WordPress got so many things right.

They created a platform that today powers more than 43% of the web. They pioneered the plugin ecosystem before Apple’s App Store existed. They kept the core lean, giving developers a canvas to paint their own vision of the web.

In building this remarkable platform, though, one simple connection got overlooked: making excerpts automatically work as meta descriptions.

What is a Meta Description?

A meta description is the brief text snippet that appears under your page title in search engine results. It’s your chance to tell potential visitors what they’ll find on your page—think of it as your content’s elevator pitch to the world.

When someone searches on Google, they see three main elements for each result:

• The page title
• The URL
• The meta description

That description text is typically 155-160 characters that can make the difference between someone clicking through to your site or scrolling past. While Google says meta descriptions don’t directly affect rankings, they absolutely affect click-through rates—which indirectly impacts your SEO success.

The Beautiful Simplicity of Excerpts

WordPress has always had an excerpt field. It’s brilliant in its simplicity—a dedicated space to summarise your post. Theme developers use it for archive pages. Readers see it in a website’s internal search results. It’s the perfect 160-character summary of your content.

Yet this same text—already written, already perfect—doesn’t automatically become your meta description for the World Wide Web. The field sits there, doing half its potential job, waiting for a plugin to unlock its full purpose.

It’s like installing a doorbell that can ring inside your house, but forgetting to connect it to the button outside that actually makes it ring.

Learning from WordPress’s Own Evolution

WordPress has shown they know when to bring features into core. Remember when every site needed:

• A plugin for custom menus?
• Third-party solutions for featured images?
• External editors for rich content?

WordPress eventually saw those as universal needs, and so they absorbed the features into core, and suddenly millions of sites got better overnight.

The biggest leap? Gutenberg. WordPress saw that modern publishing needed block-based editing and made it happen. Yes, it drastically disrupted the theme and plugin ecosystem in 2018, but it also gave every WordPress user a powerful, modern editing experience out of the box.

That’s the WordPress I believe in—one that identifies universal needs and meets them.

The Case for Turning Excerpts Into Meta Descriptions

Here’s why excerpts-as-meta-descriptions belongs in core:

• Universal Benefit: Every single WordPress site needs meta descriptions. From personal blogs to enterprise platforms, everyone benefits from better SEO.
• Zero Learning Curve: Users already write excerpts. No new fields, no new concepts. Just their existing workflow suddenly working better.
• Instant SEO Improvement: Millions of posts would instantly have proper meta descriptions. No plugin installation, no configuration, just better search presence.
• Respects User Intent: If someone writes an excerpt, they’re summarising their content. That’s exactly what a meta description does.

Building the Bridge

Until WordPress fills this gap, I built Excerpts as Meta Descriptions by Solespire. It’s the simplest plugin I’ve ever created—just taking the excerpt field and making it do what it should have done all along.

Get the Plugin Free:

Join the Marcus.Blog Telegram channel and request your free copy of the plugin that uses excerpts as meta descriptions, rather than creating a custom field, as other plugins tend to do, which creates a redundant set of actions—needing to copy your excerpt and paste it into the custom field. The plugin I created eliminates that double effort—just enter and save your excerpts as you always do, and they will also serve as your meta descriptions. Easy enough.

Consider it a preview of what WordPress could eventually offer everyone, built-in with their core offering of the platform.

If you’re code-savvy and want to roll on your own, here’s how little it takes, by pasting this code snippet into functions.php:

add_action( 'wp_head', function () {
	if ( ! is_singular() ) return;

	$excerpt = esc_attr( wp_trim_words( get_the_excerpt(), 30, '…' ) );
	echo '<meta name="description" content="' . $excerpt . '">' . "\n";
}, 20 );

The Obvious Next Step

WordPress has always excelled at recognising when a plugin’s functionality has become essential enough to bring into core. Making excerpts work as meta descriptions fits this pattern perfectly.

When millions of users copy their excerpt text into a separate meta description field, it’s unnecessary duplication. The solution requires minimal code, zero interface changes, and makes WordPress quietly do what users already expect.

Sometimes the best improvements are the small connections that make us wonder why they weren’t there from day one.

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What other “obvious connections” could WordPress make to improve everyone’s experience? The best platform improvements often start as community conversations.