Can You Copy and Paste Into WordPress?

Not in the straightforward sense that you’re probably thinking about. If you’ve ever tried to simply copy and paste text from a Microsoft Word document to a page within WordPress, you’ll have noticed that it never looks quite right when you publish it to your blog.

I’m not going to go into all the technical reasons why this doesn’t work, as if you’ve googled this, it’s likely you don’t want boring to death, you just want to fix the problem!

Get Your Content from Word to WordPress Without Dodgy Formatting

So, I’m going to walk you through exactly how I’m going to get this blog post onto my WordPress website once I’ve finished writing it. Here goes.

1. Add a new page (in this case a new blog post)
2. Pop your page title in the box at the top.
3. There are two tabs, one says ‘visual’ and the other says ‘text’. Click ‘text’.
4. Then, copy and paste your text from Word into the box.
   

   DON’T STOP THERE!

5. Now click the ‘visual’ tab. This will get you a better idea of what it’s going to look like.
6. Highlight any headings and click the drop down menu in the top left to turn them into heading tags (also called H tags). Use H2 and H3 tags throughout your page. This is good for SEO.
7. Make sure all your paragraph spacing and formatting is how you want it to look, whilst still in the ‘visual’ tab.  If you have numbered or bulleted lists, such as this one, make sure it’s formatted as such by using these options above the text field.  They’re next to the bold and italic options.
8. You’ll want to make sure you have a free plugin called “Yoast SEO” installed on your website. If you haven’t got it, just click ‘plugins’ on the left hand menu and do a search for it. You’ll be glad you did!
9. Right, now you’ve got your plugin, scroll down. You can run an SEO analysis on your page, and just follow the suggestions to make sure your page is fully optimised. Things like text length, subheadings, keyphrases, SEO titles and other things will all be mentioned here. It sounds a bit mind-boggling to beginners, but Yoast lets you click anything you don’t understand for more information. Don’t aim for perfection here, it’s sometimes a right pain to get it all right.
10. Your main aims here should be to set a relevant focus keyphrase, which can be explained as the word you’re talking about most on that page.
11. Then, click ‘edit snippet’. A box will appear called ‘meta description’. This is basically the text that appears about your page on Google. Make sure it’s relevant, and try and keep it to the right length. The bar will turn green when Yoast is happy with it.
12. Before you publish, take a look at the analyser’s results on the right hand column of the page. If Yoast says that readability and SEO are good or okay, you’re good to go.
13. Then, click preview, and take a look to make sure you’re happy with the appearance.
14. Now you can click publish. Job’s a good un!
15. Finally, share it all over social media. Ta-dah!

Get in touch

If you need any help with writing content for your website, contact me. Also, if you need help with designing your website, more complicated SEO issues or Google Adwords, speak to my husband, Billy Martin, web developer extraordinaire!  We really make quite the team, as he can design your website and I can fill it with amazing content.

Now I’m going to follow these instructions and pop this onto my website!