How to Add a Key Takeaways Plugin to WordPress Posts

One of the modern developments in website marketing is catering to people who just don't have a lot of time to go digging for information. 

There are all sorts of reasons why you might be limited in time or attention. You could be in a hurry, needing to find information for a tight deadline. You could have a limited amount of access, like you're looking something up on your phone before the flow of conversation moves on, or before your bus or train moves out of your cell range. You could just have a limited attention span for whatever you're researching.

Once you notice this shift, you see it everywhere. Social media is a big part of it, with shorter posts and more graphical and image-focused posts taking over. Short-form video content is all the rage, from TikTok to Reels to Shorts. 

With written content, the shift is still there, but it takes different forms. AI Overviews are a big one, giving people answers before they even reach a website. Short sentences, larger fonts, more line breaks, stronger formatting; anything that draws you from point to point also counts.

A big one, though, is the Key Takeaways box. You see these all over now, top-level summaries at the start of every post, giving people a thorough idea of what's in the post.

How do you make one of these? Is it even a good idea? Let's talk about it. Hint: as you can probably tell from my use of the same kind of infobox, I support it.

Making a Key Takeaways Box Manually

One of the nice things about the modern WordPress block editor is the way you can create blocks to serve specific purposes. The block editor is a surprisingly powerful tool, even if it's one that the majority of WordPress users aren't going to touch.

The idea, basically, is to create a block-based template you can use to fill out a simple bulleted list of key takeaways for your post. A 2-3 sentence summary, 3-5 bullet points for important details from the post, maybe a CTA to read on for more details, and you're good to go.

As you can see from posts here on my site, mine is pretty simple. I just use a bullet list of details. I've tried a few different options, including a generalized paragraph summary, but I've found the list format to be the most effective.

Note, of course, that if what you're seeing now when you read this is different, it means things have changed since I wrote this post. Feel free to let me know about the disconnect!

Obviously, there are a lot of downsides to making a key takeaways block manually.

You have to design the block. This isn't hard, necessarily. A simple key takeaways block isn't much more than a pre-formatted bulleted list and header. But, if you don't really know how to mess around with custom blocks, it has a bit of a learning curve.

You have to re-read and re-summarize your post for key takeaways. Reading a blog post, extracting 3-5 single-sentence bullet points of the important details, and summarizing them isn't too difficult. What it is, is time-consuming. A blog post can take 5-10 minutes to read, even if you're familiar with it. Then you have to determine what the most important points are.

It's easier if you go into your writing with the expectation of summarizing it. You can basically just use a chunk of your outline or your headings. That's fine moving forward, but it doesn't help with the hundreds or thousands of blog posts you already have published.

You have to manually insert and populate the block for every post. It's just a lot of work, you know? I know I don't want to do it. 

Using a Plugin (and AI) for Key Takeaways

Fortunately, this is one area where LLMs are quite good. And I know I'm not the only person to think so, because there are quite a few plugins and tools to do it.

Some potential options include:

• n8n's AI workflow
• WPSummarize
• SummarAIze

Personally, though, I didn't really like any of these, at least not enough to throw my recommendation behind them. Instead, I just made my own.

Introducing the Content Powered Key Takeaways Plugin

You can find my custom-made AI-powered Key Takeaways plugin here.

That's a direct link to the .zip file, so you can download it and install it easily, no accounts, no payments, no gateways, nothing in the way.

Installing the Key Takeaways Plugin

Installation is super simple, just like you would install any other manual plugin.

Here are the steps:

• Log into your WordPress site's admin dashboard.
• On the left-hand sidebar, find Plugins and click it.
• At the top of the window, click Add New.
• Click Upload Plugin.
• Click Choose File.
• Find the zip file you downloaded from the link above and choose it.
• Let the plugin install, and click Activate Plugin when it's done.

That's all you need to do to install the plugin, but it won't start working just yet. You need a little more.

Get a Claude API Key and Activate the Plugin

If you don't already have a Claude API key, you'll need one. Fortunately, it's easy enough to grab one.

Even if you already have one, it might be worthwhile to make a new one for this purpose, so you have different keys for different things.

• Create or sign into your Claude account.
• Go to Settings and click on API Keys.
• Click to Create a Key. Claude will ask you to give the key a name; I recommend something like SiteNameKeyTakeaways, so you know what it is and what it's for. You can also give it an expiration, but that will probably cause problems if you forget about it, so you can leave it unlimited.
• Copy your API key for use in the plugin.

Now, go back to your WordPress site.

• Click on Settings.
• Click on Key Takeaways AI.
• In the prompt, enter your Claude API Key.

You're good to go! The plugin is now active, and all you need to do now is start using it.

Now, this plugin is not automatic. It's not going to suddenly add an AI-generated Key Takeaways box to every post on your site. You still need to do that individually.

Using the Key Takeaways Plugin

So, how do you make use of the plugin?

