HTML Formatter / Minifier
This HTML formatter and HTML beautifier (or "HTML prettifier," if that's the term you
use) takes messy, minified, or inconsistently indented HTML and turns it into clean,
well-structured markup — or minifies it to strip whitespace and comments for
production. It handles nested elements, attributes, comments, void elements like
<br> and <img>, and embedded
<script> and <style> content. Everything runs in
your browser; nothing you paste is ever sent to a server.
When should I minify vs. format my HTML?
Format while you're actively writing, debugging, or reviewing markup — consistent indentation makes nested structure far easier to follow. Minify only for the version you actually ship: stripping whitespace and comments shrinks the file and speeds up page loads, but a minified file is painful to hand-edit, so keep a formatted source copy and minify as a build step, not your working copy.
Why does some markup stay on one line while other elements break into multiple lines?
Simple elements — a lone link, a single icon inside a wrapper — stay compact
on one line so short markup doesn't sprawl across the page for no reason. Elements with
real structure, like a paragraph containing several pieces of text and inline tags, get
one line per piece so the nesting stays easy to scan. A handful of container elements
(<html>, <head>, <body>,
<ul>, <ol>, <select>,
<table>) always break onto multiple lines even with just one item
inside, since these are the elements most likely to grow more items later and reads more
predictably that way from the start.
Does this mess up my embedded <script>, <style>, or <pre> content?
No. JavaScript inside <script> and CSS inside
<style> are left exactly as you wrote them — only re-indented as
a block, never reformatted as if they were HTML. If you want the CSS inside a
<style> block actually reformatted rather than just re-indented,
paste it separately into the CSS Formatter. Content inside
<pre> and <textarea> is whitespace-significant, so
it's preserved verbatim rather than having its internal spacing collapsed or
re-indented, which is exactly the kind of thing a naive HTML formatter tends to break.
Last reviewed: August 2026