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Why the Same Block Can Look Different on Two Pages

Field Note #105
🔬 Generalized 🟡 Intermediate ⏱ 30 Minutes ✓ Observation from Experience
You built one header. One template part, used site-wide. So why does it sit with extra breathing room on your homepage, but noticeably tighter everywhere else?
This is one of those bugs that looks like a CSS problem — padding is inconsistent, so surely there’s a stray rule somewhere overriding it — but the real cause usually has nothing to do with your stylesheet at all.

What’s actually happening
In WordPress’s block editor (Full Site Editing), a template part like your Header isn’t always as “shared” as it looks. If a specific page ever had that block edited while viewing that page — even something as small as nudging a spacing value — WordPress can quietly save that page its own local copy of the block, detached from the shared template part everyone else uses.
From that point on, you have two versions of the same header living in your site: the real shared one, and an orphaned copy that only that one page pulls from. Edit the real one all you want — that page won’t budge, because it’s not looking at it anymore.

How to tell the difference
Open the browser’s dev tools (right-click → Inspect) on the affected element on two different pages, and compare the actual computed values — not just how it looks, the literal CSS values in the Styles or Computed panel. If you see two different values for the same class — for example, one page using a –spacing–20 preset and another using –spacing–40 — that’s your signal. A shared template part can’t be “sometimes 20, sometimes 40” on its own; someone (or something) saved a page-specific override.

The fix
Go to Appearance → Editor → Templates (or Template Parts, depending on your theme) and open the actual shared Header.
Set the value you want there — this is your source of truth going forward.
Go to the page that’s still showing the old value. Select the block, open its toolbar’s ⋮ menu, and look for a “Reset” option — this snaps that page back to the shared template part instead of its own local copy.
If no reset option appears, you may need to delete and re-insert the block on that page so it re-links to the shared version.

How to avoid it next time
The trap is usually innocent: you’re on a page, you notice the header looks slightly off, and you nudge a spacing slider right there instead of going to the actual template part. WordPress happily saves that as a page-specific override without much fanfare.
The habit that prevents this: whenever you want to change something in a header, footer, or any other template part, go to it through Appearance → Editor → Templates/Template Parts directly — never edit it “in place” from a regular page, even if the editor lets you.

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