Recent­ly, a read­er asked us how to copy and paste items into Word­Press with­out caus­ing for­mat­ting issues? 

Often when you are copy­ing and past­ing con­tent from a desk­top app or a web page, you end up past­ing unwant­ed for­mat­ting too. This does not match your Word­Press theme’s fonts and col­ors which sim­ply looks odd. 

In this arti­cle, we’ll share how to eas­i­ly copy and paste into Word­Press with­out any unwant­ed for­mat­ting and styles. 

Understanding Copying and Pasting in WordPress

Copy­ing and past­ing means copy­ing text from one place to anoth­er with­out need­ing to type it all out again.

To copy text from a doc­u­ment or web­page, you need to high­light it using your mouse. Then, sim­ply right-click and select ‘Copy’ from the menu. Or, you can use the key­board short­cut Ctrl+C (Command+C on a Mac) to copy the high­light­ed text.

To paste text into Word­Press, you can right-click and select ‘Paste’ from the menu. Or, use the key­board short­cut Ctrl+V (Command+V on a Mac) to paste the copied text:

When you copy text, the for­mat­ting of the text is copied with it. The prob­lem is that some­times you will end up with for­mat­ting that you don’t want. 

This unwant­ed for­mat­ting can affect how your text dis­plays on oth­er devices.

Some Word­Press users choose to avoid copy­ing and past­ing alto­geth­er. Instead, they draft their posts straight into their Word­Press site.

How­ev­er, you may pre­fer to draft using a sep­a­rate tool, such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs. This lets you work offline and can make it eas­i­er to share your work for com­ments and revi­sions before publication.

It’s also impor­tant to avoid adding unnec­es­sary for­mat­ting because it impacts your page size which means slow­er site speed.

That’s why we have cre­at­ed this ulti­mate guide on how to prop­er­ly copy & paste text in Word­Press. You can use the links to jump straight to the sec­tions you need:

• Cop­ing and past­ing from Word to Word­Press using the block editor
• Copy­ing and past­ing from Google Docs to Word­Press using the block editor
• Cop­ing and past­ing using the clas­sic editor
• How to check and fix copy and paste for­mat­ting errors

How to Copy and Paste from Word to WordPress (Block Editor)

Copy­ing text from Microsoft Word­Press is quite straight forward. 

For years, Word­Press has allowed you to copy rich (for­mat­ted) text from Word doc­u­ments straight into the edi­tor. This is a big advan­tage if you like to write and for­mat your posts in Microsoft Word.

Copy­ing your post from Word into Word­Press lets you keep ele­ments like head­ings, bold and ital­ic text, links, and lists. It will dis­card any styling options like col­ors, spac­ing, etc. 

Here is a doc­u­ment that we’re going to copy from Word into WordPress:

This doc­u­ment is for­mat­ted with two Head­ing 2 sub­head­ings for sub­sec­tions of the post. There is bold and ital­ic text, a bul­let­ed list, and a link.

We will sim­ply copy all the con­tent from Word doc­u­ment and paste it inside the Word­Press block editor. 

Note that some for­mat­ting has not been copied over. The image has been left out, but Word­Press has cre­at­ed an image block in the cor­rect place.

Tip: Always use the ‘Head­ing styles’ in Word to cre­ate your sub­head­ings. Don’t high­light the text and increase the font size manually.

Want to con­firm that your text has copied over cor­rect­ly? Just fol­low our instruc­tions lat­er in this arti­cle on check­ing for and fix­ing for­mat­ting errors.

How to Copy and Paste from Google Docs to WordPress (Block Editor)

Google Docs is a very pop­u­lar word pro­cess­ing tool. Just like with Word, it’s easy to copy and paste from Google Docs into the Word­Press block edi­tor.

Here is our piece of text in Google Docs. It’s iden­ti­cal to the piece we used in Word, above.

When we copy and paste the text from Google Docs to Word­Press, again, Word­Press has for­mat­ted the text correctly. 

This time, the image has also been uploaded to Word­Press too.

Copying and Pasting Using the Classic Editor

Are you hav­ing trou­ble with for­mat­ting errors after copy­ing and past­ing text into Word­Press? Then you are like­ly using the old clas­sic edi­tor.

The clas­sic edi­tor han­dles Word doc­u­ments well and shouldn’t add any unnec­es­sary code. How­ev­er, it doesn’t do such a good job with the text copied from Google Docs.

Here’s how our text from Google Docs looks when past­ing it into the clas­sic editor:

The head­ings, link, bold, and ital­ic text all look correct. 

How­ev­er, some unnec­es­sary extra for­mat­ting has been added that isn’t visible.

How to Check and Fix Copy and Paste Formatting Errors

Let’s take a look at how to check for and fix for­mat­ting errors now.

All the text in your Word­Press posts is for­mat­ted using HTML (hyper­text markup lan­guage). HTML tags go around the words that are for­mat­ted in a par­tic­u­lar way.

For instance, bold text in Word­Press posts looks like this in HTML code:

There is <strong>bold text</strong> in this sentence.

