Bloggers know not to underestimate the power of the WordPress excerpt. When choosing to enhance the appearance of your WordPress blog, it is a good idea to use this excerpt tool because it makes WordPress easier to browse and bring in more traffic to your site.
When it comes to adding a WordPress excerpt, otherwise known as a post summary, to your blog, it is usually for two purposes. The first use of having a WordPress excerpt is because it replaces the full content in RSS feeds. This allows the option to display summaries, which is selected under the dashboard tab under settings and then by selecting reading. The alternative reason for using a WordPress excerpt is because, depending on the WordPress theme, it can be displayed in places where quick summaries are preferable to the full content. A few examples of this would be with search results, tag archives, category archives, monthly archives and author archives. There are a few different ways to add excerpts to post. Let’s start with the basics:
How to add a WordPress excerpt:
Adding an excerpt for any of the above-listed reasons is easy. Simply write the excerpt in the excerpt field under the post edit box. This excerpt can be as long or as short as you want it to be. Generally a couple of sentences will suffice in length depending on its purpose. Keep in mind that with WordPress version 3.1 or higher, there are some screen options on the Post and Page edit administration panels that are hidden by default. In this version, the excerpt field is hidden by default if it has not been used before. Because the WordPress excerpt is similar in purpose to the META description of HTML documents, excerpts can easily be used additionally as a meta description as well. There are some WordPress themes that do this by default. It can also be done as an SEO plugin or a plugin that is specifically for managing data in the head of some of the (X) HTML pages.
One important step to remember when learning how to add a WordPress excerpt, is that it is important to add a link to the excerpt linking it to the full post. WordPress does not automatically do this step for you, which is why you will need to provide a link to the page containing the entire post. This can be easily accomplished by including the following code in the loop directly below: <?php the_excerpt(); ?>.
<a href="<?php echo get_permalink(); ?>"> Read More...</a>
Or you can put the following in your WordPress theme’s functions.php.
function excerpt_read_more_link($output) {
global $post;
return $output . '<a href="'. get_permalink($post->ID) . '"> Read More...</a>';
}
add_filter('the_excerpt', 'excerpt_read_more_link');
The difference between excerpt, automatic excerpt and a teaser:
Remember there is a difference between the manual WordPress excerpt and the automatic excerpt or the teaser. The manual WordPress excerpt is often confused with these two other features. The teaser is the part of a post that appears on the front page when you use the More tag. To remember the relationship between these three features, keep in mind that when a post has no manual excerpt and the post template uses the the-excerpt() template tag, WordPress does automatically generate an excerpt containing the first 55 words of the post. However, this is not an example of summarizing the entire blog post or article. To have a quality blog that is easy to use and functional for web visitors, it is important to use features like the WordPress excerpt. It gives visitors an idea of exactly what they are about to read. If they don’t get a clear picture of what they are about to read on your WordPress blog, they may go elsewhere for the information. Unless you don’t care if people read your blog, it is a good idea to make sure and write up an excerpt that will keep visitors coming back. This can prove to be an essential tool to have especially if you are using your blog to make money. Having repeat visitors is a great way to keep them coming back and to keep your business going.