Are you looking for a simple way to show excerpts of your posts and pages instead of displaying full text in WordPress?
Luckily, by default WordPress offers 2 ways to shorten your posts/pages and display them more neatly. In today’s tutorial, we will show you step by step how to display a summary of your post so that your readers get an overview of your article before reading the whole post.
First of all, we will provide you with a brief definition of the More tag and custom excerpts features in WordPress.
What are the more tag and custom excerpts in WordPress?
The More tag is a useful WordPress feature that allows you to choose which posts have excerpts and make the excerpt any length you like. This feature helps you display the main content of your article instead of showing the entire article. Thanks to that, readers can easily grasp the main content of your post. Then, when readers want to read the full text of an article, they only need to click on the “Read More” link.
Custom Excerpt is another built-in WordPress feature that also allows you to show a short summary of the entire article. It is usually used instead of the full post on the blog index and archive pages, so you don’t need to show the full content of each post.
How to add the more tag in WordPress
This method allows you to show a summary of your post by using a simple button built right into your toolbar, so you don’t need to write a single line of code.
However, note that if you use a theme that uses excerpts, then it will override the More Tag and provide an excerpt with the length defined by your theme. In addition, this method can take a lot of time because you have to manually add the more tag to all of your posts.
If you want to add the Read More tag in WordPress, follow the steps below.
First of all, open an existing post that you want to show an excerpt for, or create a new one.
Then, if you are using the Visual editor, simply place your cursor at the end of the text where you want the Read More link to appear.
Next, click on the “Insert Read More Tag” button in the toolbar.
After that, you will see a dashed line with More displayed under the excerpt.
If you are using the Text editor, place the cursor at the end of the text that you want to be the excerpt and click on the “More” button in the toolbar. You will notice that the more tag will be displayed at the end of the excerpt.
Alternatively, you can manually add the more tag at the end of the excerpt like this:
<!–more–>
How to add custom excerpts in WordPress
This is another way to show the post summary with the “read more” link. By using this method, you can enter custom excerpts in the excerpt box. Otherwise, WordPress automatically creates an excerpt based on a word count.
However, excerpts depend completely on your current theme. It means that if your current theme doesn’t use the_excerpt tag, then regardless of what you enter in the excerpt box, your theme still shows the entire content of your post on the homepage and archive pages.
Now, we will show you the detailed steps to add a custom excerpt to a WordPress post.
First, go to Posts > All posts and choose any post whose excerpt you want to customize, or click on the “Add New” button to create a new one.
Then, click on “Screen Options‘ at the top right corner of the editor screen. It will display a list of screen options. Simply check the box next to the “Excerpt” option. By default, this option will be turned off, so you need to turn it on first.
After that, scroll down the editor screen, and you will see the excerpt box below your post editor.
There, you can add the text you want to use as the excerpt for your article. Otherwise, WordPress will automatically show the first 55 words.
Once you are done, don’t forget to click on the “Update” or “Published” button.
Note that the excerpt feature is not built into pages, so you need to add it manually.
To add an excerpt option to pages, copy the following code and paste it into the functions.php file of your theme.
add_post_type_support( 'page', 'excerpt' );
Don’t forget to click on “Update file” to save your changes.
Once you are done, you can navigate to Pages > All pages and edit any existing page. You will see an excerpt option added below your page editor.
Now, you can repeat the steps that we did with a post.
Summary
To conclude, the more tag and custom excerpts in WordPress are useful features that help improve the user experience and reduce your bounce rate. Hopefully, our blog gave you a great solution to help you use the more tag and custom excerpts in WordPress properly. If you find it useful, don’t forget to share it with your friends.
By the way, if you want to change your site’s appearance, don’t miss our list of beautiful, responsive free WordPress themes on our website. Thank you!
