How To Change Excerpt Length in WordPress (No Coding Required)

When viewing a WordPress theme or a WordPress website, especially WordPress blogs, you'll see the posts are not displayed fully on the homepage or the blog page. Instead of that, only a part of the content is displayed. That part is called excerpt. Here is a screenshot of our EightyDays theme that uses excerpt in the blog page:

Using excerpts in WordPress themes has some benefits:

• It keeps your homepage or blog page short and focused. Your readers see only the brief description of the posts. When they need to see more information, they can just click on the posts to read more.
• It makes the WordPress design clean and clear. It gives your readers "a space to breath". If you're a designer, you'll know that using white space well is an important key of a successful design. That's why most WordPress templates use excerpt.

The Problem With WordPress Excerpt

While using excerpt is very common, it has a problem: the number of characters or words in the excerpt is usually fixed by the theme. A number X might look fine in a language, but might not in another language.

For example: assuming we use a WordPress blog theme like EightyDays, the design looks good with 3 lines of excerpt content. That is approximately 20 words in English. If you're Arabian or Russian, 20 words might have only 2 lines because the characters are different. That changes the design and makes your blog looks bad.

Another example: if you're using a WordPress theme that has the option to change the layout of the blog page from 2-columns grid of content (like EightyDays) or 1 column of content (like Floral), the number of words in the excerpt needs to adapt to match the layout. Usually, the 2-columns design requires shorter excerpt length than the 1-column one.

And because of that, the excerpt length (or excerpt limit) should be able to change.

Customize Excerpt Length

There are basically 3 ways to change the excerpt length.

1. Manually Customize Excerpt

There are 2 types of excerpt:

• The automatic excerpt: that is generated from the content of the post. Usually, the automatic excerpt takes 55 first words from the post content. The number of words (55), of course, is what we're going to change.
• The manual excerpt that users can enter themselves when editing a post. The manual excerpt is entered in the Excerpt meta box below the main editor as in the screenshot below:

Not many people know and use the manual excerpt! It's a big mistake.

Using a manual excerpt helps you to:

• 100% control what displays in the excerpt
• Improving SEO score

Regarding the SEO, some SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO automatically takes the excerpt content and display it as the description in the search results. Using a manual excerpt, you can customize this description and increase the click-through-rate.

To enter the manual excerpt, simply enter the content in the Excerpt meta box below the editor as shown in the screenshot above. That's very simple.

But just note that if you use a manual excerpt, the read more link might disappear. This depends on the WordPress theme you're using. It doesn't always happen, but happens in most cases. If you want to keep the read more link, you should take a look at an automatic excerpt.

2. Change Excerpt Length With Code

If you know the code, you can customize the excerpt length easily. Open the functions.php file of your theme and enter the following code:

add_filter( 'excerpt_length', 'your_prefix_excerpt_length' );
function your_prefix_excerpt_length() {
    return 30;
}

Remember to change 30 to the number of words you want to show in the excerpt.

When using code, it's recommended to use a child theme. Because when your current WordPress theme updates, your customization will be lost.

3. WordPress Plugins To Change Excerpt Length

The 3rd way and the easiest way to change excerpt length is using a WordPress plugin. We have researched and here are the 3 best WordPress plugins to change excerpt length.

Change Excerpt Length

This plugin is very simple. It adds only 1 option in the Settings → Reading page for excerpt length. You just need to enter the number of words in the excerpt and done!

Custom Excerpt Length

This plugin is very similar to the plugin above. It also adds an option for excerpt length in the Settings → Reading page:

Excerpt Length

This plugin not only helps you to customize the excerpt length, but also the excerpt more text. It's similar to both the plugins above.

These plugins are very simple and very lightweight. They don't affect your website loading speed, but provide a very good way to customize the website without touching code.

We have tested these plugins and use them for some of our customers. It works nicely.

Alternative option

If all stated above does not quite look like a fit for your needs, you can always "play" with the excerpt content itself to make it look good. This is a pain-free option for single or double language websites as all it takes is to find professional writers who will do the work in no time. The benefits of this kind of approach are obvious: you don't need any tools, neither skills since you don't actually make any changes to a WordPress theme. What's more, you can safely update it and be sure of your website's stable performance.

Conclusion

The excerpt is a small piece, but the important one, in your WordPress design. Customizing it is a common question. We hope the solutions we provided in this article can help you to control it and make it look perfect on your website.