Elite CSS Beautifier
Clean, optimize, and organize your CSS with high-performance formatting
Make squashed CSS readable again
Minified stylesheets, code copied from a browser inspector and CSS written in a hurry often end up on one line or with random spacing. The beautifier breaks that code into one declaration per line, indents everything inside its braces and shows the tidy version next to your original so you can see what changed. It is useful any time you need to read or edit CSS that someone else, or a build tool, has compressed.
Beautifying step by step
- Paste your code into the CSS Code Input area. The Paste button pulls text from your clipboard, and Clear empties the box and hides the results.
- Choose an Indentation Size of 2, 4 or 8 spaces. Four is the starting value.
- Leave Syntax Validation ticked if you want a quick structure check, or untick it to skip that step.
- Click Process & Format CSS.
- Compare the Original (Input) and Formatted (Output) panes. A summary line under them shows the size in kilobytes, the number of rules and the number of lines.
- Use Copy, or Download to save the result as formatted.css.
What the formatter does
Each opening brace starts a new indented block, each closing brace returns to the previous level, declarations get their own lines and a space follows every colon. Comments are placed on their own lines. Nested blocks such as those inside @media queries receive deeper indentation.
Everyday uses
- Reading a minified production stylesheet while debugging a layout issue.
- Cleaning up CSS pasted from a tutorial, forum answer or design handoff.
- Making a diff easier to review by normalising the layout before comparing two versions.
- Teaching or learning CSS by turning cramped examples into structured code.
Limits to keep in mind
This is a simple text-based formatter, not a full parser. It adds a space after every colon, so check pseudo-classes such as a:hover and any URLs containing a colon in the output before using it. The validation is also basic: it checks for unbalanced curly braces and lines that look like they lack a semicolon, and reports them with line numbers. It does not verify that property names or values are legal.
Formatting changes only whitespace and line breaks, so it will not fix errors or alter what your styles do. If the validation flags a problem, correct it in the source and format again. The tool runs on the page in your browser, and there is a separate minifier if you later want to compress the result again.
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