Everybody jump!

photo: Lighttruth (CC BY-NC 2.0)

The old jump break offers hidden benefits to all Blogger blogs.

Before Blogger introduced the jump break in 2009, blog themes displayed entire posts stacked on top of each other.

The break allowed blogs to make a main page of posts truncated with "read more" links to each post on separate post pages. (It still does that, for older blog themes.)

Today, the most modern blog themes truncate posts automatically. But the jump can help even these blogs in ways not anticipated in 2009.

Blog themes introduced in 2017, and many third-party themes, excerpt the start of a blog post into a snippet that is shown on the main blog pages.

Snippet-based themes introduced some side effects that the jump-break can fix.

Snipitization

Blog themes like Notable, Emperio, Contempo, Soho, and Essential 

• grab the first few sentences of each blog post.
• strip away all formatting and line returns, and 
• display what is left in a block of text—the snippet—with a "read more" link.

Most themes also grab the first image in the post and snipitize it, cropped to fit in a rectangle of precise dimensions.

Blogs with these themes can use the jump break to improve blog performance and reader experience.

Reduce Blogger load

Snippet themes load the entire blog post, though they don't show it. This increases both load and load time.

Especially if you have many images in your blog post, this can be a significant performance hit. 

In particular, it can cause Blogger to paginate your main page after fewer posts than the maximum-posts setting that you specify.

To control for this, make it your practice to put a jump break before your second image.

The post's own page will still load in full when you readers click on it. Meanwhile, the jump-break will stop the invisible full-page load on dynamic pages-of-posts like the home page.

Truncate your snippet

You can shorten the snippet by putting the jump break where you would like things to break.

(You can't make the snippet any longer, though.)

Control your feed

If you set your feed to its jump-break option (in Settings), then people who follow your feed in an rss reader, including Blogger's own Reading List, will see a truncated blog post with a read-more link.

If you use a subscribe-by-email service, it is probably based on your feed and will show the same thing, rather than the whole post.

Why is this good? Your blog website is, or should be, a better user experience than these feed readers.

If your readers navigate to your blog, they have access to sidebar widgets that can help them to explore what you offer.

They can read, and leave, comments. They can click on labels to read more on those topics.

Write compelling leads that make clicking on that "read more" link in the email a no-brainer.

Older blog themes

For blog themes that do not use snippets, the jump break is an essential tool to tame the home page (and other dynamic pages) into a menu of scrollable blog posts.

A blog so organized is more reader friendly than one that demands a lot of scrolling to see what is on offer there.

Many bloggers (including me, as of 2023), prefer the flexibility of the jump break in these older themes to the rigid limits of the snippet, which strip away formatting, hyperlinks, and paragraphing.

The pre-2017 themes are not responsive, but are still quite robust.

Bonus HTML

There is a jump-break tool on the editing toolbar of the post editor (Compose mode only). It looks like a long dash —.

The HTML code it inserts is

<!--more-->

in case you like typing stuff out in HTML mode.

Further Reading

• Taming the snippet
• Review of blog themes
• Automatic pagination by Blogger
• Following your feed