Wordpress · December 15, 2023

WordPress Tip: Use Excerpts on Homepage and Archives

WordPress Tip: Use Excerpts on Homepage and Archives

When it comes to managing a WordPress website on your Hong Kong VPS Hosting, one of the most effective ways to enhance your site's user experience and SEO is by using excerpts on your homepage and archives. This article will guide you through the benefits of using excerpts and how to implement them on your WordPress site.

What are Excerpts in WordPress?

Excerpts in WordPress are short summaries of your blog posts. They give your readers a quick overview of what the post is about before they decide to click and read more. Excerpts can be manually written or automatically generated by WordPress, depending on your preference.

Why Use Excerpts on Your Homepage and Archives?

There are several reasons why using excerpts can be beneficial for your WordPress site hosted on a Hong Kong VPS:

  • Improved User Experience: Excerpts provide a snapshot of your content, allowing visitors to quickly scan through your posts and find what they're interested in.
  • Better SEO: By preventing duplicate content, excerpts can help improve your site's SEO. Google tends to penalize sites with duplicate content, which can happen if you display full posts on your homepage and archives.
  • Faster Load Times: Excerpts are shorter than full posts, which means your pages will load faster. This is especially important if you're using a VPS, as faster load times can help improve your site's SEO and user experience.

How to Use Excerpts in WordPress

Now that you understand the benefits of using excerpts, let's look at how you can implement them on your WordPress site hosted on a Hong Kong VPS.

Manual Excerpts

WordPress allows you to write your own excerpts for each post. To do this, simply navigate to the post editor, find the Excerpt box, and enter your summary.

Automatic Excerpts

If you don't want to write your own excerpts, WordPress can automatically generate them for you. To enable this feature, you'll need to edit your theme's files. Here's a simple code snippet you can use:

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

This code will display an automatic excerpt of your post. By default, WordPress will use the first 55 words of your post for the excerpt.

Customizing Excerpt Length

If you want to change the length of your automatic excerpts, you can do so by adding the following code to your theme's functions.php file:

function custom_excerpt_length( $length ) {
    return 20;
}
add_filter( 'excerpt_length', 'custom_excerpt_length', 999 );

This code will change the length of your excerpts to 20 words. You can adjust this number to whatever you prefer.

Conclusion

Using excerpts on your homepage and archives is a simple yet effective way to improve your WordPress site's user experience and SEO. Whether you choose to write your own excerpts or let WordPress generate them for you, this feature can help your site stand out and attract more visitors. So why wait? Start using excerpts on your WordPress site hosted on a Hong Kong VPS today!

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