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 this guide
- 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.
- 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.
You can ask AI to create a page or post excerpt to save you time in writing short summaries of your content.
Write your content first as AI will use the content of your post or page to create the excerpt.
Settings
Click the icon next to the Settings header to expand the Advanced AI Options.
- Language – Choose the language you want the excerpt to be written in.
- Tone – Set the tone AI will use to generate the excerpt, from options like Formal, Humorous, Confident and more.
- Model – Select between the AI models; the default is GPT-4, but you can switch to GTP-3.5 Turbo for faster results.
Desired Length – choose the number of words for your excerpt, between 10 and 100.
Click the Generate button to create your excerpt.
You can choose to discard or accept the 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 your theme settings to ensure the theme is set up to display excerpts.
- Block Themes – use the Excerpt block in your template.
- Universal, Hybrid and Classic Themes – check 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.
- Third-Party Themes – check your theme documentation for details.
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:
<strong>Espresso</strong> is coffee of Italian origin, brewed by expressing or forcing a small amount of nearly boiling water under pressure through finely ground coffee beans.<br><br>
<a href="https://yourgroovydomain.com/2019/03/05/blog-post/">Read More</a>
