How to Add a Read More Link to Manual Excerpts

If you want to add a 'read more' link to your manual excerpts, here's how to do it. I tested this code with a child theme from Genesis but it should work for all themes.

Written by Jean Galea
Last updated 3 years ago
Blogging, Developers

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If you want to add a ‘read more’ link to your manual excerpts, here’s how to do it.

//* Changing excerpt more - only works where excerpt IS hand-crafted
function manual_excerpt_more( $excerpt ) {
	$excerpt_more = '';
	if( has_excerpt() ) {
    	$excerpt_more = '&nbsp;<a href="' . get_permalink() . '" rel="nofollow">[Read more]</a>';
	}
	return $excerpt . $excerpt_more;
}
add_filter( 'get_the_excerpt', 'manual_excerpt_more' );

I tested this code with a child theme from Genesis but it should work for all themes.

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Written by Jean Galea

Jean Galea is an investor, entrepreneur, and writer. He is the founder of WP Mayor, and the plugins WP RSS Aggregator and Spotlight. He also runs the Good Life Collective. Connect with him on X or visit jeangalea.com.

If you purchase through a link on our site, we may earn a commission.

6 Responses

Eden Chan says:

May 19, 2022 at 17:50

Thanks for your kind post, it saved my whole day!
Alexandra Cordes says:

February 9, 2017 at 22:15

Thanks
Kirill says:

September 30, 2016 at 13:13

Hi! Thank you very much!
May be you know how to make that my custom more link showing in same paragraph. Now it looks like that:

(paragraph tag open)
here manual excerpt text
(paragraph tag close)
(paragraph tag open)
here my custom more link
(paragraph tag close)

I want to display more link inline at the end of excerpt text, after last letter.
Janet says:

September 13, 2016 at 12:11

Thank you so much for this!
morfik says:

October 22, 2015 at 11:23

The manually created excerpts don’t have anything like “read more” in the RSS feed. The posts have the link on the main page. When I look in the RSS feed, I can see that the automatically generated excerpts have […] at the end. Do you know how to add something to those manually created excerpts in the RSS feed?
Drake says:

January 22, 2015 at 05:39

Thanks dude, very helpful.