Making a footer stick to the bottom with CSS

Ever wanted to have a footer that's stuck to the bottom, but will push down if the content is bigger?

To demonstrate I've created this image.

What this illustrates is the following:

• left: Green box is the viewport, yellow is the content which is very small, and the pink footer is stuck to the bottom
• right: Content is larger than the viewport so it pushed the footer down as well.

For this specific problem, there are quite a few solutions, which all have their pros and cons.

I'll just be demonstrating two of them since I think they are the most mainstream ones.

Those will be:

• CSS flexbox sticky footer
• CSS grid sticky footer

CSS flexbox sticky footer

With flex, we can easily achieve this sticky footer effect by expanding our content section.

What this means is that we set our body to be a flex element, and the content part will have the flex: 1 0 auto value.

This value forces the content to expand as the biggest element, so if we have a small content area it will auto expand to fill the space.

The HTML structure we will be using for this:

<div class="content">
  Content goes here
</div>
<footer>
  I'm a sticky footer
</footer>

Now let's first add a flex property to our body:

body {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
  min-height: 100vh;
}

This tells our body to become a flex element, which flexes elements vertically.
Then we make the minimum height based on the viewport.

Then all we have to do is add the following property to our content div.

.content {
  flex: 1 0 auto;
}

That line will force the content block to space out between the content and the footer.

You can see this method in action on the following Codepen.
You can use the button to toggle between no text and a lot of text.

CSS grid sticky footer

Now for the grid is a very similar setup, we can actually use the same HTML for this method.

<div class="content">
  Content goes here
</div>
<footer>
  I'm a sticky footer
</footer>

Now for our body we can use the following setup:

body {
  display: grid;
  grid-template-rows: 1fr auto;
  min-height: 100vh;
}

This will tell our body to behave like a grid and have 2-row setups where the first one will use 1fr which means 1 fraction unit.

It comes down to the content expanding whatever it needs or can fill, and the footer being auto, which means it will take how the size of the copy in the footer.

Then we don't even need any styling for our content div.

This result in the following:

Again you can click the button to toggle the copy.

Thank you for reading, and let's connect!

Thank you for reading my blog. Feel free to subscribe to my email newsletter and connect on Facebook or Twitter

Comments

[Peter Dietrich]

In some cases, I recommend to use height 100% instead of 100vh as vh might cause issues with the chrome nav bar on mobile

[Chris Bongers]

Ah good point Peter! Didn't account for that indeed.
There is a fix for the 100vh on mobile though.

[Peter Dietrich]

Oh - can you elaborate on that fix?

[Chris Bongers]

Sure CSS-tricks has a very good article on that:
css-tricks.com/css-fix-for-100vh-i...

[Ertan Kara]

This was a thing that I dealt with a few weeks back on my own blog. I fixed it with JS but I was ashamed of the solution. Thanks for this, I will apply this one instead of following.

(() => {
  if (window.innerHeight >= document.body.scrollHeight) {
    document.querySelector('footer').classList.add('fixed-footer')
  }
})();

[Chris Bongers]

Hi Ertan, It's cool you found your own solutions as well, it's what we do as developers.
There are always different quicker solutions.

[Tobias Nickel]

is there some reason not to use position: fixed anymore?

[Chris Bongers]

You can however in this example I didn't want the footer to be always visible, which it would be with fixed.

It's a different solution and imagines those big-ass footers these days, don't want that as a fixed block.

[Tobias Nickel]

thanks

[maxloh]

Margin collapsing won't work on a flexbox based layout.

I think I will stick to the old fixed footer way and add a empty div to occupy spaces for the footer.

[Chris Bongers]

What exactly do you mean by margin collapsing? in which sense?

[Andrew Schimelpfening]

This is great, thanks for sharing! I’ll try to use this in my next project.

[Chris Bongers]

Awesome Andrew, if you want to you can share the end-result always cool to see what people use it for 🤟

[Edson Jr.]

What about the position sticky? Today its browser support is more than 95%.

[Chris Bongers]

Sticky is a valid solution same as fixed.
Just remember the footer will always be visible, which I didn't want for this example.

If that's what you want it's a propper solution though!

[Edson Jr.]

Perfect!

[akshay_magrani]

Thats a good idea Edson Jr.! How will you account for the footer that keeps being visible on the bottom of your screen though?

[Habdul Hazeez]

Related:

How to create a sticky Website footer in 5 different ways

Habdul Hazeez ・ Jun 30 ・ 6 min read

#css #webdev #html #javascript