Advanced Excerpt
Control the appearance of WordPress post excerpts
4.3(101 reviews)
·80K+ active installs·Updated 2 years agoAs of April 2026, Advanced Excerpt is a WordPress post plugin with 80K+ active installations and a 4.3/5 rating from 101 reviews. It has been downloaded 1.5M+ times in total. Requires WordPress 3.2+ and PHP false+. Available on WordPress.org since 2007. Last updated 2 years ago — may have compatibility concerns. Downloads are up 20% this week. Top alternative: Header and Footer Scripts.
4.3/5101 reviews
80K+active installs
1.5M+total downloads
19 yearssince 2007
Overview
This plugin adds several improvements to WordPress’ default way of creating excerpts.
- Keeps HTML markup in the excerpt (and you get to choose which tags are included)
- Trims the excerpt to a given length using either character count or word count
- Only the ‘real’ text is counted (HTML is ignored but kept)
- Customizes the excerpt length and the ellipsis character that are used
- Completes the last word or sentence in an excerpt (no weird cuts)
- Adds a read-more link to the text
- Ignores custom excerpts and use the generated one instead
- Theme developers can use
the_advanced_excerpt()for even more control (see the FAQ)
Most of the above features are optional and/or can be customized by the user or theme developer.
Banner image credit – chillihead
Original plugin author &#…
Screenshots
Ratings & Reviews
4.3101 reviews
5 ★
74
4 ★
10
3 ★
4
2 ★
4
1 ★
9
Recent Reviews
No longer working apparently
by pipspeak·5 months ago
It looked promising, feature wise, but is not working on WordPress 6.8.3 running Twenty Twenty-Five theme — has no effect on the default Excerpt block and no other custom excerpt block seems to have been created by the plugin.
Is this plugin still maintained
by ibiza69·10 months ago
Is this plugin still being maintained by its developers? It hasn’t been updated in a year? What version of PHP does it support?
I’d also like to ask if there’s support, given that we’ve read many questions here and none have been answered. For this reason, if not, we should inform WordPress that this plugin is no longer being maintained or serving its users, so they can remove it from the repository.
Didn’t work on wordpress 6.8.1
by pundarikaksa·10 months ago
It’s a real pity… 🙁
almost totally fine
by eoik·11 months ago
Hi, I’m using it with twenty twenty-one and wp latest version, and it’s working almost totally fine.
The Read-more link is not showing where there is an excerpt.
And it is sometimes not well aligned (aligned on the left border of the screen), when i’m using columns (after a div styled with : wp-block-columns alignwide is-layout-flex )
- This topic was modified 11 months, 4 weeks ago by eoik.
Love this plugin!
by nealumphred·1 year ago
Love love love this plugin! It really makes the excerpts for each article on my blog’s old-fashioned home page look fantastic.
Keep on keepin’ on!
Download Trends
Today: 91Yesterday: 107This week: 545Period total: 35K
Compatibility
| WordPress | 3.2+ requiredTested up to 6.4.8 |
| PHP | false+ required |
Version Adoption
v4.4
86.0%
v4.3
9.6%
Other
4.3%
Top Alternatives to Advanced Excerpt
Frequently Asked Questions
Changelog
4.4.1 (January 19th, 2024)
- Fix – PHP 8 issue with “creation of dynamic property” being deprecated
Contributors
Plugin data sourced from WordPress.org. Analysis and metrics by PluginSift.