%%excerpt%% not working in Avada theme

Hello Titoz,

Thanks for reaching out regarding your excerpts. If I understand correctly, you want the Yoast SEO plugin to pull the contents of the excerpts field as the meta description. You have used the snippet variable %%excerpt%% in the meta description field. Is this correct?

Can you let me know where Avada shortcodes come in here? Do you mean that the excerpts field is populated with Avada shortcodes?

Hi Maybelline, you are correct. I am using the %%excerpt%% variable to attempt to create the meta description tag dynamically from the post content.

However, on the snippet preview, all I see are the Avada builder shortcodes – there’s so many no actual copy makes it into the snippet. See this screenshot:

https://paste.pics/ad12979cad439e598a76f6555e4d0b20

It looks like the Yoast plugin is ignoring the shortcodes and not generating a meta description at all because there is no content to add after filtering out the shortcodes. See this screenshot for what the source code shows on the front end to admin users:

https://paste.pics/2e3d010ef17902a9e7d1487682c8b89e

Thanks in advance for any insight you may be able to offer. We are aware that we can manually insert a meta description but we are trying to avoid that as there are dozens of pages and posts on this site that don’t have a meta description and we would rather handle it dynamically with the variable.

Hello Titoz,

Thanks for the helpful screenshots; they make the issue clearer. I see that you set the excerpt to be used as meta description, but you see the shortcode from your theme in the snippet preview. Fusion Builder is adding shortcodes to the top of the page, which the Yoast SEO plugin is viewing as part of the content. Since each site builder available for WordPress uses its shortcodes, the plugin might not be able to ignore them all.

The workarounds:
1. You already mentioned this. Manually enter the meta description in the Yoast SEO meta box. This is recommended since meta descriptions are important when optimizing your site. We know how tedious this is; we are very sorry. There is a feature in WordPress > Yoast SEO > Tools > Bulk Editor that lets you edit the meta description in bulk
2. Use the code at https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/issues/6288#issuecomment-360581842 and place it into your functions.php file. If you are unsure how to do that, your theme developer or host provider can help. We also recommend taking a backup before adding the code. Your host provider can help with that. Or test on a staging site first.

This thread was marked resolved due to a lack of activity, but you’re always welcome to re-open the topic. Please read this post before opening a new request.