Some of our users wanted us to post a tutorial on how to display Post Excerpts in WordPress Themes. This is a very simple tutorial that anyone can implement and take advantage of this built-in feature. The benefit of implementing this tutorial is that it decreases page load time and it increases the pageview count.
How does it Decrease Page Load Time?
If you write long posts like best practices of contact forms or must have iphone apps for bloggers which has a lot of images, then having them load on one page can significantly impact your page load time. By adding this technique, you can simply show a mini description of the article and let user view the post on single post page.
How does it Increase Page View count?
Sometimes users just read the post on the category page if you don’t use the excerpt. By adding it this way, they will go to the original post. That is 2 page views instead of 1. It also encourages users to make a comment on the post because comment form is also on this page and they don’t need to load a separate page to make a comment.
Tutorial
Open your index.php file, archive.php file, and category.php file. Now some of you might not have all these files in your template, so just open the ones that you do have.
Find the following code:
<?php the_content(); ?>
And replace it with:
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
Now you can write custom excerpts for your posts from your WordPress admin panel and have it displayed in your theme.
If you do not write a custom excerpt, then WordPress automatically takes the first 55 words from your post and put them in an excerpt with elipses and display it. You can change the word limit starting from WordPress 2.9. If you want to change the word limit open your functions.php file and add the following function:
// Changing excerpt length
function new_excerpt_length($length) {
return 100;
}
add_filter('excerpt_length', 'new_excerpt_length');
// Changing excerpt more
function new_excerpt_more($more) {
return '...';
}
add_filter('excerpt_more', 'new_excerpt_more');
If you want to see this code working live, just click on any of our categories from the navigation menu and you will see that we do not display full posts.
for the plane these this is what worked for me – Go to the home page and clkick edit. Go to the block editor and click on the block – Blog Posts. You will seea setting which states ‘post control settings’
There you can enable or disable the show excerpt setting
Thanks for sharing where you found your settings
Hi thanks for this. I don’t have those files in my child theme. If I just go ahead and do this in my parent theme, won’t it be erased if there is an update?
Correct, if you place it in your parent theme and the parent theme is updated your changes would be lost
Thanks for this post – I used this back in 2016 and again today in 2019!
Glad our recommendations can continue to be helpful
Thanks for this post. I also want to ask for help on how to add padding around excerpt. I have added border lines around my excerpt; the problem is the excerpt is touching the borderlines. How do I add padding around the excerpts, preventing it from touching the borderlines? Thanks in advance.
Hi their,
I am using ‘Enlightenment’ theme but I have a problem that in my post I can’t see the short Post Excerpt ie it’s come blank. And this happened only with ‘Enlightenment’ this theme. Because same code I am using in other theme is working fine. So is anybody give me solution on this?
Hey Atul,
Please contact your theme developer and they will be able to help you.