How to show excerpts instead of full posts in the WordPress RSS feed

Step by step

1. Look at your feed as it is now

Open https://example.com/feed/ in a browser, or:

curl -s https://example.com/feed/ | grep -c "<content:encoded>"

A full-text feed has a <content:encoded> element for each post, holding the whole article. With excerpts, only the <description> element is present, holding the summary. A count above zero means you are publishing full text.

2. Switch to excerpts

1. Go to Settings → Reading.
2. Under For each post in a feed, include, select Excerpt.
3. Optionally change Syndication feeds show the most recent from its default of 10 items.
4. Click Save Changes.

The setting applies to the main feed and to category, tag and author feeds.

3. Control what the excerpt says

The feed uses each post's Excerpt field when it has one. If the field is empty, WordPress generates an excerpt from the start of the content, which is about 55 words. An automatic excerpt can end mid-thought, so for posts that matter, write the excerpt by hand in the editor's settings sidebar: two sentences that say what the post covers and why to read it. The same text is often shown on your blog index, so it does double duty.

4. Add a link back in every item

Even an excerpt can be republished without credit. With Hydrogen SEO, open Hydrogen SEO → General, find RSS Feed, and fill in After each post:

The post %post_link% appeared first on %site_link%.

%post_link% prints the post title linked to the post and %site_link% the site name linked to the homepage. The line is added to every item in the RSS and Atom feeds, in the summary as well as the full text, so a site that republishes your feed automatically carries a link to the original. Preview in a feed reader shows the result on a sample post.

5. Refresh and verify

Feeds are often cached by the server, a CDN or a feed service. Reload /feed/ with a cache-busting query string, such as /feed/?nocache=1, and repeat the curl count, which should now return 0. Open one item and confirm the <description> ends with your link-back line if you added one.

6. Tell subscribers if it matters

People who read you through a feed reader will now see summaries and have to click through. If you have a loyal feed audience, mention the change in a post. Email services that build newsletters from your feed are affected in the same way: they will send the excerpt, which is usually what you want for a "new post" email anyway.

Full text or excerpt: how to choose

Choose Excerpt if scraper sites copy your posts, if visits to your own pages matter for revenue, or if your feed mainly feeds automated tools. Choose Full text if you write for a community that reads in feed readers and you value that reach over visits. In that case, add the link-back line so every copy points home. A feed is not a ranking factor either way. The practical SEO concern is copies of your article appearing elsewhere before or alongside yours.

What excerpts do not stop

A determined scraper reads your pages, not your feed, so excerpts reduce casual copying without ending it. They also do not affect how search engines or AI crawlers read your site, since those fetch the pages themselves. For crawler access, robots.txt is the control; see block AI crawlers in robots.txt. When you do find a copy outranking you, the copy's lack of a link or canonical to your original is the issue to raise with that site.

Comment feeds and extra feeds

The Reading setting does not remove feeds you may not want at all, such as the site-wide comments feed and the per-post comment feeds. Hydrogen SEO's Crawl cleanup section on the same General screen can remove their links from the head or switch them off with a redirect. Your main feed is never touched by those switches. See crawl cleanup.