Whether you’re using a free or premium WordPress template to power your website or even if you’ve got a custom designed and coded WordPress template, sometimes you’ll find yourself in a situation where you want to do something a little unique, style-wise on a blog post – like center the blog post title instead of having it left aligned like it normally is – or maybe you can’t stand having the dates show on all your blog posts or you want to get rid of that weird block of HTML text below the LEAVE A COMMENT box.
The proper way to make changes to a WordPress theme
Typically, if you want to make modifications to any of the styles on your website, it involves changing your theme which in turn means setting up a child theme and functions and extra style sheets in order to preserve the integrity of the original theme. Themes get updated all the time, and if you alter the theme’s files on your own, there’s a very good chance when you go to update that theme, you’ll lose any changes you’ve made. (I’ve fixed more than a few sites for clients who have had this very thing happen to them).
But you’re an industrious WordPress site owner, and it’s just one small change you want, and a child theme is a bit confusing and most likely overkill for what you want to do. However, you don’t want to muck up your theme either.
Enter the Simple Custom CSS plugin
I found Simple Custom CSS a few weeks ago when helping someone at a WordPress meetup get rid of the unsightly block of Allowed Tags text in their blog post comments section. It was frustrating this person to no end (and seriously, WordPress should have a checkbox built in already to just turn this off, but alas, it’s not quite that easy yet).
The Simple Custom CSS plugin is super simple to install and use. Once you add it (PLUGINS / ADD NEW in your admin sidebar and then search for SIMPLE CUSTOM CSS) and activate it, it’s simply a matter of plugging in little bits of CSS that affect just the sections of your website you want to fix.
In this case, the fix for getting rid of the Allowed Tags block involved pasting the following into Simple Custom CSS editor (which you can get to under APPEARANCE / CUSTOM CSS in the sidebar – that was the hardest thing about this plugin I found – finding where the darn settings box was):
.form-allowed-tags {display: none;}
(Don’t forget to click the UPDATE CUSTOM CSS button to save your changes.) Simple, huh?!
Plugins may (or may not) be scary to you, but this one is lightweight (meaning it won’t slow down your website much, if any) and easy to use, and most importantly, it gets the job done. Two thumbs up from this developer.
