What Is a WordPress Excerpt?

A WordPress excerpt is a summarized version of a blog post or page that is often used in WordPress themes to display a brief preview of the content. Excerpts are typically displayed on the homepage, category pages, and other archive pages, where they provide a quick overview of the post and entice users to click through and read the full content.

In WordPress, the excerpt is a custom field that can be added to any post or page. By default, WordPress automatically generates an excerpt by taking the first 55 words of a post and stripping out any HTML tags. However, users can also create a custom excerpt by manually entering a summary of the post into the excerpt field.

Why Use a WordPress Excerpt?

Excerpts serve several important purposes in a WordPress website. Here are some of the key benefits of using excerpts on your site:

• They make your site more organized and easy to navigate: Excerpts help to break up long lists of posts and make it easier for users to find the content they’re looking for. By providing a brief overview of each post, excerpts help users quickly identify which posts are relevant to their interests and which ones they can skip over.
• They improve the user experience: Excerpts provide users with a quick and easy way to get an idea of what a post is about without having to click through and read the entire thing. This can save users time and make it more likely that they’ll find the information they’re looking for.
• They make your site more appealing to search engines: Search engines like Google use the content of your excerpts to understand what your site is about and determine its relevance to users’ search queries. By including keywords and relevant information in your excerpts, you can help search engines understand what your site is about and improve its ranking in search results.

How to Create a WordPress Excerpt

There are two ways to create a WordPress excerpt: automatically or manually. Here’s how to do each:

• Automatically: By default, WordPress automatically generates an excerpt for each post by taking the first 55 words of the post and stripping out any HTML tags. This excerpt is displayed on your homepage, category pages, and other archive pages whenever your theme is set up to display excerpts.

To customize the length of the automatically-generated excerpt, you can use the excerpt_length filter in your theme’s functions.php file. For example, to change the excerpt length to 70 words, you would add the following code to your functions.php file:

function custom_excerpt_length( $length ) {
    return 70;
}
add_filter( 'excerpt_length', 'custom_excerpt_length', 999 );

• Manually: If you want more control over the content of your excerpt, you can create a custom excerpt by manually entering a summary of the post into the excerpt field. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Edit the post or page for which you want to create a custom excerpt.
2. Scroll down to the “Excerpt” field, which is located below the main content editor.
3. Enter a brief summary of the post into the excerpt field. This summary should be no more than a few sentences long and should accurately reflect the main points of the post.
4. Update or publish the post to save your changes.

Once you’ve created a custom excerpt, it will be displayed on your homepage, category pages, and other archive pages in place of the automatically-generated excerpt.

How to Display a WordPress Excerpt in Your Theme

To display a WordPress excerpt in your theme, you will need to add a few lines of code to your theme’s template files. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open your theme’s index.php file in a text editor. This file controls the main loop of your theme, which is the section of code that displays your posts on the homepage, category pages, and other archive pages.
2. Locate the section of the file that displays the post content. This section will typically include a call to the the_content() function, which displays the full content of the post.
3. Replace the call to the_content() with a call to the_excerpt(). This function will display the excerpt for the current post, rather than the full content.

For example, if your theme’s index.php file currently contains the following code:

<div class="post-content">
    <?php the_content(); ?>
</div>

You would change it to this:

<div class="post-content">
    <?php the_excerpt(); ?>
</div>

4. Save your changes and upload the modified index.php file to your server.

Once you’ve added the code to display the excerpt, it will be displayed on your homepage, category pages, and other archive pages in place of the full post content.

Keywords for SEO

If you want to improve the search engine optimization (SEO) of your WordPress site, you should include relevant keywords in your excerpts. This will help search engines understand what your site is about and improve its ranking in search results.

When choosing keywords for your excerpts, keep the following tips in mind:

• Use keywords that accurately reflect the content of your posts: Don’t try to stuff your excerpts with irrelevant keywords just to improve your search ranking. Instead, focus on using keywords that accurately describe the content of your posts. This will help users find your site when they’re searching for information on a specific topic.
• Use a variety of keywords: Don’t just use the same keyword or phrase over and over again in your excerpts. Instead, try to use a variety of keywords that relate to the content of your posts. This will help search engines understand the full range of topics that your site covers, and it will improve the chances that your site will rank well for a variety of search queries.
• Use keywords naturally: Don’t force keywords into your excerpts in a way that sounds unnatural. Instead, try to use keywords naturally, as if you were writing a summary of your post for a friend. This will make your excerpts more readable and more likely to rank well in search results.

In conclusion, a WordPress excerpt is a summarized version of a blog post or page that is often used in WordPress themes to display a brief preview of the content. Excerpts are important because they make your site more organized and easy to navigate, improve the user experience, and make your site more appealing to search engines. To create a WordPress excerpt, you can either let WordPress generate one automatically or create a custom excerpt by entering a summary of the post into the excerpt field. To display the excerpt in your theme, you need to add a few lines of code to your theme’s template files. Finally, to optimize your excerpts for SEO, you should include relevant keywords that accurately reflect the content of your posts.