Free text tools — updated for 2025 | All Text Tools
Text Tools› CSS Formatter

CSS Formatter & Beautifier

Beautify messy CSS with consistent indentation, minify it to the smallest possible size, or validate for syntax errors — all in your browser.

CSS Formatter & Beautifier

CSS formatting tips

  • One property per line — Makes diffs readable in Git. "Minified in source, one-liner" is an anti-pattern that makes code review painful.
  • Sort properties alphabetically — Reduces merge conflicts when multiple developers add properties to the same rule. Popular in large teams.
  • Minify for production — CSS minification typically reduces file size by 20–40%. Combined with gzip compression, this can be very significant for large stylesheets.
  • Check your braces — A single missing } can silently break an entire stylesheet. Use the Validate option before deployment.

Frequently Asked Questions

Rarely, if the original CSS is valid. The minifier removes comments, collapses whitespace, and removes optional semicolons before closing braces. It does NOT remove vendor prefixes, shorten color values, or merge duplicate properties — those are optimisations that require understanding CSS semantics and carry more risk. The result is functionally identical to the original. One edge case: if you have calc( 100% - 2rem ), the spaces around operators inside calc() are required — this minifier preserves them.
It depends on your team preference. Alphabetical ordering reduces merge conflicts and makes it easier to scan for a specific property. The alternative is grouping by type (position/layout → box model → typography → visual). Both are valid — the most important thing is consistency. Some linters (Stylelint with order plugin) enforce either style automatically.
Minification removes whitespace and comments from your existing CSS — all rules remain. Purging (also called tree-shaking, used by tools like PurgeCSS or Tailwind CSS) removes CSS rules that are never referenced by your HTML — it can remove 90%+ of a large framework like Bootstrap. Purging requires analysing your HTML/JS to know which selectors are used, so it can't be done in a browser-only tool. For frameworks like Tailwind, purging is essential and built into the build process.