Special Characters WordPress Formatting Issue

Recently, I logged into one of my wordpress sites on a mobile and found that all of the images were huge. So I hit some google-fu and searched for the issue and most of the responses I got suggested to try clearing the cache. So I followed the advice found, but still the issue persisted. – Huge images on the front page, when using mobile browser, but curiously not on any other pages. The theme used was based off 2024 default with a 3 collumn blog preview. Delving deeper I noticed that the text from one of the blog posts was also going wide across the page. I moved the impacted blog post to draft and this immediately resolved the issue. Now I could take time to investigate deeper. Next I copied the blog text into visual studio code and found a great many special characters. So finally this could be the cause. Sure enough, removing all of the special characters and then pasting the text back into the blog and reposting and the issue was resolved.

So next time you notice some strange formatting issue on your wordpress site, be sure to check for special / hidden characters on the impacted area! Hope this helps someone else out!