Read More
Using "Read More" as anchor text is completely unacceptable in 2025.
We covered this in the Rethinking the Homepage post in 2019, yet we still see outdated themes and setups that have this as the default.
This is a low quality site signal that tells everyone that you don't care about:
- SEO
- user experience
- accessibility
Which puts your site at a huge disadvantage to sites that properly implement anchor text. This is because search engines prefers sites with easy-to-understand labels (anchor text) and will send traffic to those. Readers prefer sites that are clearly labeled and visually cleaner.
The great news is that if you're on a theme or setup that currently uses this, fixing it has incredible potential upside.
Homepage
The number 1 place to address this is the homepage, which can be done by implementing the Modern Homepage with the Feast Plugin (or the Lattice Plugin if on Trellis).
Categories
The number 2 place to fix this is on category pages, which are often prebuilt with minimal configuration options. The Modern Categories is prebuilt with SEO, pagespeed, user experience and accessibility in mind, and uses proper anchor text instead of "Read More".
The Modern Categories can also be upgraded to an even higher quality landing-page type experience with the Custom Content for categories.
Index
The number 3 place to fix this is on "blog" pages if they're still being used (also badly outdated), by replacing it with a high quality index page.
Getting Started
Ready to update your site to modern standards to set yourself up for success? Check out the Getting Started page with options for pre-existing sites and brand new sites.