Excerpts are summaries of your content that can be used in different parts of your website. This guide will explain how to add an excerpt to your site’s pages and posts.
To add an excerpt to your content, take the following steps:
- In your dashboard, click on Posts or Pages.
- Click on the title of the post or page you wish to edit to open it in the WordPress editor.
- Under the settings on the right side of the editor, click on “Excerpt“:
If you do not have the sidebar on the right, click the Settings icon in the top-right corner to bring up the settings. This icon looks like a square with two uneven columns:
- Type a brief description of the content in just a few sentences to help your visitors understand what the content is about.
- Click the “Publish” or “Save” button to save your changes.
If you don’t write an excerpt yourself, the first 55 words of your page or post will be used in places where an excerpt is required.
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 complement your page/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.
You can ask AI to create an excerpt for you. To use AI to write an excerpt, take the following steps:
- Ensure that you have finished writing the main content of your page or post. AI will use this to write a summary of your content.
- Below the Excerpt box, click the AI icon (the symbol resembles sparkles) to adjust the following settings:
- 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.
- Choose the “Desired Length” of your excerpt between 10 and 100 words.
- Click the “Generate” button to create your excerpt.
- After a few moments, the Excerpt box will fill in with the AI-generated excerpt text. You can choose to discard or accept the excerpt.
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. The setup can vary depending on the type of theme your site uses:
- 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 the full post or an 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.
If your site uses a block theme, you can control where and how excerpts appear by adding the Excerpt block (also called “Post Excerpt”) to your templates. This block pulls the excerpt text you wrote in the post or page sidebar and displays it in the template layout.
The Excerpt block is commonly used inside templates like the Blog Home or All Archives, often within a Query Loop block that lists multiple posts on a single page.
To add the Excerpt block to a template, follow these steps:
- Navigate to Appearance → Editor in your dashboard.
- Open the template where you want excerpts to appear, such as the Blog Home or All Archives template.
- Click the + Block Inserter and search for “Post Excerpt.”
- Add the block where you want the excerpt to display.
- Click Save to apply the change.
When you select the Excerpt block in the editor, you will see placeholder text that reads “Add read more text.” To add a “Read More” link that takes visitors to the full post, click directly on this placeholder text and type your preferred text, such as “Continue reading” or “Read the full post.”
If you do not want a “Read More” link, leave the placeholder text as-is. It will not appear on your live site.
If the placeholder text does not respond when you click it, make sure you have selected the Excerpt block itself and not a parent block like the Query Loop. Use List View to find and select the Excerpt block directly.
Your site’s theme type determines which instructions to follow. Go to Appearance in your site’s dashboard: if you see Editor, follow the Block theme tab. Otherwise, follow the Classic theme tab.
The Excerpt block includes the following settings in the Styles panel of the block settings sidebar. Select the Excerpt block and click the Styles icon (the black and white circle) to access these options:
- Color: Change the text and background color.
- Typography: Adjust the font size.
- Dimensions: Control the block spacing.
- Border: Add a border around the excerpt.
