Today I learned something that made me groan and nod at the same time: most CMS headaches come from one tiny habit: copying and pasting without thinking.
I can’t tell you how many times a client has submitted a panicked ticket saying their website is “completely jacked”…text misaligned, fonts jumping sizes, layout totally broken. Nine times out of ten, the culprit? A good old-fashioned copy/paste job from Word or Google Docs. Behind the scenes, it’s a mess of extra <div>s, inline styles, mystery classes, and funky character encoding that hijacks the site’s clean design. It looks harmless in the editor… until it isn’t.
Turns out, when you paste from Word, Google Docs, or other editors, you’re also smuggling in a suitcase full of garbage code: rogue tags, weird font sizes, and mystery classes that can absolutely wreck your beautifully styled site.
The fix? It’s not a plugin. It’s a keystroke.
I should probably be embarrassed for not knowing this, but after writing a detailed Jira ticket (complete with a well-researched and overly complex proposed solution) our resident knight in shining armor (Joe) swooped in, taught me something new, and saved the client a good chunk of money.
Just another day in the bunch….peeling back problems one layer at a time. 🍌
Want to paste just the text without the formatting chaos?
- Windows: Ctrl + Shift + V
- Mac: Command + Option + Shift + V
That’s it. Clean, lean, and ready for your CMS to handle it like a grown-up.
The more you know. 💫
BONUS TIP:
Articles ‘written’ by LLMs (chatGPT, etc.,) will also insert some additional junk you likely don’t want included in your posts. There’s a lot of buzz about how to spot AI written content…you can read my growing list here.
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