How to Use the More Tag and Custom Excerpts in WordPress

Are you looking for a simple way to show excerpts of your posts and pages instead of displaying full text in WordPress?

Luckily, by default WordPress offers 2 ways that allow you to collapse your posts/pages to display them in a neater way. In today’s tutorial, we will show a step-by-step guide to help you show a summary of your post so that your readers will have an overall view of what is in your article before going over each post.

First of all, we will provide you with a brief definition of the More tag and custom excerpts features in WordPress.

What is the more tag and custom excerpts in WordPress

More tag is one of the useful features in WordPress that allow you to select which posts have excerpts and you are able to make the excerpt with any length as you desire. This feature helps you display the main content of your article instead of showing the entire article. Thanks to that, the reader easily catches the main content of your post. And then, once the readers want to read the full text of an article, they only need to click on the ” Read More” link.

Custom Excerpt is another built-in feature in WordPress that also allow you to show short summary of the entire article. It is usually used as a replacement on the blog index and archives pages, so you don’t need to show the full content of each post.

How to add the more tag in WordPress

This method allows you to show a summary of your post by using a simple button that was built right into your toolbar. Therefore, you don’t need to write any line of code.

However, when using this method, you need to notice that if you utilize a theme using excerpts, then it will override the More Tag and provide an excerpt with the length defined by your theme. In addition, this method will take you a lot of time because you have to manually add the more tag to all of your posts.

If you want to add the Read More tag in WordPress, now you can follow the steps below.

First of all, open an existing post that you want to show an excerpt or you can also start creating a new one.

Then, simply place your cursor at the end of the text that you want to show a Reade More link if you are using the Visual editor.

Next, you need to click on the “Insert Read More Tag” in the toolbar.

After that, you will see that there is a dashed line with More being displayed under the excerpt.

In contrast, if you are using the Text Editor, you also place the cursor at the end of the text that you want to be the except and click on the “More” button in the toolbar. You will notice that more tag will be displayed at the end of the excerpt.

Alternatively, you can manually add the more tag at the end of the excerpt like this:

<!–more–>

How to add custom excerpts in WordPress

This is another way to show the post summary with the “read more” link. By using this method, you can enter custom excerpts in the excerpt box. Or it automatically creates an excerpt based on your character count.

Nevertheless, excerpts completely depend on your current theme. It means that if your current theme doesn’t use the_excerpt tag, then regardless of what you enter in the excerpt box, your theme still shows the entire content of your post on the homepage and archive pages.

Now, we will teach you the detailed steps to add the custom excerpt in WordPress post.

Initially, you go to Posts > All posts and choose any post that you want to customize the excerpt or click on the “Add New” button to create a new one.

Then, click on the “Screen Options‘ at the top right corner of the editor screen. It will display a list of screen options. Simply check the box next to the “Excerpt” option. By default, this option will be turned off, so you need to turn it on first.

After that, let’s scroll down the editor screen, you will notice that the excerpt box will be displayed below your post editor.

From that, you can add the copy you want to utilize as an excerpt for your article. Or WordPress will automatically set to only show 55 words for this feature.

Once you are done, don’t forget to click on the “Update” or “Published” button.

You need to notice that excerpt feature doesn’t come inbuilt on pages, so you need to add it manually.

In order to add an excerpt option on pages, you need to copy the following code and paste it to the function.php file of your theme.

add_post_type_support( 'page', 'excerpt' );

Don’t forget to click on the “Update file” to save your changes.

Once you are done, you can navigate to Pages > All pages and edit any existing ones. You will see an excerpt option added below your page editor.

Now, you can repeat the steps that we did with a post.

Summary

To conclude, the more tag and custom excerpts in WordPress are useful features that help improve the user experience of your readers and reduce your bounce rate effectively. Hopefully, your blog gave you a great solution to help you use the more tag and custom excerpts in WordPress properly. If you find it useful, don’t forget to share it with your friends.

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