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Indentation isn’t common on the web, but it’s certainly possible.
In this post, you’ll learn both how to indent an entire paragraph, and how to indent only the first line of your paragraphs.
How to indent a paragraph
Login to your site and visit any post or page in the dashboard. In the editor, locate and press the Toolbar Toggle button.
Clicking the button exposes a new set of options for editing content in your posts and pages.
Next, place your cursor anywhere inside a paragraph you want to indent and press the Increase indent button. This will indent the entire paragraph to the right.
You can click the button multiple times to indent the paragraph further to the right. Contrarily, you can press the Decrease indent button to move it back to the left.
How to indent the first line of a paragraph
This method will create a more formal indentation at the beginning of each paragraph, like this:
There isn’t a button in the editor for indenting the first line only. Instead, we’ll need to use some CSS.
While this should work with most themes, it’s not guaranteed to work on your site.
The following CSS will target all paragraphs in your posts and use the text-indent CSS property to indent the text:
.post p {
text-indent: 36px;
}
You can increase the “36” value to indent the text further and reduce it to decrease the indent.
How do I use the CSS?
CSS is used to style web pages. The code above can be copied and pasted to change the format of your paragraphs.
If you’ve never added CSS to your site don’t worry, it’s quite easy. You can follow this short tutorial on how to add CSS to your site.
Text indentation review
The WordPress visual editor is quite feature-rich, but many of its tools are hidden. With the use of the toolbar toggle, you can uncover a new set of options such as the text-indent buttons.
While the CSS method for indenting text isn’t guaranteed to be compatible on your site, it should get you started towards your goal. If the CSS doesn’t work, try following this guide to find a new CSS selector to use.
Have any questions about text indentation in WordPress? Leave a comment below.
