
I think when to decide how and how many results to display for labels and searches, two factors are important. Speed of loading and clear presentation. As a visitor you don't want to wait very long for results to display or while your browser freezes and you don't want to be presented a cluttered page with more information than needed where you have to search and you loose time.
I am not longer sure it is best to show only titles on archive pages. The problem for me was that google indexed many of my archive pages with preference over my article pages. When my archive pages showed only titles my bounce rate from search traffic went up very much and I got only a third of the usual page views over the next days. I am now experimenting with META tags for the google bot to rectify the indexing of my pages and maybe I'll try again then to show only the titles, I am not sure yet.
I have seen several hacks to improve the display of label/search pages. I think, first, it is important not to show the complete post (you mention post summaries). Next you can set a maximum of results returned per page if you append &max-results=n to the label and search links, where n can be any number. This can be combined with a
nice navigation footer (go to previous posts or older posts). What really takes long to load are external files and javascripts (e.g. for social bookmarks), not the post text itself. If you don't use too many external files and scripts in the part of the posts which gets loaded then this is a simple solution and quite good for both speed and clarity. If you want to avoid page loading you can also use a solution such as Ajax labels, which extract a short summary text from relevant posts and does not reload your site.
With respect to summaries, there is a difference between label pages and search result pages. While for label pages summaries are ok, they are hardly satisfying for search result pages, where you want to see the context of the search keywords. I think I am going to about site search in some days.
I hope this answered your question.
Thank you for such a long and helpful explanation. As a reader myself, I do hate slow loading pages and ended up leaving the page without even wait for the full load. I do agree, too many applications on the main page would make the loading slow and sometimes fail.
I use to let people review my blog on forums, ended up they complained too much applications I put on my blog. I then realize that for visitors that actually interested more in what you wrote and the knowledge you shared seems to care less about what kind of applications you've installed. Maybe it is just a theory. But it could be right, most of my favorite bloggers have very simple layouts but with great contents and huge traffics.
Hopefully something good will come out with you experiments and please remember to share with us here. Thank you in advance.
Thanks for the encouragement, Emily.
It's certainly true that the content is most important, however you want to look your site nicely and distinctive, maybe produce even awe in your visitors. You want some images, some social features, some navigation, and there you are optimizing your sites for hours. I just added aperture which allow adding a lot of information to the site in very little time, but it makes it slow...
Anyways, I think I am done with most optimization of this blog and will shift focus back to topics that I wanted initially to write about before optimizing. Hope you'll enjoy them.
Hi,I don't have data='post' name='post'
but I have data='i.posts' name='posts'. Is it same? I use blogspot. I followed your step, but it doesn't work. Please advice.
@Cahaya: It's not the same. It should be an <b:include data='post' .../>
Please check that you marked the option "Expand Widget Templates" in layout->edit HTML.
If you still can't find the code, I can offer that you send me your template and I'll have a look (e.g. via feedback).
Hi Ben, I have found it, and it worked. Thank you very much.
Hello,
It doesn't work for me.
If you solve my problem,I will pay you $ 10 USD.
My Email: wannabekill@yahoo.com
Thanks,
Surya
This code should've been very useful.
But it doesn't work when static pages are activated. :(
this is a cool stuff, and its simple thanks
Oh sorry there is an error, if we apply this, new blogger pages will not show only it shows the title.... :(
Just back from holidays.
@സുന്ദരിക്കുട്ടി: I haven't tried this out yet with static pages. They were not available when I implemented this and now I am not very interested in this hack anymore. From your description I am not sure I understand the problem. If you send me your template with the hack implemented I can have a look. Probably it can be fixed.
I like this text: "You want some images, some social features, some navigation, and there you are optimizing your sites for hours..." is very interesting, thanks for sharing this information!
@buy viagra: I think this time you picked a better line for your comment. ;)
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