I tend to write really long posts. It’s not unusual for one of my WordPress posts to be over 1000 words long – and I’ve written some posts that have been over 3000 words long! While this is certainly good to help have lots of keywords and content for search engines, it definitely has some drawbacks, especially if your content might be slowing down the speed of your site.

Reasons Why You Might Want to Split WordPress Posts Into Multiple Pages

The big reason is because most blogs who are in the business of writing content and selling advertising space know that more pageviews means more $$$. If you sell ad space based on cpm (cost per 1000 impressions), there’s a lot of potential to get more impressions without getting more traffic.

For example, if you get 500 visitors who reads an average of 2 pages each, this equals 1000 pageviews/impressions. Getting 500 readers to read 2 pages is usually much easier than getting 1000 unique visitors, depending on what type of site you have.

There are also other advantages of splitting up posts into several pages:

• Reduces Bounce Rate – Visitors Will More Likely View 2 pages than just 1
• Increases Time Spent on Site – more opportunity to click on ads or subscribe
• Makes Loading Time Faster, especially on posts with multiple images, and we all know site speed is important!
• Organize a Series of Posts so users can find relevant information they need quickly without scrolling endlessly

How to Add Multiple Pages to Posts

Many people don’t even know this feature exists, but by using WordPress’s built in Page Links Functionality, it’s actually not very hard at all

The first step is to edit your posts to decide where you want the pages to be split up at. For example, if you were making a top 100 list, you might split it up between every 20 items. All you do where you want the pages to split is to write this code:

<!--nextpage-->

By default, when you go to publish the post, it will then display pagination below that says “Page 1 2 3″ and etc. If you don’t see the pagination for the post at the bottom, you’ll want to check your theme’s single.php file to make sure it includes the template tag shown below:

<div>
<?php wp_link_pages(); ?>
</div>

If you wanted something a little more advanced of course, you could also pass a number of variables through the template tag. For example, this adds the div class in the function itself and adds the phrase “Continue Reading”:

<?php wp_link_pages('before=<div class="pagelinks">Continue Reading&after=</div>'); ?>

Now, most likely, you probably will want something with a little more style than the WordPress default. Fortunately, that can be done pretty easily with a little CSS as well.

In your style.css sheet, you could add something like this:

.pagelinks {
padding:20px;
margin:10px;
text-align:center;
color:#663399;
}


.pagelinks a {
color:#cc0099;
font-weight:bold;
border:1px solid #663399;
padding:3px 5px;
margin:2px;
}


And you will get something that looks like this:

SEO, Social Sharing, and Other Factors to Consider

Of course, creating multiple pages out of posts makes some worry a bit about things like userfriendliness, SEO and social sharing. Some people for example might not like seeing multiple pages for an article. Others might worry about how Google will index and display the posts.

Here’s some tips to address common concerns with multiple page articles/posts:

Determine if Hierarchical Pages Might be Better: In instances where you are making a series or will have multiple “sections” about a topic, hierarchical pages might be better for organizing the content. Keep in mind that posts are individual blocks of content “looped” by taxonomy sorting – with pages you can assign parents, children, grandchildren, etc.

Use Rel Attributes: Google’s Suggestions About Multipage Articles suggests to use link rel attributes for next and previous. There are a number of SEO plugins that can do this for you.

Provide Print Friendly Solution: If people don’t like the multiple pages, they can choose a print friendly version instead. Again, a number of plugins available for this.

Concentrate on User Experience: Don’t be one of those sites that creates a new page for each paragraph of a post – that will likely get you much less pageviews instead of more or cause your cpms to drop drastically due to poor conversions for advertisers. But if you’re going on toward 1000+ words on an article, you may want to make it easier for everyone to read/sort/reference.

The Most Important Thing to Remember:

Splitting a post into multiple pages isn’t a feature everyone is going to need, but for some sites it makes a lot of sense. If you see that it can benefit not only you but also your readers and your advertisers, then it is worth implementing.

What are your thoughts on splitting up wordpress posts into multiple pages? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!