line break not working

Can you please post a link to the page or post where you inserted the <br /> tag? You’re not trying to insert it into the site title or page title, are you, because HTML code usually gets stripped out of those elements.

OK, so I see that you inserted page breaks in first post but it’s not showing up on the blog page. That is the default behavior of WordPress. That is, the the_excerpt() function strips out all shortcodes and HTML tags, so you will not see any formatting, like bold, italics, underline, or page breaks in post excerpts.

There are a few things you can try:

1. Use the <!--more--> tag. That is, in your post, insert the <!--more--> tag where you want the excerpt to end. Oftentimes excerpts created using the <!--more--> tag will retain any formatting.One advantage to using the <!--more--> tag is that you have full control as to how much text to display in the post excerpt.
2. You can also try creating a manual excerpt. In the post editor, you should see a field labeled Excerpt. If you do not, then click the Screen Options tab in the upper right corner of the screen and check the box labeled Excerpt and that field should appear. Then copy & paste however much of the post you want to appear into that field. The manual excerpt field should retain any formatting.
3. Use a plugin like Advanced Excerpt.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 5 months ago by CrouchingBruin.

I don’t know about “proper html” or using css for this but I just used a simple <p> </p> and it appears to work for me.

Hi, @cchartman1, thanks for your reply, but as I noted above, the default behavior for WordPress is to strip out all HTML tags when displaying excerpts, so the paragraph tags would get stripped out as well. Not sure if the non-breaking space would get stripped out too, but without the paragraph tags, there probably won’t be a line break.