How To Show ‘Post Excerpts’ Only On Archive Pages In WordPress

If you use a WordPress you would better know that managing archives is very essential in terms of SEO prospective.

It’s a SEO rule that if you don’t use ‘nofollow’ for archive pages, you should use ‘excerpts’ only in your theme archives rather than showing full posts, as it creates the problem of duplicate content for the search engines.

Even though many WordPress themes in recent are coming with just excerpt only pages for archives by default, there are still come classic themes like (WordPress Classic theme for instance) that will show full posts under archive pages.In this post I’ll cover how to disable full posts for archive pages.

[Fortunately for showing excerpts on homepage, we have Homepage Excerpts plugin, but for archive pages, we need to follow the below procedure]

Steps:

This method is very simple and involves a very minor code editing.

1.First, go to your “Theme editor” page from your WordPress Dashboard.

2.Under the theme files, find and open a template file called archives.php (in some themes, you need to look for tag.php and category.php template files included separately for each type of archives)

In the template file look for something similar to the following line

<?php the_content

3.Replace the above line with, the following line:

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

After editing:

Now open your archive pages (tag/category), and you will only see the post excerpts instead of full posts.

Now your archive pages will show first 55 words of the blog post as excerpt.But you can still personalize it.Either you can use ‘Post Excerpt’ field under your WordPress WYSIWYG editor or you use “more” tag present under “HTML” mode in your post editor.

More Tag:

Using ‘more’ tag splits your post into parts, and adds ‘Read More” link

Or use ‘Excerpt’ field under the post editor in WordPress

Note: If you are using some professional theme, you may not find archives.php or other files in your theme template files.