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If you’ve been using WordPress for some time now, you may have come to notice that, by default, it places the entirety of your posts on the front page. This can, obviously, be an annoyance for visitors on your page, as they would have to scroll through blocks and walls of text just to look through it. To absolve this issue, you can create a Post Excerpt.
In order for post excerpts to work properly on your site, you must first go to Settings and select Reading. By default, ‘Article in a feed’ will be set to Full text – set it to Summary and save. Then, go to the Add New Post page to confirm if you have the excerpt module enabled or not. If you don’t, just go to Screen Options at the top of the page, and check the box for Excerpt. You should now see the excerpt module below the main body for text.
Within the module, you can write a brief summary about your post, copy/paste a line from the post itself, etc., just put in the info you need and click Update.
If you notice that your full post is still being displayed, don’t fret – this is due to the fact that excerpts are meant to work with your posts in RSS feeds, which are generally used with widgets. Within your post editor, you will have an option (above the main body for text) called the Insert More Tag. Place your cursor at the point you would like your summary to end, and select the tag icon. This will separate that part of the post with a line, displaying which information visitors will be able to preview. Once you have finished, just hit update.