HTML Beautifier

What this tool does

This tool formats HTML. You paste markup that is minified, deeply nested without indentation, or just messy, and it returns the same HTML rewritten cleanly: each element on its own line, child elements indented under their parents, and the indentation amount you chose applied throughout. It is a pretty-printer for HTML — the opposite of a minifier. The formatting runs entirely inside your browser, so the markup you paste is never uploaded anywhere.

Why you might need it

HTML reaches you in many shapes. Production pages are minified into one long line to save bytes. Markup generated by a CMS, a page builder, or an email template often has no consistent indentation at all. Code copied from a browser’s developer tools comes with its own quirks. The page still works, but reading the structure — figuring out which </div> closes which <div> — is slow and error-prone. Beautifying gives you a clear, indented tree so you can see the nesting at a glance, locate the element you need, and edit it without breaking the layout.

How to use it

1. Paste your HTML into the input box — minified, messy, or a fragment all work.
2. Choose your indentation: 2 spaces, 4 spaces, or a tab.
3. Click Beautify HTML, or press Ctrl/Cmd + Enter.
4. Read the formatted result in the output box.
5. Copy it with one click and paste it back into your project.

The character counters under each box show the before-and-after size. The formatted version is larger — that added weight is purely the whitespace that makes the markup readable, and you would minify it again before deploying.

Common pitfalls

Beautifying reformats markup; it does not validate it. The tool will not tell you about an unclosed tag, a misspelled attribute, or invalid nesting — it simply re-indents what you give it. If a tag is left unclosed, the indentation afterwards may look wrong, which is actually a useful hint that the source has a structural problem. Be aware that content inside whitespace-sensitive elements such as <pre> and <textarea> is deliberately left as-is, because reindenting it would change what the page displays. Finally, inline elements like <span> and <a> may stay on the same line as their text by design, since breaking them apart could introduce unwanted spaces between words.

Tips and advanced use

Match the indentation setting to your project so the formatted output drops into your templates without creating noisy diffs — two spaces is a common choice for HTML. When you are inspecting a page pulled from a live site, beautify it first: a one-line production document becomes a navigable tree, and the nesting problems become obvious. Beautifying before a code review also helps your reviewer, since a tidy, consistently indented diff is far easier to follow. And because the whole process is client-side, you can safely format the markup of an internal dashboard or an unreleased landing page without sending any of it to a third-party server.