I want to show post excerpt and cap it at 20 words [duplicate]

You can use filters to change the excerpt length. (It goes in your theme or child theme’s functions.php)

function wpdocs_custom_excerpt_length( $length ) {
    return 70;
}
add_filter( 'excerpt_length', 'wpdocs_custom_excerpt_length', 999 );

At this point I usually also like to change the part that gets added to the end of a truncated excerpt to something like ‘…’

function wpdocs_excerpt_more( $more ) {
    return '...';
}
add_filter( 'excerpt_more', 'wpdocs_excerpt_more' );

If you want this to only happen on your homepage, you can use the is_page(title/slug/id) function as follows:

function wpdocs_custom_excerpt_length( $length ) {
    return 70;
}

function wpdocs_excerpt_more( $more ) {
    return '...';
}

function homepageCustomExcerpt() {
    if (is_page('home')) {
        add_filter( 'excerpt_length', 'wpdocs_custom_excerpt_length', 999 );
        add_filter( 'excerpt_more', 'wpdocs_excerpt_more' );
    }
}

add_action( 'init', 'homepageCustomExcerpt' );

The reason for calling the homepageCustomExcerpt function with add_action( 'init', 'homepageCustomExcerpt' ) is because if is_page() fires too early, the page would not yet be set and it will always return false.

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