What is excerpt field wordpress

WordPress has two default post type called Post and Page. Post are displayed in reverse chronological order from latest to oldest on your blog page or home page. Each time you publish the post it will appear on the blog page. Hi sterndata , Thanks for your attention, as you can see in a screenshot 1 of both Classic Editor and Block Editor, I can not see where the Excerpt filed is nor can I find it.

In Classic Editor, check the Screen Options at the top right. This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by KC. While going through this page or any other archive page , the excerpt enables users to know what each post is about. Without a brief description to guide them, they would need to open each article to find out, or be given the entire article content for several blogs all at once. The average website visitor is not patient so this will lead to lots of frustration and higher bounce rates.

Another place where excerpts are utilized is in search engines. Google and other search engines display summaries in search results. Having an excerpt helps the search engine identify what you want to display as a summary for that post. However, although they would often use this excerpt, they may sometimes generate a summary instead from your content. So you cannot always control what they use. Before now, your aim for writing an excerpt may not have been related to search engines.

Yet, that is one of the most important considerations when making an excerpt for your post. Try to write excerpts that are catchy and would get people to click on the post. WordPress supports excerpts out of the box. But as we mentioned, whether it works on your site or not depends on your theme. If your blog or home page displays the full content for each post, then excerpts are either not enabled or not supported.

Such archive pages should list WordPress posts along with a little summary for each, and a read more link or button. This means that your posts will appear fully in the feeds section. This enables the summary of your posts to show in browsers. Here, you may have to find the setting for excerpts. You can enable excerpt in WordPress by modifying your theme code. However, we do not recommend this step for beginners, and you should seek professional WordPress help if you require this option, but cannot complete it on your own.

Before you begin, perform a complete backup of your site, in case anything goes wrong. Read this guide to learn how to perform WordPress Backups. Next, you would need to create a child theme in which you will make these modifications. Learn how to create a child theme in WordPress. After creating the child theme, you will need to modify the WordPress template file or files displaying your archive content. The template names may vary depending on the theme, but it should be the following:.

If done properly, excerpts should now be enabled. There are two primary ways to use excerpts in posts. You can allow WordPress to generate them for you, or you can add them yourself recommended.

Upon agreeing to let your post display only its summary in feeds, you are set to use excerpts by default. WordPress can then automatically create excerpts for you. How does it do this? It singles out the first 55 words in your post as the excerpt. Excerpts allow users to display more content in less space. It is particularly useful for content rich websites such as news or magazine sites where the website owners would want to showcase more content on the front page with links to full articles.

Examples of places that generally use these are RSS feeds, archived pages, and search pages.