# How to clean HTML pasted from Word in PrestaShop descriptions > The visible text sometimes represents less than 10% of the description's actual weight. What the word processor injects, why mobile rendering breaks, and how to clean in bulk without losing the structure. - Page: - Language: en - Published: 2026-09-20 - Last updated: 2026-09-20 - Other languages: [fr](https://www.datafirefly.com/2026/09/20/nettoyer-html-descriptions-prestashop/index.md), [es](https://www.datafirefly.com/es/2026/09/20/limpiar-html-descripciones-prestashop/index.md), [de](https://www.datafirefly.com/de/2026/09/20/html-beschreibungen-bereinigen-prestashop/index.md), [it](https://www.datafirefly.com/it/2026/09/20/ripulire-html-descrizioni-prestashop/index.md), [pl](https://www.datafirefly.com/pl/2026/09/20/czyszczenie-html-opisow-prestashop/index.md), [nl](https://www.datafirefly.com/nl/2026/09/20/html-beschrijvingen-schoonmaken-prestashop/index.md), [pt](https://www.datafirefly.com/pt/2026/09/20/limpar-html-descricoes-prestashop/index.md) - Index: A product description pasted from a word processor looks clean in the editor and becomes a problem in the code. The visible text sometimes represents less than 10% of the description's actual weight, the rest being formatting markup you have no use for. ## What the word processor actually injects A copy-paste from a document brings in four families of junk code. **Inline styles.** Every paragraph, every fragment of a sentence gets a font, size, colour and line-height declaration. A ten-word sentence can carry three hundred characters of style attributes. **Proprietary tags.** Elements and attributes specific to the original software, which browsers ignore but which stay stored in the database and served on every display. **Conditional comments.** Blocks of code meant for old browsers, sometimes bulkier than the text itself. **Empty and nested tags.** Paragraphs containing nothing but a non-breaking space, formatting elements stacked five levels deep around a single word. ## The concrete consequences Three effects, in order of severity. **Page weight.** On a catalogue where each description weighs 30 kilobytes instead of 3, the product page loads more slowly, and that affects your performance metrics. **Broken mobile rendering.** This is the most visible problem for your customers. A font fixed at 11 points and a width in pixels produce unreadable text or horizontal overflow on a small screen. The theme cannot correct what an inline style imposes. **Visual inconsistency.** Five people pasting from five different documents produce five different typographies across your catalogue. The site looks cobbled together, and no theme change fixes it. A fourth, quieter effect: the content becomes hard to reuse. Exporting these descriptions to a product feed or a marketplace passes on the junk markup, which is often rejected or displayed as is. ## What to remove, and what to keep This is the question that decides whether a bulk clean-up is feasible. **Remove without hesitation:** inline style attributes, proprietary tags and attributes, comments, purely visual formatting tags, empty paragraphs, class attributes that do not exist in your theme. **Keep at all costs:** the semantic structure. Headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, links, bold and italic where they carry meaning. **Examine case by case:** tables, whose formatting may be necessary for readability, and images embedded in the description, whose fixed dimensions can break mobile rendering. The deciding rule: remove what describes appearance, keep what describes the nature of the content. A heading must stay a heading, not become a bold 16-point paragraph. ## Cleaning in bulk without breaking anything Three precautions, in this order. **Back up first.** A badly calibrated clean-up on three thousand descriptions cannot be recovered by hand. The database backup must be made and verified. **Test on a sample.** Take twenty representative products, including the most complex: those with tables, embedded images and long lists. Compare before and after visually, not only in the code. **Work in batches.** One category at a time rather than the whole catalogue. You limit the scale of a mistake and you can adjust the rules between two passes. A method point: also handle short descriptions, category descriptions and CMS pages. They suffer from the same problem and are often forgotten. ## Stopping the problem coming back A one-off clean-up is pointless if the same content returns with the next import. Three preventive measures. **Pasting without formatting.** Train your teams on the plain-text paste shortcut. It is the most effective and least expensive measure. **Filtering on input.** The back-office editor can be configured to clean pasted content automatically. That configuration exists and is rarely enabled. **Cleaning on import.** If your descriptions come from a supplier or a file, the processing must happen at import time, not afterwards. ## The case of supplier descriptions A frequent situation on reselling catalogues: descriptions arrive from a supplier file, with their own markup. Two problems come on top of the technical clean-up. The content is **identical across all resellers**, which does nothing to distinguish you in the eyes of search engines. And it sometimes contains **references to the supplier**, external links or warranty statements that do not match your terms. HTML cleaning fixes the form. The substance calls for a rewrite, at least on your main references. ## Checking the result Three checks after a clean-up. The **average weight of descriptions**, before and after. A reduction of 60 to 80% is common on a catalogue that has never been cleaned. The **mobile rendering** of a sample of pages, particularly those that contained tables. The **load time** of a typical product page, which should improve noticeably on the heaviest descriptions. The handles this work on PrestaShop 8 and 9: removal of word-processor code, inline styles and empty tags, batch processing with a preview before applying, and preservation of the semantic structure.