Making Hugo Post List Summaries Plain Text with plainify

Removing HTML tags from article summaries in Hugo using plainify

 Posted on January 6, 2026  (Last modified on August 19, 2026)  • Other languages: 日本語

The summary display in the article list on the top page was being shown with the HTML notation still left in it, which felt wrong, so I fixed it ↓

Stripping the HTML also looks better for SEO, so I made the following change

layouts/partials/post_preview.html

<article class="post-preview">
    <a href="{{ .Permalink }}">
        <h2 class="post-title">{{ .Title }}</h2>
        {{ if .Params.subtitle }}
        <h3 class="post-subtitle">
            {{ .Params.subtitle }}
        </h3>
        {{ end }}
        {{ if .Params.image }}
        <img src="{{ .Params.image }}" alt="{{ .Title }}" class="img-title" />
        {{ end }}
        {{ if .Params.video }}
        <video loop autoplay muted playsinline class="img-title">
            <source src="{{ .Params.video }}">
        </video>
        {{ end }}
    </a>

    <p class="post-meta">
        {{ partial "post_meta.html" . }}
    </p>
    <div class="post-entry">
        {{ if or (.Truncated) (.Params.summary) }}
        {{ .Summary | plainify }}
        <a href="{{ .Permalink }}" class="post-read-more">[{{ i18n "readMore" }}]</a>
        {{ else }}
        {{ .Content }}
        {{ end }}
    </div>

    {{ if .Params.tags }}
    <div class="blog-tags">
        {{ range .Params.tags }}
       <a href="{{"tags" | absLangURL}}/{{ . | urlize }}/">{{ . }}</a>&nbsp;
        {{ end }} 
    </div>
    {{ end }}

</article>
Markdown 

Test markdown

Each post also has a subtitle

 Posted on February 20, 2015  (Last modified on August 19, 2026)  • Other languages: 日本語

You can write regular markdown here and Jekyll will automatically convert it to a nice webpage. I strongly encourage you to take 5 minutes to learn how to write in markdown - it’ll teach you how to transform regular text into bold/italics/headings/tables/etc. Here is some bold text Here is a secondary heading Here’s a useless table: Number Next number Previous number Five Six Four Ten Eleven Nine Seven Eight Six Two Three One How about a yummy crepe? [Read More]
example  markdown