CSS Beautifier
Format and beautify CSS code with proper indentation
CSS Beautifier
Format and beautify your CSS code with proper indentation and spacing
Formatting Options
Privacy: All CSS beautification happens in your browser. No data is sent to any server.
Your Privacy is Protected
All processing happens entirely in your browser. No data is stored, transmitted, or tracked. Your information remains completely private and secure on your device.
About CSS Beautifier
A CSS beautifier (also called a CSS formatter or CSS prettifier) is an essential tool for web developers and designers who work with Cascading Style Sheets. It transforms minified, compressed, or poorly formatted CSS code into clean, well-structured, human-readable format with proper indentation, spacing, and line breaks. When CSS is minified for production to reduce file size and improve load times, it becomes a single line of code that's impossible to read or edit. Similarly, when copying CSS from various sources or working with auto-generated stylesheets, the formatting is often inconsistent or messy. Our CSS beautifier instantly restructures your code according to standard formatting conventions, making it easy to understand, debug, and maintain. The tool adds consistent indentation (spaces or tabs), properly spaces selectors and properties, organizes declarations logically, and adds line breaks in appropriate places. This is invaluable for code reviews, debugging styling issues, learning from minified CSS, maintaining coding standards across teams, and preparing code for version control. Whether you're debugging a production stylesheet, cleaning up legacy code, or standardizing formatting across a project, a CSS beautifier saves time and improves code quality.
Key Features
Automatic Formatting
Instantly transform minified or messy CSS into clean, readable format with proper indentation and spacing. The tool intelligently identifies selectors, properties, and values, then applies consistent formatting rules throughout your stylesheet.
Customizable Indentation
Choose between spaces or tabs for indentation, and select your preferred indentation level (2 spaces, 4 spaces, or 1 tab). This ensures your beautified CSS matches your team's coding standards or personal preferences.
Selector Organization
Automatically organize selectors with proper line breaks and spacing. Each selector gets its own line for better readability, and nested rules are properly indented to show hierarchy and relationships.
Property Alignment
Align CSS properties within rule blocks consistently. Each property appears on its own line with consistent spacing between the property name, colon, and value, making it easy to scan and identify specific declarations.
Comment Preservation
Maintain your CSS comments while beautifying code. Comments are preserved in their original positions and properly formatted with appropriate spacing, ensuring documentation stays intact during the formatting process.
Batch Processing
Format multiple CSS files or large stylesheets in seconds. Whether you're beautifying a single rule or thousands of lines of minified CSS, the tool handles any size file efficiently without performance issues.
Vendor Prefix Handling
Properly format vendor-prefixed properties like -webkit-, -moz-, and -ms- declarations. The tool aligns them correctly, making it easy to see which prefixes are used and maintain consistent cross-browser support.
Copy or Download
Copy the beautified CSS to your clipboard with one click, or download it as a .css file. Perfect for quickly applying formatting without switching tools or manually saving files.
How to Use the CSS Beautifier
Paste CSS Code
Paste your minified, compressed, or messy CSS code into the input textarea. You can paste code from any source—minified production files, copied snippets, or poorly formatted stylesheets.
Select Formatting Preferences
Select your formatting preferences. Choose between spaces or tabs for indentation, and set your preferred indentation size (2 spaces, 4 spaces, or 1 tab per level).
Beautify Code
Click the 'Beautify CSS' button. The tool will instantly process your code and display the formatted result in the output panel with proper indentation.
Review Result
Review the beautified CSS in the output area. Check that the formatting matches your expectations and that all selectors and properties are properly organized.
Copy or Download
Copy the beautified code to your clipboard using the copy button, or download it as a .css file if you need to save it for later use.
Use Formatted CSS
Paste the formatted CSS into your code editor or stylesheet. The beautified code is now ready for editing, debugging, or version control.
Batch Process
For large projects, repeat the process for multiple stylesheets or use the batch processing feature to format all CSS files at once.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will beautifying CSS change how my styles work?
No, beautifying only changes the formatting and whitespace of your CSS—it doesn't alter the actual code, selectors, properties, or values. The resulting stylesheet produces exactly the same visual output as the original. Beautifying is purely cosmetic, adding indentation and line breaks to improve human readability without affecting browser interpretation.
Should I beautify CSS before or after minification?
You should maintain beautifully formatted CSS during development for readability and maintenance, then minify it only for production deployment. Keep your source CSS files formatted and readable, use version control for the beautified versions, and only minify when building for production. Never beautify minified code that's meant for production—keep a separate source version.
Can this tool fix CSS errors?
No, the CSS beautifier only formats code—it doesn't validate or fix syntax errors. If your CSS has errors like missing semicolons, unclosed brackets, or invalid properties, you'll need to fix those manually or use a CSS validator. However, beautifying can make errors easier to spot by properly organizing and indenting your code.
Does beautifying affect file size?
Yes, beautified CSS is larger than minified CSS because it includes indentation, line breaks, and spacing that make it human-readable. Beautified files are typically 30-50% larger. This is why you should keep beautified CSS for development and only serve minified CSS to end users. Use build tools to automatically minify during deployment.
What's the difference between beautify and minify?
Beautifying adds formatting (indentation, line breaks, spacing) to make code readable for humans. Minifying removes formatting, whitespace, and comments to reduce file size for faster loading. They're opposite operations: beautify for development and maintenance, minify for production deployment. You can toggle between both depending on your current needs.
Can I customize the beautifier settings?
Yes! Our beautifier offers customizable settings including indentation type (spaces vs tabs), indentation size, selector formatting rules, and property alignment options. You can configure it to match your team's style guide, personal preferences, or industry standards like Prettier or StandardJS configurations.
Will it preserve my CSS comments?
Yes, CSS beautifiers preserve comments while formatting code. Your documentation, notes, and section headers remain intact and are properly formatted along with the code. This ensures you don't lose important information when beautifying stylesheets, making it safe to use on well-documented codebases.
How is this different from a code editor's auto-format?
While many code editors have built-in CSS formatting, our online beautifier offers several advantages: no software installation required, consistent formatting across different editors, works on any device with a browser, provides specific CSS-focused formatting options, and can process code from any source without opening files. It's perfect for quick formatting tasks or when you don't have access to your usual editor.
Use Cases
- Debugging Minified Production Code: When investigating styling issues in production, you often need to read minified CSS files. Beautifying the code makes it possible to understand the structure, find specific rules, and identify problematic declarations. This is essential for hotfixes or troubleshooting live site issues.
- Code Review and Collaboration: Ensure consistent CSS formatting across your development team. Before code reviews, beautify all stylesheets to a standard format, making it easier for reviewers to focus on logic and structure rather than formatting inconsistencies. This improves review efficiency and code quality.
- Learning from Third-Party CSS: Study CSS frameworks, libraries, or templates by beautifying their minified code. Transform compressed stylesheets from Bootstrap, Tailwind CSS, or other frameworks into readable format to understand their implementation patterns, learn best practices, and adapt techniques to your projects.
- Version Control Preparation: Format CSS files before committing to Git or other version control systems. Consistent formatting makes diffs more meaningful, simplifies merge conflicts, and creates cleaner commit histories. This is especially important for teams following strict coding standards.
- Legacy Code Maintenance: Clean up old, poorly formatted CSS codebases. When inheriting legacy projects with inconsistent styling or no formatting standards, use the beautifier to establish a consistent baseline. This makes the code more maintainable and easier to refactor or update.