By default, WordPress excerpt feature removes all format and displays first 55 words of written article. For some SEO reasons, it is good to display excerpt on home and archive pages.
To enable excerpt feature on home and archive pages, open your index.php file and look for the following line.
<?php the_content(); ?>
replace it with;
<?php if ($single) { the_content(); } else { the_excerpt(); } ?>
This code will display post content only on individual post pages.
I want to do this, but only on the archive and search pages, not the home page. Is there a way to adapt your method for this?
Yes Elizabeth,
Look on your theme files to see archive.php and search.php files
on both files replace the_content with the_excerpt
Thank YOU! Worked like a charm, I figured they had to be an easy way to do this.
Is there a way to do this only for the “categories”, but not the home?
J.D,
Use the same hack that I told above to Elizabeth, Make sure to edit following files
archive.php
category.php
search.php
I was hoping so, but archive is for when you click archive links and search is for when you use the search form.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a category.php or that would do the trick. Apparently you either have home.php and category.php, or you have index.php instead. I have index.php.
I did come across the following code that looks like it should actually work when you replace the_content inside index.php:
… but strangely, I still get full posts. It doesn’t generate an error, but I also don’t get excerpts when clicking categories. I’m wondering whether this code isn’t automatic excerpts and I’m supposed to do something extra.
JD,
When you don’t have category.php, your browser looks for archive.php to use. If you change the content into excerpt in your archive.php that will do the trick
Sweet! That worked – thanks!