WordPress.org

The WordPress built-in support for excerpts is somewhat basic.

This plugin extends that support and adds the following features:

• choose after how many words the excerpt should cut off
• OR choose after how many characters the excerpt should cut off
• choose the cutoff character (default: html horizontal ellipsis, aka three dots)

With this plugin, excerpts will happen automatically. There is no need to put in the 'read more' tag and there is no need to add a Post Excerpt field by hand. However, if you do one of those things, you will override your manual excerpt for that specific post.

Author: joost538