What is Excerpt in WordPress?

An excerpt in WordPress is a term used for an article summary with a link to the whole entry. ... Another way to create excerpts for a WordPress post is by entering the summary of an article in the Excerpt field on the Post Edit screen.

It is a term used instead of meta description for your post/page in your blog explaining the summary in few words.

If you noticed, WordPress shows full posts by default on your home page, blog page, and auto generated archive pages such as category, tag pages.

What's wrong with full posts? Well, it may make your site slow or you may get penalised by search engines due to duplicate content. In short, it may be bad for your SEO.

Solution? Use excerpts - a small intro / text reveal / summary / part of each article. It can make your pages load faster because you will only be loading a tiny part of each post.

How to use excerpts?
If your WordPress theme supports excerpts, then it will automatically generate an excerpt for you. Standard rule is, Wordpress will pickup first 55 words of your post, or perhaps some more depending on your theme.

Now, I found there a small problem. I use a theme with page builder on my site swatisjournal.com . My designer created some heading sections for posts that have short stories, poems and children stories. ( check my custom post excerpts that appear in Google snippets - shorturl.at/qvyNS )

For me, auto-generated excerpt will begin with whatever text is at the start of your post. It didn’t work so well if you have anything before you start your post’s introduction. It picked up some items from my heading sections instead of text content I wanted as a summary of my post.

I tried a plugin called Advanced Excerpt (https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-excerpt/) to create custom excerpts on home page, RSS feed, and other archive pages. It worked for a while.

But then I learnt that Yoast SEO plugin (https://yoast.com/) also offers custom excerpts with keyword diagnostics. It really helps to tune your excerpt around the keyword your content is targeting.

Hope this helps. Feel free to ask more. I will try to help :)

An excerpt in WordPress is a term used for article summary with a link to the whole entry.