If You Write a Series of Blog Posts, Please Link Them at the Beginning

I love reading blog posts that go into a subject in depth. So nothing disappoints me more to find a part 3 of a blog post and not know where to find part 1 and 2. I can look at the blog archive, but if it’s mixed in with other posts, I may not be able to find it. The author sometimes links to the previous post at the beginning of each one, which is better, but then I don’t know if there’s a fourth part.

I want to read your blog series, but I can’t read blog posts I can’t find. Not linking the posts in a series frustrates your readers, suppresses engagement, and means fewer people actually read the whole thing. And if readers do read a single part of your post series, they lose the context of the whole series. You worked really hard on your post series! You deserve to have it be the best series it can be, and your readers deserve a great experience.

So, if you write a series of blog posts, please make it easy for your readers: link each part at the top. And if you develop a blogging platform or static site generator, I have a request: make it easy for writers on your platform to automatically generate a table of contents for a series of blog posts.

If You Use Jekyll, I Made It Easy

For my own website, I developed a jekyll plugin to link related posts together at the top of each article. It’s not the only tool either, jekyll-series-navigation and jekyll-series. I really should have investigated if a plugin already existed before I wrote my own.

What About Other Platforms?

Jekyll isn’t the only static site generator out there, and this problem isn’t unique to it. Hugo has built-in series support through taxonomies, which lets you group posts together and generate navigation automatically. Astro doesn’t have a built-in series concept, but its content collections make it straightforward to query and link related posts. WordPress users have plugins like Jeangenerator Series or can use categories and custom fields to stitch posts together. Ghost and Substack, unfortunately, don’t offer much here – you’re stuck manually linking posts, which means the problem I described above is alive and well on those platforms.

If you’re building or choosing a blogging platform, series support should be on your checklist. It’s a small feature, but it makes a real difference for readers trying to follow along.

Make It Easy to Follow Along

A blog series is a commitment. The writer puts in the work to break a complex topic into digestible parts, and hopefully the reader comes back for each one. The least we can do as writers and platform developers is make sure the reader can actually find the next part. Link your series. Build tools that link series automatically. Your readers will thank you.