Inserting whitespaces is a major hassle in WordPress. I really love WordPress but this is one thing that really irritates me. There is no way you can insert whitespace in a post through the WordPress WYSIWYG editor.
But we just cannot do without whitespaces. Whitespaces are essential for properly formatting a post. Often you would want to have a little extra space between paragraphs or between a piece of text and an image. To manually insert whitespace in WordPress, you can use any one of the three codes given below in the HTML editor of a post.
<br/>
<p> </p>
<div> </div>
Repeat the codes in HTML editor to increase the whitespace. Alternatively you can also use the code below to give an adjustable blank space where needed.
<div style="height:20px;"> </div>
Change the “height” value to change the amount of whitespace used.
Source: WordPress Support and Forums.

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Will holding shift and pressing enter at the same time help? I believe that hotkey combination will put in a “br” tag while just pressing enter creates a “p” paragraph tag.
I’ve never really had a problem with this myself.
Victor´s last blog ..Day Trip to Boreal 2010
@Victor
No. “Shift+Enter” does not work. You are right about the hotkey combination but empty br and p tags get stripped out. Thats why you need to enter something between the tags like in this case we use “& nbsp;”. Hope that helped
Thanks for the helpful tips. I prefer the code:
so that I can specify the amount of space.
But, the code gets stripped if I change to visual mode. Any ideas on a code in which I can specify the space amount and that won’t get stripped?