Stop a curation block repeating the same link

A fully set-up curation block quietly gives your readers three ways to reach the same story: the image is clickable, the headline is clickable, and the read-more prompt underneath is clickable. That is often more than you want. If you have written a clear “Keep reading” invitation, having the picture and the headline silently do the same thing adds nothing — and on a busy layout it can make a block feel like it is nudging from every direction at once.

You can now switch either of those automatic links off, one block at a time.

Turn off the image link, the headline link, or both

1. Open your newsletter in the composer and click into a Curation block.
2. In the block’s settings, find Display Options.
3. Switch off either of these:
   • Link the Image to the Story — the picture stays exactly as it is, but is no longer clickable.
   • Link the Title to the Story — the headline keeps its styling, but is no longer a link.

Both start switched on, so nothing about your existing newsletters changes until you turn one off. And because the setting belongs to the block, you can make one story’s image plain while the next one stays clickable.

What stays the same

Your read-more prompt keeps its link, whether it is a button or wording tucked onto the end of the description. That is deliberate: it is the invitation you wrote, so it stays the one thing a reader can rely on clicking. If you want to change how it looks, see style a curation block’s call to action.

Turning off the headline link does not change the headline’s own styling. If you had it underlined, it stays underlined — see format text in curation blocks if you want to drop the underline now that the headline is no longer a link.

Where you will and won’t see each switch

Link the Image to the Story appears on the layouts that actually show an image. On a text-only layout or a bulleted list there is no picture to link, so the switch is not offered.

Link the Title to the Story appears wherever the headline does — including the text-only and bulleted-list layouts, where a headline link is just as much a repeat of the read-more prompt. If you switch the headline off entirely, the link switch goes away with it, and comes back when you show the headline again.

What your readers see

Exactly what you set up: the same picture, the same headline, in the same place — just without the extra links.

There is a quieter benefit too. Every link in an email carries a surprising amount of hidden text behind it, and it grows once click tracking rewrites the web address. Dropping two repeated links from each story in a ten-story newsletter can trim a few kilobytes, which matters more than it sounds: inbox providers cut a message short past a certain size and hide everything after the cut, including your unsubscribe footer. A leaner newsletter is one your readers see all of.

For more ways to fine-tune these blocks, see format text in curation blocks and reorder the image in a curation block. For the full tour, start with Working in Curations.