One page keeps going wrong every time I change it

Most pages behave. You ask for a change, the change happens, and nothing else moves. Then there is the one page that doesn't: you ask for a heading to move, and the spacing goes odd; you ask for that, and an image jumps. Three tries later it looks worse than when you started.

That page is almost always an inheritance from your old website.

Where the mess comes from

Older sites — especially ones built on a page-builder with a stack of plugins — rarely produce simple pages. Each plugin wraps your content in its own containers, and those containers wrap each other, so a single paragraph can sit ten layers deep inside boxes that do nothing. Styling gets glued onto individual elements rather than described once for the whole site, and every element carries class names generated by a tool that is no longer running.

When your site moved to bernard, your words and pictures came with you — and so did all of that scaffolding. It is invisible on the page and completely visible underneath, and it is the reason one page resists what every other page accepts. Ask for the heading to move and there are four possible headings it might mean; nudge the spacing and it is being set in three places at once, two of which contradict each other.

None of this is your fault, and it isn't a fault in your writing. It's leftover machinery.

The move that works: start the page again

Rather than making a fourth repair, take a page on your site that behaves — often the simplest one — and rebuild the difficult page on the same bones. Your words and pictures move across; the scaffolding does not. The prompt above asks for exactly that, and asks for a list of anything that couldn't be placed, so nothing disappears quietly.

Two things to expect. First, the rebuilt page won't be pixel-for-pixel identical to the old one — if it were, the old mess would still be in there. What you should get is a page that matches the rest of your site and behaves the next time you edit it. Second, it arrives as a draft with a preview: compare it with the live page, and approve it only if you prefer it. Nothing goes live on its own — see Make changes safely.

If no page on your site is clean

Sometimes the whole site came over the same way and there is no good page to copy. Then the job is to make one: pick the page that matters most — usually the one visitors land on — and have it rebuilt properly first, from scratch rather than from a neighbour. That page becomes the model, and every other page can follow it afterwards. It's slower to start and much faster after that, because each rebuilt page makes the next one easier.

Knowing when it's worth it

A page that has taken two or three failed attempts is telling you something. So is a page that is enormous compared with the others, or one where changes seem to work and then look wrong on a phone. If a page has cost you more arguments than it's worth, it is a rebuild candidate — and it usually only needs doing once.