Tips & Tricks: How to Paste External Text as Plain Text

Hi again! We are back with another useful tip!

Ever copied some external text, but when you pasted it in WordPress and viewed your page, the formatting looked all funny?

Yeah. Frustrating, right? Happens to us all the time.

What’s the cause of this formatting issue?

Well, when you copy and paste from Microsoft Word or an external web page into WordPress, the text brings its internal formatting – fonts, sizes, alignment, and much more – with it.

These styles are embedded in the text itself and they tend to override the styles set up in WordPress. Your content may look normal on the visual editor screen, but hidden behind that is a lot of extra formatting.

How to Paste External Text as Plain Text

WordPress comes with a feature that allows you to paste any external text into WordPress and won’t keep all of its internal formattings.

The button is called “Paste as Plain Text” found on the far left of the text editing bar. The function works as a toggle switch – meaning you can turn the feature on and off when you want to.

To Paste External Text:

1. Click the Paste as Text icon. A grey outline will appear. Plain text pasting is now on.

2. Place your cursor in the content area and select paste.

3. Click the Paste as Text icon again to turn plain text pasting off.

If you view your page, you will see that all the text is formatted normally!

And that’s it! This tip is super easy and will save you time playing around with complicated formatting!

Until next time!