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Excerpts on posts pages

When visitors come to your blog, category archive, date archive, or other area of your website that can show multiple posts at a time, you can show each of them completely or you can choose to show a truncated “excerpt view” of them.

The excerpt view of a multi-post page can show each with a title, single photo, and snippet of text, or can show each in a grid format down the page. And in either case, you can control the look & layout of the pieces of each excerpt type.

Why use excerpt views?

Excerpt views serve a few purposes.

  • Excerpt views give a condensed list where readers might want to scan quickly through many posts (esp. your archive and search results page types) saving time.
  • Excerpt views reduce the number of images which must load, speeding up the loading time of the page.
  • Excerpt views can help you analyze your site traffic because visitors must click to view a blog post in-full. You can track which types of posts get the most views.

Enable or disable excerpts

You can toggle excerpts on or off within any layout you use for pages that feature multiple posts at once, such as your blog posts page type, your categories page type, etc.

To enable or disable excerpts on a multi-post page:

  1. Customize the layout while viewing a page that shows multiple posts.
  2. Click to edit the settings of the WordPress content module found in your layout.
  3. In the popup, click the Excerpt styles tab along the side.
  4. Click to check or uncheck the option Show excerpts on blog posts pages at the top.

Here is a demonstration:

How do I use excerpts differently on certain page types?

If you want to enable/disable this option for different parts of your blog, you can create separate layouts to assign for each unique view. This way you are able to enable excerpts on some pages and disable it on others.

For example, if your main blog page should show posts in-full without excerpts, but your category, author, tag, and monthly archive page types should use an excerpt view, you can setup a layout where excerpts are on and one where they are off, like:

  • “Blog pages” layout – excerpts turned OFF
  • “Excerpts pages” layout duplicated from the “Blog pages” layout – create a unique copy of the WordPress content module with excerpts turned ON

Then, you can see our Apply layouts to pages guide to learn how to apply each layout to your page types in the Layouts area of ProPhoto. You might use the “Blog pages” layout for WordPress Pages > Blog posts page and the “Excerpts pages” for Archives > All archive page types as seen in this side-by-side example:

… giving you this layout assignment result:

Of course, you can set up as many layouts as you need for different purposes, and they can have any names you want. Again, see our Apply layouts to pages guide to learn how to apply layouts.