The Challenge of Inconsistent Previews

Excerpts play an important role in your site's design by providing short, engaging previews of your posts on blog indexes, category archives, and homepage sections. By default, WordPress truncates post content automatically at 55 words, adding a simple [...] string to the end. While this works for standard layouts, it can look messy on custom layouts or multi-column grids, where uneven text lengths can throw off your design alignment.

The Excerpt Length Control Block plugin provides a simple, visual solution built directly into the Gutenberg editor. It lets you customize the exact length and ending style of post summaries right within your layouts.

Adjusting Your Layout Previews

  1. Installation Phase: Open Plugins > Add New, type "Excerpt Length Control Block" into the search field, install, and activate the plugin.

  2. Opening Your Layout Template: Navigate to the page or theme template where you want to display your post previews (such as your blog home page layout).

  3. Inserting the Custom Preview Component: Click the + block inserter icon, search for Controlled Excerpt, and add it to your post query layout block.

  4. Adjusting the Sidebar Settings: Click on the block to open its specific styling options in the right sidebar:

    • Word/Character Limit Selector: Adjust the slider to set your ideal length (e.g., 25 words for tight grid layouts, or 75 words for single-column lists).

    • Custom Suffix Input: Replace the generic [...] with a clean custom suffix, such as ... or a direct Read Full Story link.

  5. Publishing Your Layout: Click Save to update your live layouts.

Maintaining Design Alignment

Using this block ensures that all of your post previews remain uniform and visually balanced, regardless of how long the original articles are.

It's an easy way to maintain a polished, professional design across your archive pages while giving readers a clean snippet of your content.