How To Change Default WordPress Excerpt Length
This article is from our archive. It is kept as it was first written, so some steps or versions may be out of date.
If you want to change the default excerpt length of a WordPress site, you can do it using the code below. Paste it in the funtions.php file and update the number in line 9.
remove_filter('get_the_excerpt', 'wp_trim_excerpt');
function custom_trim_excerpt($text) {
global $post;
if ( '' == $text ) {
$text = get_the_content('');
$text = apply_filters('the_content', $text);
$text = str_replace(']]>', ']]>', $text);
$text = strip_tags($text);
$excerpt_length = 75;
$words = explode(' ', $text, $excerpt_length + 1);
if (count($words) > $excerpt_length) {
array_pop($words);
array_push($words, '[...]');
$text = implode(' ', $words);
}
}
return $text;
}
add_filter('get_the_excerpt', 'custom_trim_excerpt');