Lead and body

One of the many interesting publishing features WordPress has to offer is the concept of the lead and the body of the post. This may sound like a strange thing, but it's actually quite simple. When you're publishing a new post, you don't necessarily want to display its whole contents right away on the front page. A much more user-friendly approach is to display only the lead, and then display the complete post under its individual URL. Achieving this in WordPress is very simple. All you have to do is use the Insert Read More Tag button, available in the Visual editor (or the more button in the Text editor). Simply place your cursor exactly where you want to break your post (the text before the cursor will become the lead), and then click the Insert More Tag button:

An alternative way of using this tag is to switch to the Text editor and input the tag manually, which is <!--more-->. Both approaches produce the same result. Clicking on the main Update button will save the changes.

On the front page, most WordPress themes display such posts by presenting the lead along with a Continue reading link, and then the whole post (both the lead and the rest of the post) is displayed under the post's individual URL.