Many blogs preferred to display post excerpts instead of full posts on the Homepage (eg. WPTidBits). For many reasons, it is still one of the most selected methods of displaying posts list on the Homepage. While there are many arguments with both ways, let see what are the advantages and disadvantages with this method.
Advantages
To ensure that search engines will not penalized the website for duplicated content, it is best to display only post excerpts on the homepage. As in single post pages will also display full post, it will be considered as having the same exact content on two places same with homepage if displaying full post on homepage.
Apart from the SEO benefits displaying only post excerpts on the Homepage will also boost the number of page views and possibly the number of comments. Readers that before were used to reading posts on the Homepage will now need to visit single post pages (increasing the page views) and they will see the comments on every post. Should they find an interesting or provoking comment they will be much more likely to leave a response.
At the same time the Homepage will be less crowded with images from full post, while displaying only post thumbnails and selected images only which also decreasing Homepage load time.
Disadvantages
There is a trick to this method. While some of visitors are quite lazy to do more clicking, they prefer to see full posts on the Homepage and this might damage the user experience for those readers since it will add an extra click before they can access the content (if displaying post excerpts on Homepage).
Now which way do you prefer? And which way are you using?
