First, you can install the TinyMCE Advanced plugin for WordPress. After this is installed, go into the TinyMCE Advanced settings and enable the option – “Stop removing the <p> and <br /> tags when saving and show them in the HTML editor”. And then you can add all the <br /> tags you want.

The second solution, which I like better is to use <br clear=”none” /> in your posts. This will work without any plugins. Now, a couple of things worth mentioning. If you put this tag on it’s own line in your post, WordPress will put <br clear=”none” /> and <br /> inside of a <p>, thus making it two line breaks. But if you use it on the same line as another sentence, it will only add one line break. Either way, you can control the formatting of the line breaks with CSS using something like this…

br[clear="none"] {
  margin: 5px 0;
}

.entry br {
  margin: 2px 0;
}

I hope this was helpful. Also, if you want to learn how to stop WordPress from automatically adding <p> and <br /> to your post, read my other post: How to control WordPress HTML formatting.

Just the other day, I uploaded some panoramas to my site. I made each panorama a page in WordPress with a custom theme. The problem was that WordPress was adding all these extra <p> and <br> tags to my HTML, which was throwing off my CSS.

To control WordPress HTML/text formatting, I found this plugin, called Text Control, which you can download here. This plugins will let you control the formatting and encoding for individual posts and comments. But I needed control over individual pages in WordPress, so I found this version of Text Control by _ck_, that will do exactly that. You can download it here.

After you have one of these plugins installed you will have total control of how WordPress formats your posts, pages and comments. You can control these settings globally by going to the Admin, then going to Settings>Text Control. You can also control these settings for each individual posts and pages as seen below.

You can read this article if you want to learn more about how WordPress formats your content and how wpautop() and wptexturize() works.