If you use WordPress and want to quickly and precisely tell your visitors what your content is about, you can do so easily by adding an excerpt to your posts.
In summary, excerpts represent a brief summary or description of a post that can be easily viewed in different parts of your webpage. While it’s possible to let WordPress generate post excerpts for you, they may not look so good in the end. So, since this is the only tried-and-true way to make your post excerpts look the way you want, you might consider creating a custom excerpt instead.
Just like WordPress lets you easily reorder your blog posts, it also comes with an integrated functionality that makes the process of adding custom quotes relatively simple. In fact, you have several different options at your disposal and this time we will list them all.
Why Add Custom Quotes to Your Posts?
As we mentioned earlier, a quote is basically a small summary that shows users what to expect when they click on a particular post on your website or blog. So, in this context, the benefits that post-quotes can bring to the user experience are clear. Citations help users identify whether they are interested in the topic, so creating a custom citation can be particularly beneficial for user engagement. This way, you can provide information about your article that you find most interesting and informative, thus prompting users to click on that article and read more.
There are also some free default WordPress themes that display all of your posts on your homepage, blog page and/or archives by default. So if you use any of these themes, it can hurt your website speed. Worse, it can confuse search engines and falsely inform them that you have duplicate content on your site.
If you display excerpts instead of entire articles, your pages will load faster and your users will find your content easier, which can only result in increased viewing. Also, search engine bots do not detect any duplicate content on your site, which is always good news for your website’s SEO.
That said, let’s take a look at all the different options you can use to add custom quotes in WordPress:
Many premium WordPress themes are set to automatically generate an excerpt for your posts. While this may seem helpful at first glance, the theme still sets the citation for you, which means you may not be satisfied with the result. This is where a custom quote can come in handy.
To edit a custom excerpt in WordPress, all you have to do is create a new post or access one of the old posts in your backend.
If you are using the classic editor, after entering the editing screen of your post, find Display Options tab (located in the upper right corner of your screen) and check if Quotation box ticked.
ticking this box, Quotation area that will appear below your post editor. Here you will be able to add any text you want as your post excerpt. If you don’t add anything in the box, WordPress will automatically take the first 55 words of your post and use it as a quote.
If you are using the Gutenberg block editor, the Citation field will always be displayed in the Settings section on the right side of the editor. document tab. If you don’t see this section, click the gear icon and your Settings will appear.
Scroll down a bit and you will be able to see Quotation collapse. Click on it to expand it and add your quote in the “Write a quote (optional)” box.
don’t forget to press Publish/Update Button for changes to take effect (of course, the same is true if you’re using the Classic editor).
Now comes the potentially difficult part. Some WordPress themes do not display the custom citation you have installed. In this case, regardless of the type of editor you use to add your excerpt, you can save your theme files. Appearance >> Theme Editor. Depending on the theme file this might be archive.php, content.php, category.php etc. It could be a file like For example, for the theme Twenty Seventeen, content.php file.
All you have to do is find the following code in your theme file:
<?php the_content(); ?>
Then simply replace it with this line of code:
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
shoot me Update File Press the button, when you’re done, that’s it. Now your WordPress theme will allow you to display custom excerpts of your posts.
The Read More tag in WordPress has a very similar function to an excerpt. The only main difference between the two is that a quote represents the ability to add a short description of your post that can be set to appear automatically. The Read More tag must be manually enabled for each post you want to use.. Also, with this tag, you don’t have the option to enter custom text, but you can still easily select any part of your text that you want to display as a quote. Also, you don’t need to bother with adding any code to your theme files.
To add this tag to the Classic editor, select where you want to cut your post with your mouse. Then click on the “Insert Read More tag” button as we did in the picture below (the button’s title will appear when hovered over it).
When you do this, you will notice that the line “– – – MORE – – –” appears in the editor. The text above will be used and displayed as an excerpt of your post.
As for the Gutenberg editor, here’s what you need to do Click the (+) icon below the text you want to use as a quote and Find and add a block named More.
– – – READ MORE – – – line will now be added to your post and will show where your quote ends.
When you’re done setting up your Read More tag, be sure to save your changes.
If your theme is still not displaying your Read More tag (or standard custom excerpt) properly, there is another method you can use: a plugin called Advanced Citation.
First, install and activate the plugin. Next, configure the plugin settings by going to: Settings >> Quote.
The plugin comes with several options to take care of any issue you encounter while trying to add your citation. For example, you can set quote length, prevent it from cutting a word or sentence finally, strip or hide the WordPress shortcodes in your excerpt, disable quote filtering on certain page types etc.
All the options are pretty simple and self-explanatory, so you can easily adjust them to your liking.
To save your changes Save Changes button at the end Advanced Citation Options page. Then you can go ahead and see how the changes you applied affect your citations.
Solution
If you want to view a shorter, summarized version of your website’s posts, there are a few different ways to do it in WordPress. Whether you choose to use a custom citation feature or decide to use the Read More tag, this simple yet useful feature can only benefit your website in the long run. And if any of the two methods we listed above aren’t working properly, you can always use a plugin to further polish the look of your quotes and make sure everything works smoothly.
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