The site adds the space between paragraphs for you. Every paragraph you write is automatically given a consistent gap above it, so a page reads evenly whether it was written today or three years ago.
That means you should get vertical space by writing paragraphs — not by padding your content with blank lines.
The most common thing editors try is pressing Enter two or three times to push content further apart. It doesn’t work, and it’s worth knowing why: an empty paragraph has no text in it, so it collapses to nothing at all. The page looks exactly the same as if you hadn’t added it.
What you’re left with is invisible clutter — empty paragraphs sitting in the content, doing nothing, that show up later as odd behaviour when the page is restyled or the content is reused elsewhere.
Here’s what each option actually does to the gap between two paragraphs:
| What you do | What you get |
|---|---|
| Press Enter — a new paragraph | The standard gap. This is the house standard. |
| Press Enter again to add an empty paragraph | No change at all. It collapses away. |
| Shift+Enter twice inside one paragraph | Essentially the same as a normal paragraph break — so just use Enter. |
| A paragraph containing a single blank space character | About three times the normal gap. |
| Shift+Enter twice between paragraphs | About two and a half times the normal gap. |
Shift+Enter makes a line break — it starts a new line without starting a new paragraph. Use it only when the lines genuinely belong to one thought:
Don’t use it to create space between separate ideas. Those are paragraphs, and Enter is the right tool.
Sometimes a page genuinely needs more air between two blocks of content. Ask your developer for a spacing option rather than faking it with blank lines. Done properly it stays consistent everywhere on the site and survives future design changes — a hand-made gap doesn’t.
Pasted content often carries hidden formatting with it, including empty paragraphs you can’t see in the editor. Where you can, paste as plain text (Ctrl+Shift+V / ⌘+Shift+V) and then apply headings, bold and links inside the CMS. You’ll get cleaner content and far fewer spacing surprises.
In July 2026 we cleaned up the empty paragraphs that had built up across both sites over the years. You may still come across paragraphs that contain a single blank space — those were deliberately left alone, because unlike a truly empty paragraph they do create a real, visible gap, and in most cases someone added them on purpose. If you find one that looks wrong, remove it and use a proper paragraph break instead.