One of the more frequent queries we receive from clients when editing their WordPress website is related to text formatting.
Clients sometimes create pages or blog posts and find that the text looks different than normal. This may be larger or smaller font, a different colour, strange spacing, or even a different font altogether. We’ve even seen text appear in multiple columns to the surprise of the client!
Sitewide Styling
Before we look at the cause, we should provide a little background on website styling. When a website is initially built, styles are defined centrally to ensure they’re standardised across the whole site. These styles include font family, font size and colours amongst other things.
It is possible to change fonts on a per page basis through the WordPress dashboard, but we advise clients against using these tools – it is much better to manage them across the whole site in one go, otherwise the client may have to go back through each page individually to change those per-page styles in future.
But I Didn’t Change The Font Settings?
Often, clients will write a blog post in Microsoft Word before copying and pasting into their website. Unfortunately this can copy across formatting ‘behind-the-scenes’ from Microsoft Word, to the website. Sometimes this formatting is barely visible, such as line spacing, and other times the formatting change is more obvious, such as enlarged text. Either way, rogue formatting is not something website owners want scattered about their website pages.
The same can happen when copying text from leaflets, PDFs, or other websites.
How Do We Get Around This?
There are a few options to remove the formatting before pasting, or to remove the formatting after already pasting into their website:
- When pasting the text, do a right-click and select ‘paste as plain text’.
- Before pasting into your website, paste your text into a plain text editor such as notepad (which removes formatting), before copying it back out of notepad and pasting into your website.
- When the text is already pasted in, select it in the WordPress text edit box and click the eraser icon on the toolbar to ‘clear formatting’.