New User – Why are there no paragraph breaks in my posts?

It still doesn’t work – visual editor shows returns but they don’t appear live. And it changed the text, this is what it looks like in the editor:

Experimenting with the visual editor.

This post has no html tags.

Testing paragraphs one more time.

Hm, in the visual editor, in between “This post has no html tags” and “Testing paragraphs…” it says ” ” I tried to paste it above but it doesn’t show up.

Why do the letters “n…b…s…p” not show on this page when I paste them? Anyway, those letters are in between two sentences in my editor and I did not put them there.

Okay, let’s go back to basics to see if there is a problem on your WP installation – first, clear and deactivate your caching plugin – you shouldn’t have that active when you are working on a site.

Next, deactivate all plugins.

Next, switch to a more current theme just to test things – twentyfifteen would be good.

Now see if the visual editor behaves.

I’m not sure what the cache is but I found a plugin called WP Super Cache, figured out how to delete the cache, and then deactivated the plugin. (Why was it on by default if I shouldn’t have it active?)

Did everything you said and tried two posts. Both put the paragraphs in where they should be. Next steps? I don’t like this theme so hoping that’s not the problem.

Sorry, forgot to mention that I switched to the 2015 theme…

Okay, so that’s good that it’s all working on a plain installation. I’m guessing that one of your plugins was causing problems. I’d suggest activating them one by one to see if any starts causing that problem again.

Ok, I will also take your advice and switch to a more responsive theme, even if I have to start all over customizing it. I do want something mobile compatible. Thanks again for your help.

I’ve spent a considerable amount of time on this and still the problem persists. I found a new, responsive theme, got everything set up all over again and once again there are no paragraphs in my posts. A Google search shows that many people have had this problem going back at least 7 or 8 years.

Some people suggest adding the following to the CSS file:
p {
margin-bottom: 1em;
}

I (eventually) figured out how to do that since no one provided instructions, but it didn’t work for me. Any other thoughts here? I really have a hard time believing none of these themes were designed to handle paragraphs. I’ve also tried turning on/off all plugins again and that didn’t work.

Please post a link to a page that shows this problem

https://designsage.net/

Ah, so those are excerpts and they don’t show any formatting – by design.

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Function_Reference/the_excerpt

If you click on Read More – which goes to a different template, the formatting will show up there,

If you want formatting to show up in your excerpts, you can either use a plugin or modify the theme (needs to be done via a child theme).

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/advanced-excerpt/

Ok, I see that there is a space underneath the Classic Editor to type in an excerpt, but that’s not where I’m typing out the post. Shouldn’t I have to type something IN the excerpt box for that to happen?

Incidentally, the same thing is happening on my About Me page. I can understand why using the excerpt makes sense to shorten posts in small boxes on the main page, but really don’t want this to happen in the About Me page.

Many themes use excerpts on the home page by default – I’m guessing yours does. Try the plugin I linked to if you want to modify that.

I just installed this theme on a test site and paragraphs work fine on static pages using a return (no tags needed) in the Visual editor. Is that what you are doing?

Nope, just set up Another Test Page and paragraphs did not show when I hit return, just like the About Me page.