Excerpt

Excerpts can be shown in various places throughout your website. The exact ways in which they're used depends on the theme that you have active on the site. Most commonly, themes will display a post's excerpt in place of the lead (described earlier in this chapter), which is taken from the body of the post. Effectively, excerpts provide you with yet another way to summarize the content of your post and use that text instead of what's taken automatically from the body of the post itself.

To edit a post's excerpt, switch to the Document tab of the settings sidebar and scroll down to the Excerpt section (as can be seen in the following screenshot). There, you can write a short excerpt, usually best kept to a single paragraph of not more than three lines:

With that being said, it's worth pointing out that entering the excerpt is optional. However, it is advisable that you do take advantage of this possibility. Excerpts can introduce big readability improvements to your site, and make your content easier to grasp for the reader—provided that your current theme does use excerpts in one way or another. In some cases, excerpts also give your site additional SEO benefits—provided that your theme displays them in places where Google and the other search engines can see them.