How to Properly Format Text in WordPress

I post to WordPress websites almost every day. Clients send me the text in a variety of forms – Word documents, Google Docs, sometimes they ask me to pull the text from a MailChimp or Constant Contact e-newsletter. Pretty straightforward, right?

But here’s the problem: the underlying formatting of the text from the original application sometimes comes along with the words. That can affect how the post is displayed on the website, messing with things like text size, color, and paragraph spacing.

In order to let the WordPress “style sheet” take over and display the text the way it was designed for the site, we need to remove the embedded formatting before we post. Read on for simple instructions.

Here’s how:

1. Copy the text into a text editor (Notepad for the PC or TextEdit for the Mac). This will remove the formatting, leaving just the words. Then copy and paste them into the WordPress post.
2. If there are bullets or numbers in the post, remove them and then add them back using the bullet and numbering tools inside WordPress.
3. Next, click the “text” tab for the post and see if there are any <div> tags. These can impact word spacing on the page and need to be removed. You can find and remove these easily by clicking CTRL A to select all the text, CTRL C to copy the text (including all the code), and CTRL V to paste it into your text editor. Click Edit in the top menu of Notepad and then click Replace.

Enter <div> in the “Find what” field and leave “Replace with” blank. Click Replace All.  Then Change <div> to </div> and do the same thing.  Then copy the text back into WordPress on the Text tab.

(Note that If your <div> tags are more complex, you might need to remove them manually by deleting them one at a time.)

There you go!  Nice, clean, beautiful text in your WordPress website!

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