WordPress Excerpts: The Definitive Guide

The Complete Guide to WordPress Excerpts and How They Can Help You Get More Clicks

What are excerpts for WordPress Posts?

What is the excerpt in writing?

An excerpt is a summary of a blog post or article. The excerpt usually provides the reader with information on the article’s topic and why it is essential to read the post. The excerpt can also be used as a teaser for your blog post, enticing readers to click through to read more. The excerpt is an essential aspect of blogging because it helps readers understand what they are clicking through to read and whether they want to continue reading. It also has SEO value because your content is well-structured and provides a better User Experience, leading to better rankings.

What is an excerpt example?

An excerpt is a passage from an article posted on your blog. The site owner posts the excerpt usually on the homepage or on the main blog page (where all the other articles are posted, in the form of excerpts). If you have an, let us say, 1500 words article, you post the summary on the homepage, in the “Featured Articles,” or whatever place.

WordPress excerpt length

If you wonder how long excerpts can be, the default maximum words you should use for the WordPress excerpt length are 55 words. You can configure the length of your excerpts to be more (or less) words. You have to pay attention to the length of the excerpts and make sure there is included catchy information (to make the visitor curious about the article).

How do I create a custom excerpt in WordPress?

To add a custom excerpt in WordPress, log in to WordPress and navigate to Settings > Reading > Scroll down to “For each post in a feed, include” and select/check “Summary”> Press “Save changes.”

By default, WordPress CMS has an inbuilt feature to add excerpts to WordPress posts through the Gutenberg editor. In order to add/edit the excerpt of a new or published post, select the article (in the edit mode), and in the right panel, you will find the Excerpt option (see the image below).

To add a custom excerpt to your post, go to WordPress dashboard > Posts > All Posts and:

• click Add New to create a new post.
• click on a post you want to edit.
• in the right panel, you will find the Excerpt field.

In the case of WordPress pages, you have to tweak the Functions.php file.

ATTENTION: Make sure you did a backup before touching this file. A slight mistake, and your site is broken.

To add the excerpt length for your WordPress page(s), locate the functions.php and add this code:

add_post_type_support( 'page', 'excerpt' );

If you want to learn more about how to configure the WordPress excerpt length, go here: https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/hooks/excerpt_length/