Are you interested in discovering how to automatically shorten your blog post titles using PHP?
Truncating your post titles allows you to manage the length of your titles throughout your website. Depending on your WordPress theme, you may prefer to display shorter titles than what your theme originally supports.
In this guide, we will demonstrate how to automatically truncate your post titles in WordPress.
What is the reason for truncating post titles in WordPress using PHP?
Truncating post titles in WordPress with PHP provides greater flexibility in managing the length and appearance of post titles on your website.
This can be particularly useful when dealing with lengthy titles that may disrupt the overall design of your WordPress blog’s homepage, for instance.
There are some users who prefer to use shorter post titles in order to optimize their blog posts for SEO. However, it is not necessary to truncate post titles in order to achieve this. Instead, you can utilize a WordPress SEO plugin to make your title tag shorter.
By using an SEO plugin, you can create custom SEO titles specifically for search result pages, while still maintaining longer post titles for your site visitors. This allows you to optimize your blog posts for SEO without sacrificing the user experience on your website.
Method 1: Shorten WordPress Post Titles Using a Built-in WordPress Function
The most straightforward method for truncating WordPress post titles is by incorporating PHP code into your WordPress files. If you’re new to this, refer to our tutorial on how to copy and paste code in WordPress.
Numerous tutorials suggest adding code directly to your theme’s functions.php file. However, any errors could result in various WordPress errors or even cause your site to crash.
Therefore, we suggest using the free WPCode plugin instead. Follow our guide on how to add custom code in WordPress and insert the following code into your WordPress site:
functionmax_title_length( $title) {
$max= 35;
if( strlen( $title) > $max) {
returnsubstr( $title, 0, $max). ” …”;
} else{
return$title;
}
}
add_filter( ‘the_title’, ‘max_title_length’);
This code snippet will run within your WordPress post loop and abbreviate your blog post titles to a maximum of 35 characters. If you want to adjust the title length, simply modify the $max variable to your desired length.
After integrating this code, your blog post titles will be truncated to the specified length across your entire WordPress website.
Method 2: Shorten WordPress Post Titles Using PHP by Modifying WordPress Theme Files
Another approach to truncating WordPress post titles involves directly adding code to your WordPress theme files. This method provides greater flexibility in determining where your titles are shortened. For instance, you may want to limit titles on your homepage but display the full title on individual blog posts.
To achieve this, you will need to insert PHP code directly into the WordPress theme files where you wish to truncate your post titles. For instance, you can modify your index.php file by replacing the existing the_title tag within your WordPress post loop with the code snippet below to adjust the title length across your site:
<a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>”>
<?php
$thetitle= $post->post_title; /* or you can use get_the_title() */
$getlength= strlen($thetitle);
$thelength= 25;
echosubstr($thetitle, 0, $thelength);
if($getlength> $thelength) echo”…”;
?>
</a>
This piece of code establishes a maximum length of 25 characters for post titles. If the title exceeds this limit, it will be truncated at the 25th character and an ellipsis ‘…’ will be appended to the end.
To customize the character limit for your website, simply modify the $thelength variable to your desired character count.
Once you have inserted the code and saved your file, you must upload it to your theme directory in your WordPress hosting account. This can be accomplished using an FTP client or the file manager tool in your WordPress hosting control panel. If you are unfamiliar with FTP, please refer to our guide on how to use FTP to upload files to WordPress.
Upon implementation of the code, your post titles will be shortened to the designated character count.