CSS Beautifier & Formatter

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is the language used to style and lay out web pages. Clean, well-formatted CSS is essential for maintainable projects, especially when you are working in a team or maintaining a large stylesheet that has grown organically over time.

A CSS beautifier, or formatter, automatically applies consistent indentation, organizes properties, and restructures your code so it is easier to read. This tool works entirely in the browser: paste CSS into the input, choose your options, and the formatted result appears in the output area immediately.

The formatter supports three indentation styles — two spaces, four spaces, or a tab — and an optional alphabetical sort that reorders the properties inside each rule. It also includes a minify mode, which removes whitespace and newlines and strips the spaces around { } : ; , > + ~ to produce a compact single-line result.

As you work, the tool shows the character and line count for both the input and the output, and it displays an error banner if it cannot parse the CSS. Everything runs locally in your browser, so you can process even sensitive stylesheets without sending them anywhere.

Key Concepts

• Beautify / format — apply consistent indentation and spacing so the CSS is easy to read.
• Minify — remove whitespace and newlines to shrink the stylesheet for production.
• Indentation — choose between 2 spaces, 4 spaces, or a tab character.
• Property sorting — optionally order declarations alphabetically within each rule.
• Statistics — live character and line counts for both input and output.
• Error handling — a banner explains any parsing problem instead of failing silently.

1. Paste your CSS — Copy and paste any CSS code into the top textarea, type directly, or use the Example link to load sample CSS.
2. Choose your options — Select an indentation style (2 spaces, 4 spaces, or Tab) and whether properties should be sorted alphabetically.
3. Format or minify — Click Format CSS to beautify with proper indentation, or Minify to compress the code into a compact single-line form.
4. Check the statistics — Read the character and line counts shown for the input and the output to confirm the change.
5. Copy or download — Use the copy button on the output area or click Download .css to save the result as formatted.css.

If the input cannot be parsed, a red error banner appears above the output and describes the problem, so you can fix it without losing your work.

Formatting CSS comes up in a wide range of everyday tasks. These are some of the situations where this tool is most useful.

1. Cleaning up copied code — reformat minified CSS you copied from a library or website into something readable.
2. Preparing code reviews — format a stylesheet before submitting it so reviewers can focus on logic, not layout.
3. Reducing file size — minify a stylesheet before deployment to shave off unnecessary bytes.
4. Standardising a team — apply the same indentation and property order across everyone's contributions.
5. Debugging stylesheets — expand a compressed rule to read and fix it more easily.
6. Pasting into documentation — produce tidy, consistently indented snippets for guides and posts.