Print writers and editor have a lot of difficulty transitioning to a CMS system like WordPress because they tend to carry a full set of print editorial baggage. Now where is this more prevalent than with their legacy terminology. Concepts of Heds, Deks and even Ledes exist in WordPress however because the CMS was developed from the ground up in the digital realm by individuals who were not print editors the terminology is naturally different.
The Lede is probably the easiest to translate since that is typically just the first sentence of the post, just like on a print article.
Converting the Hed to WordPress vernacular is actually very straight forward it is the same thing as the title field. This title field is automatically set in the page <title></title> tag by WordPress as well as displayed atop the post.
Unfortunately the Dek is where things tend to really fall apart mostly due to conceptual confusion. While in WordPress we do not have a Dek field there is an Excerpt but by default the excerpt field is typically hidden in the CMS. To complicate matters further because the excerpt is optional many theme developers forget that it even exists and neglect to include it in their page designs.
Common definition: the DEK is an abstract, consisting of a sentence or two that reveals what the article is about. It expands on or clarifies what is in the headline.
The WordPress excerpt pretty much performs exactly the same function but it is typically thought of the romance copy summary of what this article is about. It performs the role of the article teaser and it is a tricky beast because it is optional.
Failing to fill the excerpt field, WordPress will take the liberty of automatically generating one out of the first 55 words (default) of the first paragraph for the post. Generally speaking this is not a good idea and bear with me as I explain.
At this point you are probably thinking that the Dek and Excerpt are the same, and while they can be the still perform functions with similar goals. Personally the excerpt is far more powerful than the Dek because Excerpts are used in Google search listings and on automatically in taxonomy and custom post type (CPT) archive pages along with the headline (Title) and the featured image.
There are several reasons you want to ALWAYS explicitly craft your excerpts and not relay on WordPress’s automatic feature. While the first 55 words are likely to include your Lede they are also likely to include less optimized text. You want to truly optimize the content in the excerpt so maximize it’s SEO value. Refer the to image below which is exactly the first 55 words from this very post.
In addition the WordPress will ALWAYs check for data in the field when hydrating the content for delivery to the visitor. If you have one it grabs the field content and uses it accordingly. If no content is found then WordPress begins a more exhaustive operation to generate the content form the first paragraph as previously noted.
For a single article this is not a huge performance issue but extrapolate this operation to a WordPress search results page or category listing page with 50 posts and that heavy operation happens for each article snippet rendered on the page. If your site utilizes continuous scroll this can lead to a very poor user experience.
One final note when crafting a WordPress article always include a featured image. The featured image should be compliant with your site’s primary social share guidelines. For instance is Facebook is your primary venue then ensure that the image meets their minimum requirements which at the time of this article is 1200 x 630, where as twitter shared photos should be 440 x 220 a 2:1 aspect ration. For more example refer to: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-image-sizes-guide/.
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