Format CSS Online — Free CSS Formatter & Beautifier 2026
Welcome to Code Formatter CSS Formatter ? the essential developer tool for organizing, beautifying, and standardizing Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Whether you're debugging a minified third-party stylesheet, cleaning up a legacy project's CSS, or simply ensuring your team's code follows a consistent style, our tool delivers professional-grade formatting instantly.
In the world of web development, CSS files can quickly become "spaghetti code" with inconsistent indentation, mixed coding styles, and single-line blocks that are impossible to read. Our CSS Beautifier parses your stylesheets and re-writes them with clean, standard formatting?resolving nesting issues, adding missing semicolons, and ensuring every rule is easy to read and maintain.
How to Use Our CSS Formatter
Clean up your stylesheets in three simple steps:
- Paste CSS: Copy your messy or minified CSS code and paste it into the "Input CSS" editor on the left.
- Click Format: Press the "FORMAT" button in the footer. We use the powerful Prettier engine to intelligently reorganize your code.
- Get Results: The formatted CSS appears instantly in the right pane, ready for you to copy or download as a `.css` file.
Key Features of Our CSS Tool
We've designed this tool to be fast, accurate, and secure:
- Prettier Integration: We utilize Prettier, the gold standard for code formatting, to ensure your CSS follows modern industry conventions (like 2-space indentation).
- Syntax Correction: Helps identifying syntax errors. If your CSS is invalid (e.g., missing a closing brace `}`), the formatter will alert you, helping you debug issues faster.
- Privacy First: Your styles are processed 100% in your browser. No CSS code is ever uploaded to our servers.
- Format Minified CSS: Easily expand minified CSS files (like `bootstrap.min.css`) back into a readable multiline format to inspect the rules.
- Support for SCSS/LESS: While primarily for standard CSS, our parser also handles basic SCSS/LESS syntax gracefully.
Why You Should Format CSS
Properly formatted CSS isn't just about looks?it's about productivity:
Improved Readability
When every selector and declaration is on its own line with proper indentation, you can scan the file much faster. You can instantly see where a media query `@media` starts and ends.
Easier Maintenance
Finding a specific class in a 5,000-character single line is a nightmare. Formatted code allows you to use `Ctrl+F` effectively and understand the context of the rules you are changing.
Consistent Team Style
Code reviews are smoother when everyone follows the same style. Using an automated formatter eliminates subjective arguments about whether to put the opening brace `{` on a new line or the same line.
Debugging Layouts
When rules are clearly separated, it's easier to spot conflicting styles or specificity issues that might be breaking your page layout.
Common CSS Formatting Standards
Our tool adheres to the most widely accepted conventions:
- Indentation: 2 spaces per indentation level.
- Braces: Opening brace on the same line as the selector, closing brace on its own line.
- Spacing: A single space before the opening brace `{` and after the colon `:` in declarations.
- Quotes: Consistent use of double quotes `"` or single quotes `'`.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes! Since SCSS is a superset of CSS, our formatter (powered by Prettier) generally handles SCSS syntax (like nested rules and variables) very well.
No. Formatting changes the visual appearance of the code, not the logic. It won't change the order of your rules or fix how the browser prioritizes conflicting styles.
No. We preserve the order of properties as you wrote them (e.g., `width` before `height`). Some developers prefer semantic grouping (positioning, box model, typography) over alphabetical sorting.
Absolutely. Because the code never leaves your browser, you can safely format proprietary, paid, or private CSS files without leaking intellectual property.
Yes, you don't need a full file. You can paste just a single block like `.my-class { ... }` to clean it up before pasting it back into your editor.
The formatter preserves existing vendor prefixes (like `-webkit-` or `-moz-`). It does not automatically add or remove them (you'd need an Autoprefixer tool for that).
Yes. After formatting, click the download icon to save the clean code as a standard `.css` file to your computer.
Formatting adds "whitespace" (spaces, tabs, newlines) to make code readable. This naturally increases file size. For production, you should use our CSS Minifier to reverse this.
Code Formatter ? 2026. Professional developer tools built with privacy and performance in mind.