Have you ever had that experience, when you copy & paste some text into a blog post you’re writing, and the results don’t match the general setup you have on your site?
This is the danger of “copy and paste”, where you might have picked up some unexpected (and unwanted!) behind-the-scenes formatting that your site doesn’t quite know how to handle. This can happen when you’re using MS Word and you’ve done some extra formatting, or if you copy something from another web page. I had this happen when I copied some of my LinkedIn profile into my website, and also once when I copied a legal template from my one website to another.
Here’s an example: it won’t break things – but it could have unintended consequences!
Another example is where font-size, not styles or heading tags are copied across, making your text look messy. MS Word is a regular culprit for this, with added paragraphs and line breaks.
- If you’re very happy to dig around in HTML and remove all this extraneous code, you can use the “Text” version when writing a page or post. What I often do if I know there’s a risk of this formatting creeping in, is to go into the text editor first and only THEN paste my copy in as this removes all formatting.
- Another option that you might prefer is to click the “Paste as text” button, and anything you then paste will be in plain text, without having to flip over to the Text editor.
Just remember to switch it off again once you need normal pasting again.
Here is how to find the Text editor (1) and the “Paste as text” button (2): 
Of course you’ll have to re-format things like headings, and bold text etc. but if you’re copying over large amounts of text that could be mis-formatted, this may well be the lesser of two evils!
I hope this helps! Let me know in the comments if you have other WordPress things that you’d like to learn more about!
