Throughout the years, there’s some areas in the WordPress backend that people aren’t aware that exists, or really what it can be used for. The excerpt metabox is just one of those areas that happens to be it.
By default, if you have a theme that pulls in the excerpt of a post, the post will show the first 55 characters. However, what a lot of people aren’t aware of is the fact that if you want to keep the default 55 characters, you can customize that excerpt. In fact, it works well for posts that start with ordered or un-ordered lists, or other strange formatting. As a note- you can also increase the number of characters in your excerpt too.
The excerpt metabox allows you to customize the words of your excerpt rather than use the first 55 characters of your blog post. The excerpt metabox is located in posts, right under the visual and text editor. It looks similar to the following image:
If you scroll down and don’t see it, just go to the Screen Options tab and find the check box for Excerpt. If the box next to it is not checkmarked, then check it, and your excerpt metabox should appear.
Please note that your screen options tab may list less or more than the screenshot given above.
The template tag for the excerpt is actually the_excerpt and used in place of the_content within the WordPress Loop.
So if the following template tag is not a part of your theme, you may need to add it in order to take advantage of the excerpt metabox.
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
The WordPress Core already has the excerpt metabox built in, but the template tag must be implemented into a theme or anything calling the WordPress Loop.
As a side note – If you use WordPress SEO plugin, under Titles & Meta, the %%excerpt%% variable will call the information you put in the excerpt metabox and put the first 156 characters in your search results. If it’s not filled out, then it defaults to the first 156 characters of your article.
Do you use the excerpt metabox on your WordPress website?
Hello Nile, At first I didn’t think I knew what an excerpt metabox even was, but then after reading this post Yes Of course I have this in my SEO Pressor Right?
I am always learning something new every time I visit.. Thanks for sharing.. Chery :))
Hi Chery!
This is different from SEO Pressor. This is built into the WordPress Core. Now, if SEO Pressor has options on variable templates of where to draw the page or post summary from, that would probably be it.
Hi there Nile, your blog is awesome and your writing skills are worth appreciative. I often visit your blog and love to explore about new topics because your always write for the newbies.
Like Cherry, I also didn’t knew what actually Excerpt metabox is, though heard its name 2 or 3 times but after reading your post I can understand its importance.
Thanks for writing, keep writing well … 🙂
I didn’t know what it was called,but I’ve been using this metabox. I did learn, however, that I can change the length of the except. Good to know!
Even I didn’t knew about it. Thanks for providing an information which can help me out sometime. Anyways brilliant writing skills you have, appreciation was obviously needed. 🙂