Every wonder why your WordPress site just goes wonky?

I launched a site recently and it looked great.  I spent hours just making everything perfect down to the last pixel.  I kept coming back and tweaking that last little thing to make it just right.

Then I got an email.

My site looks weird today, I’m not sure what happened.

I quickly pulled up the site and it was completely wonky!  The sidebar was missing and some items from the sidebar were populating in the content area and in the wrong size and orientation . . . it was just wrong.

It looked horrible!

Did my customer change some setting somewhere?  Maybe it’s a plugin conflict, but why today and not yesterday?  Was there an update I was not aware of?  I began to go down the logical list, deactivate all the plugins one at a time.  No, not a plugin issue.  Reinstall the theme.  No, it was still wonky.

So what has changed from yesterday?

A new post.

A lot of you are likely highly organized with a great workflow.  You use Word or some other word processing software to prepare your posts as you develop them.   It just makes sense, right?  Prepare your content and then copy and paste into your site.  It’s smart.  I agree.  If you have a workflow like that, great!

What you might not realize is that your word processing software may not be compatible with your post editor.  When you copy and paste a document from Word or another word processing software, it may carry over some excess baggage.

How do you fix it?

It’s simple really.  Copy your content however you choose, whether it be keyboard shortcuts or not, but don’t just paste it into your post editor.  Use the paste as text icon to paste it into your post editor.

This will remove any conflicting code that is just excess baggage and save you a huge headache trying to figure out what happened to your beautifully coded website!

I hope this saves you time (and a few gray hairs) friends!

xo,

S