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What is Excerpt in WordPress? How to Add Excerpt in Posts
### Crafting Summaries for WordPress Posts: A Guide
In the realm of WordPress, a snippet known as an excerpt serves as a brief overview of an article, complete with a hyperlink directing readers to the full text. Users can generate this snippet either automatically through the theme’s functionality or manually by inserting the <!--more--> tag within the body of the post. Additionally, one can manually input a concise summary into the designated Excerpt area on the Post Edit interface. By default, this option is hidden; however, it can be activated by selecting the Screen Options toggle situated in the upper right section of the post editing interface and then enabling the feature.
Utilizing excerpts is a strategic way to present a greater volume of content in a compact area. This is especially advantageous for sites brimming with content, like those focusing on news or featuring magazine-style layouts, where the goal is to exhibit a variety of articles on the homepage, each with a link to the complete story. Commonly, excerpts are employed in various areas such as RSS feeds, archive pages, and search result pages. They can be set to generate automatically, capturing a segment of the post up to a certain word count. While the standard word count for these excerpts is 55 words, this number is adjustable. Should a manual excerpt not be provided for a post, an automated one will be created using the default word count.
To encapsulate, WordPress offers three distinct excerpt options: the Manual Excerpt, which is typed in separately for each post; the Automated Excerpt, which is extracted from the post’s content; and the <!--more--> tag excerpt, which includes content up to the point where the tag is placed.
### Further Insights and Tutorials