WordPress hides the excerpt field on pages until you turn support on. This guide shows how to add excerpt to WordPress Pages with a few lines of PHP, where the box appears in the editor, and what to check before a theme can print that text.

Why the excerpt box is missing

Posts get excerpt support by default. Pages do not. The page type can still store a summary. Core simply never registers that support, so the editor never draws the box. A theme, a page grid, or an SEO plugin can read the saved summary once it exists. If nothing in the template calls the excerpt, the field will save and the front end will look the same. Open the template that renders the page and confirm it asks for a summary before you treat this as a design change.

Manual summaries are also useful when the first paragraph of a page is a banner, a form, or a shortcode. An automatic trim of that content is rarely the sentence you want in a card or a search snippet.

How to add excerpt to WordPress Pages

Put the snippet in a child theme functions.php file, or in a small custom plugin. Do not paste it into a parent theme. The next parent update will delete it. If you would rather leave theme files alone, Code Snippets can run the same hook. We walk through that choice in the right way to customize WordPress.

1. Connect with FTP. FileZilla is a free client if you do not already have one.
2. Open the active child theme folder under wp-content/themes.
3. Paste the snippet at the bottom of functions.php.
4. Save the file and overwrite the copy on the server.

<?php

// Add this code to your child theme's functions.php file 

function add_excerpt_to_wp_pages() {
  add_post_type_support( 'page', 'excerpt' );
}

add_action('init', 'add_excerpt_to_wp_pages');

The hook runs on init and calls add_post_type_support() for the page type. That is the same function core uses for posts. The reference is on the developer handbook if you want the argument list.

Turn the field on in the editor

Edit any page after the file is saved. In the classic editor, open Screen Options at the top right and tick Excerpt. A box appears under the content. In the block editor, look for an Excerpt panel in the document sidebar. Some themes hide that panel until support is registered, which is why the snippet has to load first.

Text you type there is the manual summary. Leave the box empty and WordPress can still build one from the page body when a template asks for it. Type your own sentence when the opening of the page is not a useful summary. Clear the cache if a page card still shows the old text.