What is an excerpt ?

First of all, for the ones who don’t know what an excerpt is, i will try to explain this term in a couple of words. An excerpt can be referred to as an extras (in our case maybe even a summary). Of course this is not the official definition. However i am sure you will understand what the word “excerpt” means by reading the rest of this article.

Advantages

There are a couple of solid reasons of why you might want to use excerpts. The ones i could think of as i am writing are the fact that your index page will have a smaller load time (especially if your posts include videos, pictures or other embedded multimedia objects), you’ll display only the article title and a brief summary or an extras that will tease your readers which hopefully will get you more page views. This way your visitors will have the chance to choose which article to read. This is great in contrast with let’s say a huge article on the index page that doesn’t represent an interest for a particular segment of visitors. That article will definitely discourage maybe annoy your visitors but also that particular article can be of great interest for some. People love to choose ! Let them choose which article will it be !

Disadvantages

I have seen numerous blog articles out there saying that the main disadvantage of using excerpts is that your feed will contain just posts excerpts which could annoy a great part of your feed subscribers. Of course we don’t want that ! As a solution you might want to try Excerpt Editor plugin. What this great plugin does is to create a single place from where you can manage all your excerpts ! You can also set up excerpts for different pages. A great variety of excerpt related options is now at your fingertips. However i’ve discovered a bug in the current version (1.0). If you have the “Excerpt for each new post…” option enabled when you will publish/edit an article after you submit it your page will go blank. The article will be pulished/edited without mistake but this can be very annoying. A solution for this problem is obviously to disable the option i was telling you about. I have noticed the plugin developer and he is well aware of this problem and will fix it in the next release.

So that is the main disadvantage i could think of (again, while writing this post). If you know other advantages/disadvantages i haven’t brought up feel free to leave a comment.

Conclusion

Overall the central idea is pretty clear: in order to offer your visitors the well deserved power of choice and to have a fast loading first page you should use excerpts. Of course in the end it is all up to your judgement.


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