50+ Most Useful WordPress Keyboard Shortcuts
If you know your way around WordPress, you have probably realized that formatting the textual portions of your website – especially posts – can take up a great deal of time, especially if you are using your mouse and the formatting buttons in the editor. Fortunately, WordPress allows for various ways of saving time using WordPress keyboard shortcuts. And while text formatting is certainly one of the most common uses of keyboard shortcuts in WordPress, it’s not the only one, as you’ll see.
In this article, we will show you some of the shortcuts we find the most useful, both for PC and Mac users. This is what we will be discussing:
Firstly, text formatting works much the same in WordPress as in other text editors. If you are a PC user, the commands you are probably familiar with are Ctrl + X, Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V for cut, copy and paste, Ctrl + B for bold, Ctrl + I for italic, and Ctrl + U for underlined text.
The ones you may not be quite as familiar with are Ctrl + K to introduce a hyperlink to selected text, and Ctrl + Shift + K to remove it.
For a Mac user, these are, of course, different.
Command + x, c, and v for cut, copy and paste, Command + b, i and u for bold, italic and underline, and Command + k to introduce a link.
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To easily select all the text, you can use Ctrl + A. If you are using the Gutenberg block editor, this will select all the text in the block you’re working on. Pressing it again will select all the blocks. To deselect anything, simply press escape.
If you are a Mac user, use Command + a to select all and Esc to clear selection.
To move the cursor to the beginning of the previous or subsequent word, use Ctrl + arrow. Left (←) arrow will move your cursor to the beginning of the current (or, if it is already there, previous word), while right (→) arrow will do the same for subsequent words.
For Mac users, the command is Command + arrow.
You can also select any text using Ctrl + Shift + arrow. Left (←) and right (→) arrows will select anything up to the next word in either direction, while up (↑) and down (↓) will select anything up to the next or subsequent paragraph. Home will bring your cursor to the beginning of the current row, while End will bring it to the end.
On a Mac, use Command + Shift + arrow instead to select anything from the cursor to the beginning or the end of the row, or from the cursor to the beginning or the end of the document, while Home and End key functions remain the same.
If you are using the Gutenberg block editor, you might find these block-specific shortcuts especially useful.
To add a new block, simply press Enter. To change the block type immediately after starting a new block, press the slash key: /. To duplicate a selected block, use Shift + Alt + D. To add a block before the one you are currently editing, the shortcut you need is Ctrl + Alt + T, and to add a new block after the one you are currently editing, press Ctrl + Alt + Y. Finally, you can delete a selection (a block or multiple blocks) using del or backspace.
If you are using a Mac, these shortcuts are slightly different: Enter and / still add new blocks and change their type, Command + Shift + D duplicates a selected block, while Command + Option + T and Command + Y introduce new blocks before and after the selected one, while Control + Option + Z removes the selected blocks.
There are also several shortcuts used for content management in WordPress. The important thing about this group of shortcuts is that they have to be specifically activated for the user to be able to use them to moderate content. You can do this by navigating to any user profile through your left-hand side menu and ticking the appropriate checkbox.
When logged in, the user will be able to use these shortcuts when moderating comments.
To navigate between comments, use the J and K keys to cycle between comments. J will move the selection one comment up, and K down.
Once a comment is selected, you can use A to approve the selected comment, S to mark it as spam, D to delete the comment, U to unapprove it, R to reply to the selected comment or E to edit it.
You can also perform bulk actions on comments. Press X to tick the checkbox on any comment. Once you are satisfied with your selection, use Shift + A to approve selected comments, Shift + S to mark them as spam, Shift + D to delete them, and Shift + U to unapprove them.
Once you have made a selection, you can press Shift + X to toggle your selection – uncheck those comments which are checked, and check those left unchecked.
To find your way around your editor more easily, you might want to introduce some of these shortcuts into your repertoire: to navigate between parts of the editor, use Shift + Alt + N and Shift + Alt + P to move forward and back between parts of the editor and Ctrl + Shift + Alt + M to switch between Visual and Code editor modes.
For Mac users, these are Option + Control + N and Option + Control + P to navigate forward and back and Command + Option + Shift +M to switch between Visual and Code editor modes.
Finally, if you need a quick overview of all the available shortcuts, you can see it using the shortcut shortcut: Alt + Shift + H for PC and Option + Control + H for Mac. If you are in your post or page editor, this will cause all the shortcuts to appear in a popup window.
And there you go! We are confident these shortcuts will cut down significantly on your post formatting time. You can trust us: after all, we use them every day!
