Excerpts are summaries of your content that can be used in different parts of your website. This guide will explain everything you need to know about excerpts.
- In your dashboard, click on Posts or Pages.
- Click on the title of the post or page you wish to edit.
- Under the settings on the right side of the editor, click on Excerpt.
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If you don’t see the Settings sidebar, click the settings icon at the top of your page.
- Type a short description of the content to help your visitors understand what the content is about in just a few sentences.
- Click Publish or Update to save your changes.
if you don’t write an excerpt yourself, WordPress will automatically use the first 55 words of your post as your excerpt.
We recommend aiming for a word count of between 55 and 100 words. Your excerpt should hook the reader and pique their curiosity.
Make sure that it is short enough to appear in full in the search results, or when the post is shared on social media platforms like Facebook.
It is a good idea to compliment your post title rather than repeat it. You only have a certain amount of space to work with. Therefore, you don’t want to waste unnecessary words by repeating the article title.
Excerpts can be used by different themes as a preview instead of showing the full post or page content. Here are some examples of places where excerpts may appear, depending on your theme:
- Search results
- Blog Page
- Portfolio Page
- Featured Content on the homepage:
Excerpts are also often picked up by social networks and search engines to be used as the meta description for that page or post:
The text you enter as an excerpt will not show on the individual post or page itself.
If excerpts are not appearing, check in the Customizer for Content Options or a similar section. Your theme may have a setting under Content Options for Blog Display that is set to show a Full post by default. If so, change it to Post excerpt.
If this does not resolve the issue, bear in mind that not all themes support excerpts. You can consider using More Blocks as a solution to this.
Very basic HTML can be used to style how the excerpt looks. A few examples include making the text bold:
<strong>text</strong> You can add a link:
<a href = "url">Link Text</a>This is useful if your theme doesn’t include a “Read More” option. You can insert the public address of the page the excerpt is for to create your own Read More option.
Create a line break between two blocks of text:
<br> Example of HTML formatting:
