How to change the WordPress excerpt length

WordPress creates a lot of pages on a website and the majority of them are created by pulling information from single articles that you create.

There is the homepage that lists the most recent articles, categories and tags that sort them into different groups, date pages that sort them by date, and several other pages some of which are optional such as comment pages.

Most of these pages have in common that they display excerpts of articles. An excerpt uses 55 words of the beginning of articles by default which you can change by adding a custom excerpt to an article, or by modifying the length of the excerpt.

This guide explains to you how to change the excerpt length on a WordPress site.

Before we start, it may be a good idea to explain the reason behind changing the length of text snippets on WordPress.

Sometimes, you may want to display longer excerpts to make the main body of the site fit the sidebar. At other times, you may have modified the number of excerpts on a page, and want to reduce the overall length of those pages by reducing the word count of excerpts.

The screenshot below shows two excerpts on the Ghacks frontpage.

It is thankfully pretty easy to modify the excerpt length, and while you can use plugins such as Easy Custom Auto Excerpt for this, it takes just a couple lines of code to modify the length manually instead.

Note that the mentioned plugin offers additional functionality that includes selecting the alignment of text or selecting on which pages excerpts are displayed on the blog.

Manual way

1. Open your WordPress theme's functions.php file. You find that file in the themes folder usually, it if does not exist, create it.

2. Scroll all the way done until you find ?>

3. Paste the following lines of code to change the excerpt length of the WordPress site. This changes the excerpt length to 65 words. Modify the value as you see fit.

function custom_excerpt_length( $length ) {
return 65;
}
add_filter( 'excerpt_length', 'custom_excerpt_length', 999 );

4.  If you also want to modify the [.....] that WordPress adds after the excerpt to indicate that there is more, add the following line of code to the same functions.php file and modify the [.....] value here.

function new_excerpt_more( $more ) {
return '[.....]';
}
add_filter('excerpt_more', 'new_excerpt_more');

5. Save the file and reload your website. If you are using a caching plugin, make sure you clear the cache before you do so as you may not see the changes otherwise immediately.

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