Appearance → Customize → Archive → Show excerpt, Excerpt length (words) and Show excerpt “(more)” link.
Where the text comes from
WordPress’s own rule, which Stoat does not change:
- The Excerpt field on the post, if you filled it in. Used whole, never trimmed.
- Otherwise, the start of the post content, trimmed to the word count below and closed with an ellipsis.
The Excerpt field is hidden by default in the block editor — open it from the Post tab in the sidebar, under Excerpt. It is worth using on anything where the first twenty words are a scene-setter rather than a summary.
Length
Excerpt length (words) — 5 to 200, default 20.
Twenty words is about a line and a half beside a 100px thumbnail. Some rough guidance:
| 12–18 | a tight list where the headlines do the work |
| 20 | the default; a line or two |
| 25–35 | a news listing where the summary is meant to be read |
| 50+ | rarely useful — at that point the reader may as well open the post |
The count applies only to auto-generated excerpts. A hand-written Excerpt field is printed in full however long it is, which is the other reason to use it.
The “(more)” link
Show excerpt “(more)” link adds a (more) link after the ellipsis, pointing at the post. On by default.
Turning it off leaves the ellipsis alone. The headline and the picture are already links, so the (more) is a third route to the same place rather than the only one — switch it off for a cleaner listing, keep it if your readers are the kind who look for the words.
An empty excerpt prints nothing
If a post has no excerpt and no content to trim — a post behind a paywall with no public teaser, say — the summary block is omitted entirely rather than printed empty. No stray whitespace, no lone ellipsis.
Full posts in the listing
Stoat has no “show full content in the archive” option. A listing of complete posts is a scroll rather than an index, and it costs you the thing a listing is for. If you want that shape, the block editor’s Query Loop block will build it on a page.