An excerpt in WordPress refers to the first part of a post with a link to the full article.
An excerpt can be generated automatically by a theme or by using the “Read more…” tag inside the article.
Another way to generate an excerpt is to manually enter the summary of an article in the field Excerpt which is located on the edit screen of an article, below the content. This field is not displayed by default. To display it, click on Screen Options in the upper right corner and check the box Excerpt.
The excerpt has two main uses:
- It can replace the content of the post in RSS feeds. To do so, you must select the corresponding option in the menu Settings > Reading.
- Depending on the WordPress theme used, it may appear in places where it is better to display a brief summary than the full content. For example, in search results, tag archives, category archives, monthly archives, author archives.
By default, WordPress displays the full content of posts on the blog home page as well as in the site archives. This creates duplicate content and can penalize the site’s SEO. Displaying an excerpt will avoid this problem.