This falls into the category of “who knew?” or of being brainwashed into thinking the WP way. For the past several years, I have always referred to the introductory text in WordPress as either the excerpt or the lede. It turns out both are wrong, and I always had the feeling they were wrong. Today, I learned that this block of text, used to entice readers to continue reading, is called the standfirst.

Standfirst – also known as a subhead, rider, kicker, or bankhead, a standfirst summarizes the article and entices the reader to keep reading. It’s often used in online blog posts.

While the term “excerpt” works in the WordPress space because it auto-extracts a post excerpt, the field associated with it should be called “standfirst”. On the other hand, the lede is the first paragraph of a story – hence, “don’t bury the lede.” In addition to using the terminology correctly, it is a great CSS class name that won’t easily be confused.

I have taken it a step further: on custom post types, I have stopped enabling the excerpt and added a social description field to feed the SEO tool, and a standfirst field in case the SEO field is not enough.

Screenshot showing the two fields.

One of the upsides of this approach is the ability to use text formatting in the standfirst to make it even more compelling.