Let’s get real here.
Copying and pasting content into WordPress is awful.
I mean, you’re probably not even the person doing it (because you’ve outsourced the work you don’t enjoy that even an intern wouldn’t find fulfilling, right?), but that person knows it sucks.
And you’re seeing their invoices coming through each month and wondering why publishing is costing you so much.
Well, here’s the thing, it doesn’t have to.
Luckily there’s a better solution that eliminates all of that messy code clean-up and individual file uploads from your publishing process.
In this article, we’ll look at two methods for uploading content to WordPress, the traditional copy and paste approach (no thanks), and the “I don’t have time for that” method, using Wordable.
Still copying content into WordPress?
You’re doing it wrong… say goodbye forever to:
- ❌ Cleaning HTML, removing span tags, line breaks, etc.
- ❌ Creating your Table of Contents anchor ID links for all headers by hand,
- ❌ Resizing & compressing images one-by-one before uploading back into your content,
- ❌ Optimizing images with descriptive file names & alt text attributes,
- ❌ Manually pasting target=“_blank” and/or “nofollow” attributes to every single link
Table of Contents
Publish Google Docs to your blog in 1-click 
- ✅ Export in seconds (not hours)
- ✅ Less VAs, interns, employees
- ✅ Save 6-100+ hours/week
What you Need to Know
Before we dive in, a quick primer:
This isn’t going to be one of those “Oh, this is good for this, and that is good for that,” ultra-diplomatic, afraid-to-have-an-opinion kind of vs. articles.
The truth is that when comparing these two methods, Wordable hands-down comes out on top for any serious content marketer (and if that’s the only answer you were looking for, feel free to not read on and just get your 5 free exports here).
Wordable automates all of the parts that suck about manually uploading content into WordPress. Stuff like:
- Ugly HTML code with excess span tags and other issues that slow down your site
- Manual image compression and uploading
- Removing weird line breaks that happen during the pasting process
If you’re still copying and pasting content into WordPress, you’re doing it wrong (sorry, not sorry).
Here’s why.
Wordable
Wordable makes life easy for anyone publishing content in WordPress. No more messy code, or manually compressing and uploading images — it’s all automated.
Thanks to our plugin, you can export documents from Google Docs directly into perfect WordPress posts in a single click.
Features
Here are just a few of the features you get access to with Wordable:
- Bulk export
- Export templates that save settings by site, category, or author
- Integrates with Medium and Hubspot, not just Wordable
- Custom slug URL
- Post categorization
- Image import and featured image generation
- Automatic imports for image titles and alt tags
- Image compression & resizing in bulk
Pros
As you might have guessed from just seeing the features, exporting with Wordable is a lot more convenient than copy and paste.
No need to fix formatting issues
When you upload content to WordPress manually, you’re going to see a whole lot of extra line breaks that make your content look weird.
There are no formatting issues to fix when you upload content with Wordable.
Publishers don’t actually want a bunch of extra line breaks in their content (duh, WordPress), so savvy content marketers use Wordable to export perfectly-formatted content directly into their CMS.
The best way to “fix” the unnecessary formatting issues is to avoid them in the first place, right?
All you have to do is click a few buttons, check a few options that control settings for link and image attributes, and it gets flawlessly imported into WordPress.
Another issue with copying and pasting content into WordPress is ending up with excess, messy code, and the only way to get rid of it is to go through and manually delete and fix up the HTML.
With Wordable, the exports don’t include any excess HTML tags, so you don’t need to fix issues that don’t exist.
Images are automatically compressed, cropped, and uploaded
Okay, so nobody wants to upload and place images one-by-one. But that’s what you have to do when you copy and paste the content into WordPress manually.
However, when you export a doc to WordPress with Wordable, all that stuff happens automatically.
Wordable automatically compresses and resizes images according to your export settings. The image quality will be retained, but you’ll save a bunch of space (read: your pages will load a lot quicker).
Here’s how it works:
In Wordable’s Export Settings, look for “Compress Images” under the Transformations options.
Then, you can choose from a few options. You can opt to compress images and resize images based on the dimensions in your Google document automatically.
For compression, you’ve got two options: Lossless and Lossy. Simply put, lossy compression saves the most space, but few images (mainly photos) may lose some quality. Lossless is kind of a happy medium. It compresses the file to take up less space but maintains the original quality.
Optimize link attributes and more automatically
It’s not just images that Wordable gives you control over in bulk — you can also do the same for links.
Want links to open in new tabs, or to set external links to nofollow for SEO reasons? It’s as easy as checking a few buttons.
Plus, you can even generate a working table of contents. Just choose which types of headings you want to include in the Wordable Table of Contents settings, and they’ll automatically be generated in functioning, clean HTML.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? Get your first 5 exports for free here and experience the difference for yourself.
Cons
The only real con that comes to mind is that Wordable isn’t free — our team plans start at $99 per month. But if you’re paying someone else to do it, you’ll easily make it back — and even more — some of our clients tell us they save over $5,000 per month with Wordable. Calculate how much you’ll save with our ROI calculator.
Copying and Pasting into WordPress
To be frank, copying and pasting content into WordPress sucks.
It just creates a bunch of unnecessary double work — like deleting line breaks and messy HTML code — making it super difficult (and expensive) to publish content at scale.
