By default, WordPress displays your posts on the homepage of your website. But with just the article title, you may not give readers enough information to know whether the article is of interest to them.
Fortunately, with WordPress we can use excerpts to give a short section or summary of your post and display it with the article. This can improve site performance, helping to keep visitors scrolling through your website.
In this article, we will discuss WordPress excerpts and suggest four useful methods to display them on the WordPress home page.
What is a WordPress excerpt?
An excerpt is generally a short snippet from a movie, show, piece of music or writing. And, an excerpt in WordPress is a summary or description of your blog post. You can think of it as similar to the blurb on the back of a book, giving you a short insight into what the article is about.
It contains a link to the “Read more” or “Continue reading” tag to direct visitors to the full article. There are three types of excerpts in WordPress:
- Manual excerpt: the excerpt that you create and edit yourself.
- Automatic excerpt: WordPress generates excerpts by default by simply selecting the first 55 words of your posts.
- The “More” tag excerpt: This is created by pulling the content from the beginning of the post and exactly where the tag is inserted.
It is highly recommended to display excerpts on your WordPress home page, and not just the headline, or the entire 1000-word articles. This helps to keep the page clear and increases the loading speed, as an excerpt contains less content than a full post.
Visitors can also get an overview of the topic of your articles through the excerpts. This is a good way to grab their attention and encourage them to read the full article. It also gives them control over what they want to read.
Let’s move on to the most important part – four methods for displaying excerpts on the WordPress home page.
How to display excerpts on the WordPress homepage
Using the “More” tag
This is the easiest way to display excerpts on the WordPress home page. To use the “Read More” block in the editor, place your cursor where you want the excerpt to end, then click the “+” icon to add a new block. Search for “Read More” and select it from the block options.
As soon as you insert it, a divider will appear in your post with “Read More” text. You have successfully created a “Continue reading” link for your post. Now only the content above the “Read More” block will be displayed on your homepage and archive pages.
Note: With the “Read More” block, you can only extract the content at the top of your post, which is sometimes a downside as you cannot edit your excerpts before they are displayed. The excerpt will always be the content that appears before this block.
Using the Custom exceptions option
With this method, you write your own manual excerpts. The advantage is that you are not limited to the text at the beginning of your post, and you can create a complete informative excerpt.
In order for your own manual excerpts to be displayed on the WordPress home page, you must:
First create a new post (Posts >> Add New) or open an existing post.
Click on the “Screen options” tab in the top right-hand corner of the user interface.
A slide-down menu with several checkboxes will open. Check the “Excerpt” box.
If you scroll down, you will see a new excerpt module below your post, at the bottom of your WordPress editor. Now write your own summary in this excerpt module.
Click on the “Publish” button when your post is finished. Your manual excerpt will be displayed on the WordPress homepage.
Via the administration console
This method is quite technical and complicated for most beginners as involves editing codes in the theme’s files, so we always recommend using a child theme on your local WordPress site. Never edit the files of your theme on your live site and remember to create a backup of your site.
Once you are ready, you can:
Locate the index.php file in your theme’s folder. Search for this code in your file:
Replace this code with the following:
Then save your changes. Now, you should be able to write custom excerpts from your admin dashboard and display them on your home page.
Using the Advanced Excerpt Plugin
Advanced Excerpt is one of the most popular excerpt plugins that fits the bill. Not only does it allow you to easily create and display excerpts on the WordPress homepage, but it also controls the appearance of the excerpts.
The plugin has many advanced features, such as:
- It highlights HTML in the excerpts.
- It shortens the excerpts to a certain length based on the number of words or characters.
- Only the “real” text is counted. The HTML text is retained, but not counted in the excerpt limit.
- It completes the last word or sentence of the excerpt to avoid a strange end to the excerpt.
- The plugin inserts a “Read more” link in the text.
- The plugin uses its own generated excerpts instead of the website’s custom excerpts.
To display excerpts on the WordPress home page with Advanced Excerpt, you need to do the following:
- Go to your WordPress admin and navigate to “Plugins”,” select “Add New”
- Search for the plugin “Advanced Excerpt” in the search field
- Install the plugin and activate it.
- Then go to “Settings” and click on “Excerpt”.” The “Advanced Excerpt Options” will appear. Here you can adjust the length of the excerpt to your needs and activate the “Add read more link to excerpt” checkbox.
- Finally, click on the “Save” button and you should see your excerpts on your WordPress homepage.
The Advanced Experts plugin provides a good way to deal with your excerpts without having to worry about managing the code on your website yourself.
Conclusion
As mentioned earlier, displaying excerpts on the WordPress home page brings many benefits to the website. It gives the site a professional look, increases the page loading speed, and encourages users to read your posts.
Use one of the four useful methods above to make the most of your excerpts and improve your website performance.
