Easy Custom Auto Excerpt Premium controls how post previews are created and displayed on WordPress home, search, archive, and custom archive pages. Choose a paragraph-based cutoff for previews that follow the content’s structure, or a character count for a more consistent text length.

How excerpt content is selected

When a post contains a Read More marker, the add-on uses it. Otherwise, it uses the post’s written excerpt, then generates an excerpt automatically if neither is present. Paragraph mode can show opening paragraphs, while character mode cuts the content at the configured count.

Settings can target selected pages and, where configured, post types or categories. Text alignment, preservation of pictures and written excerpts, and RSS feed output can also be adjusted. Options to strip shortcodes and remove empty HTML tags help clean the generated text.

Image and button controls

Image output can show all images in the visible content, only its first image, or the post’s featured image. Premium controls set image position to left, right, center, float left, or float right, and adjust image width and margin when using the first-image or featured-image options. Thumbnail size applies to the featured-image option.

For the Read More link, choose custom text, text before the link, alignment, inline display, and whether the link appears only when content exceeds the excerpt size, always appears, or stays hidden. Premium includes 10 font types, a custom font size, more than 40 button themes, and custom button HTML. To add a button manually in a post, use [ecae_button] and leave shortcode stripping disabled. The instructions also specify entering a hyphen in the Read More text field to remove the link. Custom CSS is available for the link and preceding text.

Premium options can disable excerpts on specific posts. The free and Premium plugins both need to be installed to use the Premium edition.

Theme compatibility

The plugin works on home, search, and archive pages when a theme calls the_content() or the_excerpt(). It does not support themes that use custom functions to display excerpts, including Total, OceanWP, Writee, and Customizr. The plugin has not been tested with the latest three major WordPress releases, so compatibility with newer releases may be uncertain.

Setup

1. Install the free and Premium plugins.
2. In the WordPress administration, open Excerpt > Settings.
3. Choose the excerpt method and size, display locations, alignment, image options, and Read More options.
4. Save the settings and review excerpts on the selected pages.