The words ‘bold text’ will appear in bold.

To check for and fix for­mat­ting errors after copy­ing and past­ing, you need to check the HTML code for your post.

Check­ing the HTML Code in the Block Editor

In the block edi­tor, it’s easy to view the HTML code of any block. First, click on the block. Then, click the three ver­ti­cal dots to the right of the block’s menu. 

You will see a drop­down menu. Here, you just need to click the ‘Edit as HTML’ option:

You will now see the HTML code for the block. With the block edi­tor, you should nor­mal­ly find that no unwant­ed for­mat­ting has been added. 

Here, the para­graph cor­rect­ly begins with the open­ing <p> tag and ends with the clos­ing </p> tag. 

The sen­tence in bold is also cor­rect. It begins at the <strong> tag and ends with the clos­ing </strong> tag.

To switch back to the nor­mal view of your block, sim­ply click the three ver­ti­cal dots again. Then, go ahead and select the ‘Edit visu­al­ly’ option.

Check­ing the HTML Code in the Clas­sic Editor

In the clas­sic edi­tor, it’s easy to view the HTML code of a post by click­ing on the ‘Text’ tab at the top of the box con­tain­ing the text of the post. This is the HTML code for our post copied from Google Docs:

The span tags here are extra, unnec­es­sary code. 

Also, the bold text and ital­ic text are for­mat­ted using the <b> tag instead of <strong> and the <i> tag instead of <em>. It is gen­er­al­ly con­sid­ered best to use the <strong> and <em> tags as these give your words seman­tic mean­ing, not just visu­al styling.

By com­par­i­son, here is the code pro­duced when copy­ing from Word instead of Google Docs in the clas­sic edi­tor. There are no unnec­es­sary for­mat­ting tags and the bold and ital­ics have been cor­rect­ly rendered.

If you’ve copied your post from Google docs, you will need to go through the HTML code and man­u­al­ly cor­rect the for­mat­ting. In this case, that means:

• Remov­ing all the <span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span> tags.
• Chang­ing all the <li style="font-weight: 400;"> to just <li>.
• Chang­ing <b> and </b> to <strong> and </strong>.
• Chang­ing <i> and </i> to <em> and </em>.

To speed up the process, you first need to copy and paste the HTML code into a text editor. 

Then, sim­ply use Find and Replace to change incor­rect for­mat­ting. Here’s an exam­ple using notepad. We are find­ing all instances of <li style="font-weight: 400;"> and replac­ing them with <li>:

Once you’ve replaced all the incor­rect for­mat­ting, sim­ply copy and paste the text back into the Text view of the clas­sic editor.

Copying and Pasting Plain Text

Plain text is text with­out any for­mat­ting. To avoid any pos­si­bil­i­ty of incor­rect for­mat­ting, you may pre­fer to copy and paste plain text. 

This is also a very use­ful option if you’re copy­ing a sec­tion of text from anoth­er web­site. For instance, you might include a quote from some­one else in your content.

Copy­ing and Past­ing Plain Text in the Block Editor

The Word­Press block edi­tor doesn’t have a but­ton or option to paste plain text. How­ev­er, it’s easy to do this yourself.

The quick­est method is to use the key­board short­cut Ctrl+Shift+V (PC) or Command+Shift+V (Mac) to paste your text. This will auto­mat­i­cal­ly paste in plain text format.

Alter­na­tive­ly, some browsers offer the option to paste as plain text. If you’re using Google Chrome, sim­ply right click and select the ‘Paste as plain text’ option:

Both of these meth­ods will work to paste plain text in a sin­gle para­graph block. 

Copy­ing and Past­ing Plain Text in the Clas­sic Editor

To paste plain text into the clas­sic edi­tor, first click the Tool­bar Tog­gle button:

Now, you just need to click the ‘Paste as text’ icon. It looks like a clip­board with the let­ter T on it:

Any text that you paste will now be past­ed in plain text mode, with the for­mat­ting removed. Here’s how that looks when we paste the text from our Google doc. The head­ings, bold, ital­ics, bul­let points, and link have all been removed:

Pro Tip: Copy, Paste, and Clone Entire WordPress Sites

While the above beginner’s guide show you the basic of copy and past­ing, Word­Press also offers many advanced copy, paste, and cloning features.

For exam­ple, you can eas­i­ly clone an entire Word­Press site in 7 easy steps.

There’s also a way to cre­ate a dupli­cate Word­Press page or post with a sin­gle click. 

If you’re using the block edi­tor, then you can also cre­ate re-usable blocks that you can use across mul­ti­ple posts.

We hope this arti­cle helped you learn how to copy and paste into Word­Press. You might also like our tips on mas­ter­ing the Word­Press con­tent edi­tor, and our expert pick of the must have Word­Press plu­g­ins for all web­sites.

If you liked this arti­cle, then please sub­scribe to our YouTube Chan­nel for Word­Press video tuto­ri­als. You can also find us on Twit­ter and Face­book.

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