How to Make Category Archive Page to Display as Formatted Normal Pages?

The other day, I was helping my client to add a News category to the main navigation bar and realized the archive section for the category is displayed as an excerpt. My client was not happy because he was seeing a lump of text unformatted and looked messy when he clicked on the news section. 

It was especially so where the news about participating on a trade show. The date, venue and booth number were all jumbled up together, it was hard to read, see below screen capture.

The text in the category archive section seems to lose its formatting and styling. I was thinking I would need to crack the php code to make the text to display properly. However, to my surprise after going through the Visual Editor in the Headway Theme, it was actually very easy to achieve what I wanted. See the steps below.

1. Go to Visual editor
2. Select “Category Archives” on the top right “System Pages” and click on “Switch to Page”
3. Go to the leaf that you want to edit by clicking on the pencil icon.
4. Once the edit box pops up, click on the “Options” tab.
5. Under Excerpts you can see it is at “Default”, move your cursor and select “Disable Excerpts”.
6. Click on the “Publish Change” button to save the changes.

Go to your category archive page and the texts now are displayed as normal texts. They are no longer showing as excerpt or messy lump of texts. It is cleaner and easier to read now.

If you wish your category archive pages to display as normal and formatted pages, try the above steps. It is one of the easiest and fastest ways to display full posts without touching any code.