How to Add Excerpts to Your Pages in WordPress-Themes.show

Do you want to add excerpts to your WordPress pages?

Excerpts are short extracts from your content and help add a description, summary, or small details about the page. By default, excerpts in WordPress are only available for posts.

In this article, we will show you how to add excerpts to your pages in WordPress.

add-excerpts-to-wordpress-pages

Why You May Want to Add Excerpts to Pages in WordPress?

WordPress comes with posts and pages as two default content types. Posts are displayed in reverse chronological order (latest to oldest) on your blog or homepage.

Pages on the other hand are stand-alone content not published in a time-specific order. They are typically used for one-off content like your about us or contact page.

Sometimes you may need to display excerpts for your pages. Especially if you have built a WordPress site using only pages.

Let’s take a look at how to add excerpts to your pages in WordPress and how to display those excerpts on your site.

Adding Excerpts to Pages in WordPress

First, you need to add the following code to your theme’s functions.php file or a site-specific plugin.

add_post_type_support( 'page', 'excerpt' );

This code modifies the default WordPress content type ‘page’ to add support for excerpts. For more details, please see our guide on how to add custom code in WordPress.

After adding the code to your website, you can head over to create a new page or edit an existing page. Once you’re in the WordPress content editor, you’ll be able to see the ‘Excerpt’ meta box in the panel on your right.

see-excerpt-option-in-content-editor

Now you can use this excerpt meta box to add custom excerpts for your pages on your WordPress blog.

Displaying Excerpts for Pages in WordPress

There are many different ways to display excerpts for your pages in WordPress. Depending on what you are trying to do on your website, you can choose the method that best suits your need.

Method 1: Display Recent Pages With Excerpts Using Shortcode

This method allows you to create your own custom queries and display recent pages using a shortcode.

First, you will need to install and activate the Display Posts Shortcode plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to edit the post, page, or widget where you want to display recent pages and add the following shortcode.

[display-posts post_type="page" include_excerpt="true" excerpt_more="Continue Reading" excerpt_more_link="true"]

This shortcode will display 10 recent pages with their title, excerpt, and a continue reading link.

If you didn’t enter the custom excerpt for a page, then it will automatically generate the excerpt for the page with the default length of 55 words.

displaying-pages-with-excerpts

If you are using the shortcode in a sidebar widget, then you may need to enable shortcode support for the text widget. Simply add this code to your theme’s functions.php file.

// Enable shortcodes in text widgets
add_filter('widget_text','do_shortcode');

Method 2: Display Page Excerpts in Sidebar Using Plugin

This method allows you to easily display recent pages and their excerpts in your theme’s sidebar.

First, you need to install and activate the MK Post and Page Excerpts Widgets. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit the Appearance » Widgets page and click the ‘+’ button to add the MK Post and Page Excerpts Widgets block to a sidebar.

After adding the widget block, you can select your page from the dropdown menu under Select Page.

There are also options to edit the title, choose whether to display the page title, content, set content length, featured image, and more.

When you’re done, click the ‘Update’ button at the top. You can now visit your website to see the widget in action.

Method 3: Display Page Excerpts Manually

Another way to display page excerpts is by adding the code directly to your theme files. You can create a custom page template and add the following code as a starting point.

$args = array(
'post_type' => array( 'page' ),
'posts_per_page' => 10,
);
// The Query
$the_query = new WP_Query( $args );
 
// The Loop
if ( $the_query->have_posts() ) {
    while ( $the_query->have_posts() ) {
        $the_query->the_post();
        echo '<h3>'. get_the_title() . '</h3>';
        the_excerpt();
    }
    /* Restore original Post Data */
    wp_reset_postdata();
} else {
    // no posts found
}

You will need to adjust the code to match your theme templates.

We hope this article helped you learn how to add excerpts to your pages in WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on how to choose the best website builder or our expert pick of the best live chat software.

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