Open up a post in your WordPress post editor. Here, you'll be able to insert and generate your key takeaways box. The plugin will send the post data to Claude with a custom prompt to ask it to generate your set of key takeaways, using your API key. It will get a response, and you'll see the Key Takeaways populate.

Always review your key takeaways. Claude is an LLM, and LLMs can hallucinate. Double-check numbers, conclusions, and important points. Anecdotally, I've found Claude to be the most reliable of the LLMs to date, but it can still make mistakes, so you need to double-check.

I also highly recommend starting with your popular, highly-trafficked posts first. Do one or two, make sure it looks good and works the way you want to, then start working in batches. This also helps you manage token use and the associated costs.

Part of why I don't charge for this plugin, after all, is because you're already going to be paying for the tokens. I just made the framework and internal prompt to get it all to work smoothly. If you want to compensate me, consider checking out the services I offer instead!

My Key Takeaways plugin has a few cool features you don't normally see from these plugins, too.

• Each bullet point has a unique icon to represent it, if you want. You don't have to use them, but they can add some interesting character to your infobox. Feel free to test which option works better! The icons are chosen by Claude and are powered by Lucide.
• You can inject the infobox to posts in batches. This is great for adding the box to a lot of older posts at once, especially once you've tested to make sure it's accurately summarizing your posts. I still recommend double-checking, but I fully recognize that it can be a huge pain once you have thousands of posts to go through.
• You can exclude specific posts, whole categories, or entire tags. This way you can leave out particular sections of your site if they aren't the kinds of content that works for a Key Takeaways post.
• You can edit the key takeaways directly from the post editor. No need to go into a special dashboard or re-prompt the LLM to get it to say what you want. If all you want to do is change some wording, fix a stat, or even just change the order of the bullet points, you can do so.
• If you really don't like what Claude came up with and want to give it another chance, you can also re-roll the output from the post editor as well. Sometimes Claude just doesn't quite land, and that's fine!

I made it as easy to use as I could, but I'm also open to feedback, so if you have something to say, a feature request, or a change you'd like to see, let me know!

Questions About My Key Takeaways Plugin

A few questions I wanted to address here, too.

How much does the plugin cost? Nothing at all. I made it more for my own use than to be a product, so it's free to install. You still have to deal with Claude's token pricing, but that's between you and Anthropic; I don't deal with or see any of it.

Why Claude, and not another LLM? Personally, I've had the best, most consistent results with Claude. GPT is too inconsistent, Gemini is more often off the mark, and I've seen way too many horror stories about Grok to even consider it as an option. Maybe something like DeepSeek or Qwen could work, but I haven't done much testing with them.

What if I want to use a different LLM? There are other plugins out there you can try. If there's enough demand, let me know, and I'll consider adding it, but I really do think (at least for now) that Claude is the best one for this kind of purpose. 

Is Using a Key Takeaways Plugin a Good Idea?

Absolutely!

Any criticism of the key takeaways box generally boils down to one thing: user attention. 

Some say that if you use one, you're discouraging people from spending time on your site. If they get their information right there at the start of your post, what incentive do they have to dig any deeper? 

Sure, there can be some "losses" when you use this kind of plugin. 

• People won't see display ads lower down on the page, so you lose any potential revenue from those scrolls.
• People don't see below-the-fold CTAs, so they're more likely to bounce rather than stick around.
• People don't trigger scroll-related scripts or analytics events, so more visits read as single-event visits, potentially skewing your analytics.

Frankly, most of these are going to be minimal anyway. Lower-page links and ads are always worse than higher-page versions of the same. It just requires a bit of a shift in how you front-load value.

There's one potentially valid criticism that I think you need to be aware of, though. That is, the surface-level information problem, aka the headline problem. You know how frustrating it is these days to see all these clickbait headlines on nearly every website, right? People get their information from the headline, but the nuance throughout the post presents a dramatically different picture of the truth.

A key takeaways box does kind of foster the same sort of surface-level understanding of a subject. People can get a few key facts, but they don't get the full picture. 

But let's be real; a lot of people are just skimming posts for those few key facts anyway. Having the deeper picture there is important for the people who want the nuance, but it's not why most people are searching.

In fact, I would argue that the key takeaways box is even better. It lets people get more of an understanding than what a headline alone can give, without being so long or dense that it drives them away.

The key takeaways box is also useful for another reason, and I've already mentioned it: AI Overviews.

AI Overviews want nicely summed-up information to pull and show to users. It's why a lot of Google's AI Overviews pull almost directly from pages. If you want those top-of-SERPs citations, you need information presented in an easy-to-extract way. Yeah, it kinda sucks, especially for those of us who have decades of experience catering to people rather than machines, but it is what it is.

I think there are a ton of benefits to having a key takeaways box, and the drawbacks aren't really anything new or meaningful, so there's no reason not to have it. And, of course, the use of AI makes it easy to generate them across a larger, older site, so why not give it a try?