CSS Formatter and Beautifier Online
This free CSS formatter expands minified or cramped stylesheets into readable CSS with one declaration per line and consistent indentation. It is the quickest way to inspect a production stylesheet, tidy up copy-pasted snippets, or make third-party CSS reviewable before adapting it.
Formatting runs instantly in your browser as you type or paste — no upload, no waiting, and your styles stay on your machine.
How to use CSS Formatter
- Paste your CSS into the input box — minified production CSS works fine.
- The beautified stylesheet appears automatically, with each selector block expanded and each property on its own line.
- Copy the result with the copy button.
Minified vs formatted CSS
Production sites ship minified CSS — all comments and whitespace stripped — because smaller files download faster. That is great for users and terrible for humans reading the code. Formatting reverses the readability loss: rules are separated, declarations get their own lines, and nesting becomes visible, so you can actually find the selector you need to override.
.card{display:flex;gap:8px}.card h2{margin:0}
→
.card {
display: flex;
gap: 8px;
}
.card h2 {
margin: 0;
}Common use cases
Formatting minified CSS is most useful when you need to read or edit styles you did not write: a production stylesheet you are debugging in the browser, a snippet copied from another site, a component library's compiled output, or CSS pasted from the DevTools Styles panel. Expanding it to one declaration per line makes the selector you need to override easy to find and safe to edit.
Related terminology
- Rule / ruleset
- A selector plus its block of declarations, e.g. .card { display: flex; } — the unit this formatter lays out.
- Declaration
- A single property: value pair inside a rule, such as color: red; formatted output puts one per line.
- Selector
- The pattern before the braces that chooses which elements a rule applies to (classes, ids, elements, pseudo-classes).
- Minification
- Stripping whitespace and comments from CSS to shrink file size for production delivery — the inverse of beautifying.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I unminify CSS online?
- Paste the minified CSS into the input box and the expanded, indented version appears automatically — one property per line and each rule in its own block.
- Does formatting change how my styles behave?
- No. Only whitespace and line breaks are adjusted; selectors, properties, and values are preserved exactly.
- Can I use it on CSS copied from browser DevTools?
- Yes — that is a common use. Paste whatever the Styles panel or a style tag contains and the tool restructures it into readable rules.
- Does the formatter sort or lint my properties?
- No. It only reformats whitespace and layout — one declaration per line with consistent indentation. It does not reorder properties, merge rules, add vendor prefixes, or flag errors, so your CSS behaves exactly as before.
- Can it format SCSS or LESS?
- It is built for plain CSS. Simple SCSS or LESS often reformats acceptably, but preprocessor-specific syntax like nesting, mixins, and variables may not be handled correctly — compile to CSS first for reliable results.
- Is my CSS uploaded anywhere?
- No. The formatter runs entirely client-side in your browser.