First of all, let's define the term: excerpts are the short extract from your post.

Which definition brings us to the logical question: why you should use excerpts instead of full articles?

Well, by default, Wordpress will display your full posts on the homepage and on your archive pages. Now, when you have many posts, that means a LOT of information presented on the very same endless page ... Which could be very annoying for your users ... and could hurt your SEO efforts ...

First: you want users to easily browse the website and find what they are looking for ... and an endless, overwhelming blogroll won't help them to achieve that goal ... Just imagine a homepage or an archive page with dozens of 1,000-word posts, a bunch of images, etc ... Not to mention the loading time of the page ... Long story short: by using excerpts, you can significantly improve the user experience.

Second: if you are not using excerpts, your posts will be displayed in full length at several different pages on your site ... And that means duplicate content! Yes, nowadays the search engines are are quite good in finding your canonical URLs for each post, but the risk still exists ...

This is why any professional, well-coded Wordpress theme will provide you with an option to automatically create a short excerpt of your articles ... But, many themes still don't have a built-in feature for creating excerpts ...

More than that, even if you have a theme which will create excerpts for your posts, you'll have to use the "default" calculations and styles ... And fact is, when your theme automaticaly calculates the excerpt for you, the result could be weird or "ugly" ...

This is why is always a good idea to create and define your own custom excerpts ... And this is why I've decided to create this short tutorial where I will show you how easy is to create customized user-friendly excerpts in Wordpress.

Interested?

Let's do this!