A WordPress excerpt serves as a concise overview of an extended article, frequently employed as a substitute on the blog index and archives pages, mitigating the necessity of presenting the complete content of each individual post.
To illustrate, exhibiting the complete content of ten posts, each comprising 1,000 words, would culminate in a staggering aggregate of approximately 10,000 words on your blog listing pages, forming an insurmountable textual barrier for the majority of users.
Excerpts enable you to streamline this process by featuring succinct summaries rather than the unabridged text of each post.
What is the mechanism behind the generation of WordPress Excerpts
There exist two viable approaches through which WordPress can generate excerpts for your posts:
- Automated Approach: By default, WordPress procures excerpts by extracting the initial 55 words from a post.
- Manual Approach: By making a minor adjustment, you have the ability to manually modify the text to be employed as the excerpt for each post.
The distinct advantage of the manual method lies in its liberating nature, as it permits you to surpass the confines of solely utilizing the introductory text of a post. You gain the freedom to craft a comprehensive summary, should you so desire.