I get asked lots of questions about how to do things in the WordPress editor. Here are some answers to the most frequently asked questions.
Q: I cannot see all of the icons on the WordPress editor bar.
Click on the toggle toolbar icon as shown below.
Q: How do I add a single line break rather than a paragraph?
To add a new paragraph press the return key.
To add a single line space (know as a soft return) press down the shift key and then press return.
Q: How do I add a line break or a horizontal line?
- Put your cursor where you want the line to appear
- Click on the Horizontal Line icon as indicated below.
- Your line will be added to the page. You can adjust the space above and below if you wish.
Q: How do I add an arrow or a special character?
It’s nice to add an arrow after a link like this: My link »
- Put your cursor where you want the character to appear.
- Click on the Special Character icon in the WordPress toolbar as shown below.
- Select the character you wish to use and it will be inserted.
Q: How do change the paragraph text to a heading?
- Click on the formatting box as shown below and select the format you wish to use. NB. It is very important that you do not use Heading 1 in your body text. Google hates it if Heading 1 appears more than once in a page. You can use the others as often as you like but use them naturally, as you would if you created a word document.
Q: What Keyboard Shortcuts are available?
Click on the question mark icon in the WordPress editor toolbar.
That will bring up the complete list of available WordPress editor shortcuts.
How do I insert code snippets or iFrames?
NB. You can just paste in a link to a Video, Tweet, Facebook post etc. and WordPress with convert it to a nice looking embed. More on easy WordPress embeds.
However, sometimes you might prefer to copy some embed code from social media. That will generally be a script tag that looks like code.
1. Select the text tab at the top right of the WordPress editing box.
2. Identify the point at which you wish your embed to appear. This can be a little confusing in the text area but there is plenty of normal text to help you identify the space.
3. Turn down a line.
4. Paste your code and turn down another line to add some space around your embed.
You can see the code I pasted below. This is an embed script from Instagram.
Your embedded item might be empty, a blank box or generally not look quite right in the WordPress editor but head over to view the post in the live website to see if it is OK. You can see mine below but I will say again, if you just paste in the URL of the item you wish to display it will look correct in the WordPress editor and the live website.
This is just a snapshot of what you can do.
