I had some similar problems with steempress recently... what I end up doing is going into steempeak, drafting my post and then copy it (not from the editor but from the preview on the right side) and then paste it into my wordpress editor. It seems to work much better that way! And then I turn off the steempress setting to sync edits with steem so I can make tweaks on either end as needed. If you do that, just remind yourself not to publish in steempeak, like I did once and then missed out on a post being in the blog also :P