What is an Excerpt in WordPress?

Post excerpts give readers a preview of an article so they can decide whether to click through. Whether a page shows excerpts or full posts is your theme’s choice. When a theme uses excerpts, they can appear in 4 places:

• Blog archive pages, such as category and tag listings
• The homepage or blog index, if the theme is built that way
• On-site search results
• Your RSS feed, when Settings > Reading is set to show summaries

None of those surfaces is a Google results page. Excerpts are not the same as meta descriptions: an excerpt controls the summaries your WordPress templates display, while a meta description suggests text for search engines to show in SERPs. Search engines can ignore that suggestion and build a snippet from visible page text instead, which may include your excerpt if it sits on an indexed archive page.

How to write an excerpt

In the block editor, open the Settings sidebar with the gear icon in the upper-right corner, select the Post tab, and expand the Excerpt panel. Write a 1-2 sentence summary of the post there. In the classic editor, the Excerpt box is hidden by default; turn it on under Screen Options at the top of the edit screen.

The Excerpt panel only appears for post types that have excerpt support enabled. Posts have it out of the box; pages don’t, so you won’t see the field on a page unless your theme or a plugin adds support.

Excerpt length and auto-generated excerpts

If you leave the field empty, WordPress builds an excerpt automatically from the first 55 words of the post and appends an ellipsis ([…]). The cutoff is mechanical, so auto-excerpts routinely stop mid-sentence, and the trim strips out formatting, images, and shortcodes. Writing a manual excerpt avoids that automatic trim, though your active theme or a plugin can still shorten or reformat what you wrote. Preview the archive or search page where the excerpt appears to confirm it displays the way you expect.

Developers can change the 55-word default with the excerpt_length filter: attach a callback that returns a new word count, and give it a late priority such as 999 if it needs to run after other theme or plugin callbacks. Put the code in a child theme’s functions.php or a site-specific plugin so a parent theme update doesn’t erase it. If you’d rather not touch code, write a manual excerpt instead; the word cap only applies to auto-generated ones.

Excerpt vs. the More block

An excerpt lives in its own field, separate from the post content. The More block (the classic editor’s more tag) works inside the content instead: you place it where the preview should stop, and blog and archive pages show everything above it, followed by a Read More link. If your theme displays excerpts rather than full posts, the More block is ignored and your manual excerpt wins. Use the excerpt when you want a standalone summary; use the More block when the opening of the post makes the best teaser.