Do span tags hurt SEO while crawling?

[sidra_jaf]

No, span tags have no impact on SEO, just an inline element for making your text presentation good and stuff.

[FormalWolf5]

No, why would they

[EmployedHistory]

I’m noticing CLS issues tied to these kinds of elements in GTmetrix reports. Could be why OP is asking. Might be font files loading late or images being lazy loaded and causing a shift–worth checking out.

[g-om]

I’ll have a guess that you are referring to the span tag that you are pasting in from Google docs. They could in future interfere with changers to your WordPress styling so I’d suggest pasting your text from Google docs unformatted to avoid unnecessary span tags.

Generally it’s good practice to remove unnecessary code.

Does it impact your SEO. Probably not but I’d remove the Google Doc span tags none the less

[MetrixWebDev]

Those span tags don’t directly affect SEO (from my experience) but removing them will shave some small amount from your webpage’s size, which can play into your speed, which does affect SEO.