How to Fix WordPress Themes That Do Not Show Excerpts? (Work-Around)

Has this happened to you before? You install a new WordPress theme, or you buy a premium theme somewhere, and all of your excerpts stop working! So instead of having descriptions on the tag, category and index page, full posts are now showing everywhere, and there is apparently no way to change this under theme settings. If this is you than read on, I will tell you exactly how to fix this.

WordPress SEO theme change

I recently had this happening after switching to a different theme. Other than excerpts simply disappearing, they now additionally showed up on top of each single post page. I did a lot of Googling and submitted a question to the WordPress.org forums where I was told that adding custom CSS would provide for a guaranteed fix. Not!

The CSS code

.single-post .entry-header-details .post-excerpt { display: none; }

OMG I was so pissed off they’d tricked me! One would expect that adding the CSS code would indeed take care of the problem with excerpts showing all messed up on the site, but nothing happened at all. What a bummer!

So how was the issue solved?

After I cried and screamed for about 15 minutes I eventually resolved the issue by downloading a child theme, and adding custom code that overwrote files from the parent theme. When done everything looked exactly the way I liked it which made me very happy. I smiled. However, since this method is likely confusing to those of you who are not comfortable with PHP and coding, I will provide a quick and easy work-around for you below.

The Word-Around Fix

If you are reading this and you plan on changing your WordPress theme in the future, make sure to remember this fix. Mark my words or bookmark this page so you have something to fall back on. But first of all, make sure that you have the Gutenberg editor and not the classic editor activated on your blog.

Now in the Gutenberg editor you can simply insert the ‘more’ block when editing a post. If you don’t know where the more block is located just type the word ‘more’ in the block library search field.

You will see that a block is added with a —–more—– separation right away. Everything written above this separator will be hidden from your post pages (the hidden part is your excerpt). The top part of the post will now show up on your tag-, category- and date pages.

The only thing you have to do now is to now is copy your text from the old excerpt location and paste it above the —–more—– separation line. Now make sure to delete the old excerpt data so it will not show above your posts, and then you’re all set!

That’s all folks, it’s as easy as one two three. I hope you found this post useful. If you experienced problems with your excerpts before I would love to hear from you! Don’t hesitate to ask me any questions you may have!

With Love, Debby

Notes: Ways to freshen up your WordPress blog and make it stand out (1). WordPress happiness engineers don’t ever plan on getting rid of the classic editor (2). Of the Gutenberg editor: What’s new (3)? Gutenberg Changes: The easy ones (4). WP editor online support chat tonight (5).