Excerpt

What Is an Excerpt?

An excerpt is an optional text summary associated with a WordPress post. According to the official documentation, it serves as a post summary displayed on search results pages, archive pages, and your blog feed.

WordPress handles excerpts in two ways:

• Automatic excerpt — If you don't write one, WordPress takes the first 55 words of your post content and strips all HTML formatting. The result is a plain-text snippet followed by "[...]"
• Manual excerpt — You write your own summary in the Excerpt field in the post editor. This gives you full control over what appears in previews.

Excerpts only apply to posts, not pages (though some themes and plugins add excerpt support to pages too).

Excerpts in Practice

To write a custom excerpt in the block editor: open the post settings sidebar (click the gear icon), scroll down, and look for the Excerpt section. If you don't see it, click the three-dot menu at the top right → Preferences → Panels → enable "Excerpt."

To display excerpts instead of full content on your blog page: go to Settings → Reading and under "For each article in a feed, show" select "Summary."

Tips for writing good excerpts:

• Keep it to 1-2 sentences (25-40 words)
• Include your primary keyword naturally
• Make it compelling — this is what people see before deciding to click
• Don't just repeat your first paragraph — write something specifically designed to hook the reader

Many themes display excerpts on the blog page, category archives, and search results. Some SEO plugins use the excerpt as a fallback for the meta description if you haven't set one explicitly.

Why It Matters

A well-written excerpt can significantly increase click-through rates. The auto-generated 55-word snippet is often a poor summary — it just chops off mid-sentence. Taking 30 seconds to write a custom excerpt for each post is one of the easiest ways to improve engagement. For more tips, check our blog post writing guide and SEO tips.