CSS Beautifier

About this tool

Minified CSS is essential for production performance, but it becomes unreadable the moment you need to debug a layout issue, understand someone else's stylesheet, or audit the styles injected by a third-party widget. CSS Beautifier takes minified, concatenated, or poorly formatted CSS and, when you click Beautify, rewrites it with each selector and at-rule opening a brace on its own line, each declaration on its own indented line, and each closing brace on its own line. Choose 2, 4 or 8 spaces of indentation and whether to keep comments. Declarations are kept exactly as written (for example margin:0 stays margin:0), and a missing final semicolon is not added. Nested blocks such as @media and @keyframes are indented by level. If the input has an unclosed comment or unbalanced braces, the tool shows an error instead of output. A Minify button does the reverse, collapsing whitespace and removing comments.

Why use it

• Instant Readability Restoration: Transforms a single-line minified stylesheet into indented, human-readable CSS with one click and no install step.

• Nested Blocks Indented by Level: Media queries, @keyframes, @font-face, @layer and other brace-delimited blocks are indented one level per nesting depth, so you can see which rules sit inside which at-rule.

• Configurable Indentation: Choose 2, 4, or 8 spaces to match your team's existing style guide and avoid mixed-whitespace diffs on check-in.

• Property-Per-Line Formatting: Places every CSS declaration on its own line so git diff, code review, and search operations work at the property granularity level.

• Useful for Third-Party Audits: Read and audit minified CSS injected by analytics scripts, chat widgets, or CMS plugins by beautifying it first to understand what styles are applied.

• Fully Private In-Browser: Your stylesheet content never leaves your browser — ideal when working with proprietary or unreleased design system code.

How to use

1. Paste your minified or unformatted CSS into the CSS Input area.
2. Choose an Indent Size of 2, 4 or 8 spaces (4 is the default).
3. Leave Preserve comments ticked to keep /* ... */ comments, or untick it to strip them.
4. Click Beautify to format the CSS, or Minify to compress it into one line.
5. Click Copy to copy the result, then paste it into your stylesheet, editor, or documentation.

When it helps

• When debugging a layout bug in minified production CSS that you cannot read in its compressed form.
• When auditing a third-party CSS file (from a CDN, npm package, or plugin) to understand what styles it applies before including it in your project.
• When onboarding onto a legacy codebase where stylesheets were never formatted and existing code is difficult to navigate.
• When extracting and reading computed styles copied from browser DevTools, which concatenate rules into a compact format.
• When preparing a minified CSS file for a code review or pull request so reviewers can understand the changes at the property level.
• When copying styles from a design tool export (Figma, Webflow, or similar) that produces compact single-block output you need to edit manually.

Examples

body{margin:0;padding:0;font-family:sans-serif;background:#0d0d0d;color:#e4e4e4}.btn{display:inline-flex;align-items:center;padding:8px 16px;border-radius:8px}

body {
  margin:0;
  padding:0;
  font-family:sans-serif;
  background:#0d0d0d;
  color:#e4e4e4
}
.btn {
  display:inline-flex;
  align-items:center;
  padding:8px 16px;
  border-radius:8px
}

@media(max-width:768px){.sidebar{display:none}.main{width:100%}}

@media(max-width:768px) {
  .sidebar {
    display:none
  }
  .main {
    width:100%
  }
}

@keyframes spin{0%{transform:rotate(0deg)}100%{transform:rotate(360deg)}}

@keyframes spin {
  0% {
    transform:rotate(0deg)
  }
  100% {
    transform:rotate(360deg)
  }
}

Tips

• Paste CSS directly from browser DevTools → Sources panel to instantly read the full stylesheet of any live site in a readable format.
• Use 2-space indentation if your project uses Prettier with the default CSS settings — it matches the most common style guide convention.
• After beautifying a large stylesheet, use your browser's Ctrl+F to search for a specific property or selector — much faster than scrolling minified code.
• Beautify CSS before running a diff against an older version to get meaningful line-level changes rather than a single-line diff.
• Copy only the specific rule block you are debugging rather than the entire stylesheet — the tool formats any CSS fragment with balanced braces, not just full files.

Frequently Asked Questions

Glossary

CSS Minification

The process of removing whitespace, comments, and redundant characters from CSS to reduce file size for faster network transfer. Minified CSS is not intended to be read or edited directly.

CSS Beautification

The reverse of minification — adding consistent whitespace, indentation, and line breaks to CSS to make it human-readable and editable. Also called formatting or pretty-printing.

At-Rule

A CSS statement beginning with an @ symbol that provides instructions to the CSS engine. Examples include @media, @keyframes, @import, @font-face, and @layer.

Selector Specificity

A weight assigned to CSS selectors that determines which rule wins when multiple rules target the same element. Beautification does not affect specificity — only whitespace changes.

Custom Property

A CSS variable defined with a double-dash prefix (e.g. --primary-color: #f00) and referenced via var(). Part of the CSS Custom Properties specification (Level 1).

Declaration Block

The set of property–value pairs enclosed in curly braces {} following a CSS selector. Beautifiers place each declaration on its own indented line within the block.