How to Maintain or Keep Line Breaks in a WordPress Post

One of the more annoying issues with WordPress is its tendency to remove all extra spacing and line breaks from a post or page. I like my posts to look good and be easy to read, so I add line breaks between unordered or ordered lists and elsewhere in my post to make the post easy to read. Unfortunately, the minute I click Publish the post all that extra spacing is removed and everything is jammed together again. This makes the post hard to read. The editor, TinyMCE, that WordPress uses to allow you to create posts filters those extra paragraph and line break tags out each time the post is saved.

Luckily, I found a solution to this issue. All you have to do is install a plugin, make one change in the setup screen, and activate it. Now when you add extra spacing to your post for readability sake, it remains there. Thankfully.

The plugin is called TinyMCE Advanced and can easily be found in a search from the Plugins screen in WordPress. Follow these steps and you’ll be on your way to making your posts easier to read.

1) In WordPress, click on Plugins

2) Click Add New

3) Type TinyMCE Advanced into the search box and click Search

4) When the plugin shows up on the screen click Install Now underneath it

5) After the plugin installs, click on your Settings option in the WordPress Admin screen

6) Find TinyMCE Advanced in the list and click on it

7) In the red Advanced Options box, place a check mark next to the option for “Stop removing the <p> and </br> tags when saving and show them in the HTML editor

8 ) Click Save Changes

9) Finally, go edit one of your posts that you would like to add line breaks or spacing into body of the post, save it and view it. The line breaks and spacing should have remained and your post will be more readable.

Such a simple fix, but you need to install the TinyMCE Advanced plugin to accomplish it.

Tagged with: hard return • line break

Filed under: Tutorials

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