Question

I am building a CMS and I wonder if I can skip the usage of paragraphs and only go with linebreaks in the text content.

1. Is it a good or bad idea?
2. Will Google treat the content different in any way not using any paragraphs?
3. What about allowing “double linebreaks” or even more linebreaks?

Answer 1

It is a bad idea, for several reasons:

1. browsers will no longer be able to properly flow text in boxes, which is likely to result in a lot of linebreaks in places you are not expecting. This is likely to get worse if users change the fontsize in their browser.
2. Using one or more breaks to get the right amount of vertical spacing in a page is not a useful way to get consistent styling in your site. It is much simpler to use a bit of CSS to get the right spacing between paragraphs and other elements.