Change the excerpt length in WordPress
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Change the excerpt length: There are many cases where a blog author might want to increase or decrease the length of WordPress post excerpts "the_excerpt()". Excerpts are basically condensed descriptions of your blog posts and are commonly used to provide introductory "teaser" information about the post. In the following simple solution, I'll show you how to lengthen or shorten the excerpt in WordPress to suite your personal blogging needs.
How to Change the WordPress post excerpt length:
- Login via an ftp client to the folder containing your WordPress site
- Navigate to the wp-includes directory and copy the "formatting.php" file to your desktop
- Using a text editor (I prefer notepad++), open "formatting.php"
- Find the following line:
- Now, simply change 55 to the number of characters you would like to have displayed in the excerpt.
- Save the changes back to your "formatting.php" file and upload the file to your server overwriting the old file.
$excerpt_length = 55;
That's all there is to it. Now when you visit a section on your site containing a post excerpt, the length of the excerpt will reflect the number of characters you have set to display.
Enjoy! 