Pros
I mean, there aren’t really a lot of pros to doing this the old-fashioned way. It’s what you’re used to, sure, but you’ll quickly get accustomed to using Wordable, especially once you realize how much time you’re saving.
Cons
Unfortunately, the con list of copy and paste is a lot longer than the previous section:
Pesky formatting errors
The first problem you’ll encounter when copying and pasting content from Google Docs into WordPress is a bunch of extra spaces and line breaks throughout your content.
Here’s what that looks like in the WordPress editor.
Not cool, WordPress. That’s a lot of additional work for no additional benefit.
You’ve got a few options for fixing these formatting issues if you’re copying and pasting into WordPress, but to be honest, they’re really all workarounds.
The first is to go through and delete all the extra spaces. Tedious, mind-numbing, waste of time.
The second is to force your writers to use soft returns instead of hard returns, meaning instead of hitting enter or return each time they want to start a new paragraph (which is a lot in content writing, this is already the 18th in this article), they’ll have to hold down the shift key as well.
Good luck getting buy-in on that one.
The third is to use the Gutenberg editor and blocks, which makes things a little better, but it’s still not ideal, and you’ll still see some random spaces (just not as many).
Problems with transferring images
Okay, we’ve got a couple of things going on with images when copying and pasting into WordPress.
The first is that, well, images don’t come over.
When you copy from Google Docs and paste into WordPress, the images don’t come with the content, you just get the code that refers back to the image as hosted in Google Docs.
The second is that when you do get images into WordPress (more on that soon, but the gist is that you have to upload each one manually), they’re uploaded at full-size. That is, they don’t get automatically compressed or optimized in any way.
Okay, but don’t we want big HD images on our site?
You want your images to look clean, yes, but you don’t want the files to be unnecessarily big for no reason. Lossless image compression is a thing, and can sometimes reduce image sizes by up to 80% without reducing the image quality by even one pixel or color shade.
And here’s the thing:
The bigger your image sizes, the longer it takes your web page to load, and we “I want it all, and I want it right now” internet users don’t much like waiting around for web pages to load.
In fact, for each additional second of load time (between seconds 0-5), conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42%.
In short: your big old images are losing you money.
Resizing and cropping an image inside Google Docs doesn’t update the actual image file itself (we call this non-destructive editing, in case you care).
This means that even if you make adjustments to an image in Docs, the original is what will appear when you individually upload it to WordPress.
Again, the solution here is super time-consuming. You’re going to have to manually crop and resize all of your images, then use a special software package to compress them.
Oh, and once you’ve done all of that, it’s back to the WordPress editor to upload each image manually and individually (not to mention actually putting each image in the right place), and add stuff like image alt text (again, manually).
Messy, trashy code
The final pet peeve with copying and pasting content from WordPress is all that messy, trashy code that gets injected.
You’ll see a bunch of extra <span> tags and unnecessary HTML code from font stylings courtesy of Google Docs. This isn’t adding anything to your site, in fact, it’s just slowing things down.
If you’re manually copying and pasting content into WordPress, then you’re simply going to have to go through and delete all those extra <span> tags.
Yep, more tedious manual work.
Oh, and while you’re at it, you’ll need to manually paste “nofollow” or target=”_blank” (open in a new tab) tags to every link in your content. You can do that in the visual editor or edit the HTML directly, but you’ll be doing it manually either way.
And lastly, if you want to create a Table of Contents or add anchor ID links to your content to make navigation easy for your readers, you’ll have to do all of that by hand.
Yes, even if you had them set up in your Google document (they don’t come over automatically).
Wordable vs. Copying and Pasting into WordPress: Which is Better?
You might have gotten used to the process of copying and pasting by now, but don’t let the sunk cost fallacy stop you from making the right choice.
For reasons that we’ve already covered in-depth earlier in this post, Wordable is clearly the superior option… if you forgot what some of those reasons were, here’s a recap:
Wordable vs. Copying & Pasting into WordPress
Copying & pasting into WordPress | Wordable | |
Formatting | A bunch of random spaces and line breaks that need to be removed manually. | Clean formatting, just like you wrote in your Google Doc. |
Images | Images aren’t transferred automatically. You’ll need to manually resize and compress, and upload individually. | Images are automatically resized and compressed (based on your choice of settings), and transferred to WordPress. You can even import alt tags and titles directly from GDocs. |
Code | Messy, trashy code is added from Google Docs which needs to be removed manually. “nofollow” or target=”_blank” tags must be added manually, and anchor ID links and Table of Contents must be created by hand. | No trashy code hangovers, and automatic Table of Contents creation (based on parameters that you set). |
Bottom line
If it wasn’t clear already, Wordable saves marketers and publishers a ton of time, up to an hour each time you upload a piece, in fact.
For high-volume publishers, that can represent thousands of dollars a month in publishing costs down the drain.
With Wordable, you can easily create a saved template with all of your favorite settings, so content publishing literally boils down to a single button click.
Learn more about how Wordable will transform your content publishing processes here, or see for yourself with 5 free exports.
Related reading:
- 9 Content Marketing Tips to Stand Out in a Crowded Digital World
- How to Create a Mouthwatering Content Brief for Your Writers
- How to Create a Content Production Machine that Outpublishes Your Competition
- Pro Content Optimization Tips from Doing 300+ Articles per Month
- 5 Reasons You Need a Content Marketing Manager (+ How to Hire One)
