977

I have a div tag with width set to 800 pixels. When the browser width is greater than 800 pixels, it shouldn't stretch the div, but it should bring it to the middle of the page.

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1
  • 5
    You can use flexbox applying display: flex; and align-items: center; justify-content: center Commented Mar 2, 2021 at 16:50

27 Answers 27

Reset to default
1263 

    <body>
        <div style="width:800px; margin:0 auto; background-color:red;margin-bottom: 50px;">
            Centered Content
        </div>
        <div style="text-align:center; width:400px; margin:0 auto; background-color:red; color:white; padding: 5px;">
            Centered Content (width reduced for illustrative purposes in SO)
        </div>
    </body>

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10 Comments

This is correct for demo purposes, but obviously not using inline styles in the final markup
Just make sure to apply 'text-align: center' to the <body> or else IE6 will not center the div. Then add text-align: left; to your div.
be sure to check HTML mode for IE6 or 7. If you use anything other than 4.01 strict you may have problems. Most of the time text-align works as avdgaag says.
@rybo111 Then you don't need to. The idea is that 'left' is the default for text-align, and if it isn't restored then the entire div will inherit 'text-align: center'.
why do you use width:800px ? will this work for all screens?
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353

position: absolute and then top:50% and left:50% places the top edge at the vertical center of the screen, and the left edge at the horizontal center, then by adding margin-top to the negative of the height of the div, i.e., -100 shifts it above by 100 and similarly for margin-left. This gets the div exactly in the center of the page.

#outPopUp {
  position: absolute;
  width: 300px;
  height: 200px;
  z-index: 15;
  top: 50%;
  left: 50%;
  margin: -100px 0 0 -150px;
  background: red;
}
<div id="outPopUp"></div>

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9 Comments

Thx, your answer is the one and only cross-browser solution, it should be accepted...worth mentioning that it also works with "position:relative" if you have other divs on top and below (in this case only "left:50%" and "margin:0px -150px;" are important).
position: fixed worked for me and might work best for anyone else where the added div is in some tree of absolute/relative divs already.
"position: fixed" works better
using transform: translateX(-50%) is more versatile than using a negative margin as a way to account for the div's width. same applies for translateY and height
This answer isn't super flexible, bordering on not usable if the dimensions of the div are meant to be dynamic.
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188

Flexbox solution is the way to go in/from 2015. justify-content: center is used for the parent element to align the content to the center of it.

HTML

<div class="container">
  <div class="center">Center</div>
</div>

CSS

.container {
  display: flex;
  justify-content: center;
}

Output

.container {
  display: flex;
  justify-content: center;
}
.center {
  width: 400px; 
  padding: 10px;
  background: #5F85DB;
  color: #fff;
  font-weight: bold;
  font-family: Tahoma;
}
<div class="container">
  <div class="center">Centered div with left aligned text.</div>
</div>

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2 Comments

As you can see it's enable highlights for css
FYI to align vertically you set align-items: center: justify-content is for the X axis and align-items is the Y.
71 
<div></div>

div {
  display: table;
  margin-right: auto;
  margin-left: auto;
}
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4 Comments

this is what i needed. thanks. using the more upvoted answers would only help to position a popup. this answer helps position any div in the center horizontally.
Funny this is the simplest answer and the only one that is actually correct. Should get more votes.
This CSS has to be the best way to do it. You can set the width 80% here, and then in the inner-div, set it to 100%. And this way, it will scale correctly with the browser resizing. I love it. Thank you very much.
You can use margin:auto; (it propagates)
65

  1. Do you mean that you want to center it vertically or horizontally? You said you specified the height to 800 pixels, and wanted the div not to stretch when the width was greater than that...

  2. To center horizontally, you can use the margin: auto; attribute in CSS. Also, you'll have to make sure that the body and html elements don't have any margin or padding:

html, body { margin: 0; padding: 0; }
#centeredDiv { margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto; width: 800px; }
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Comments

41

To make it also work correctly in Internet Explorer 6 you have to do it as follows:

HTML

<body>
    <div class="centered">
        centered content
    </div>
</body>

CSS

body {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    text-align: center; /* !!! */
}

.centered {
    margin: 0 auto;
    text-align: left;
    width: 800px;
}
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1 Comment

Or go out from quircks mode and use a strict mode, it helps a lot, when you want to use features like hover, auto-margins and many others.
37

Div centered vertically and horizontally inside the parent without fixing the content size

Here on this page is a nice overview with several solutions, too much code to share here, but it shows what is possible...

Personally I like this solution with the famous transform translate -50% trick the most. It works well for both fixed (% or px) and undefined height and width of your element.
The code is as simple as:

HTML:

<div class="center"><div>

CSS:

.center {
  position: absolute;
  left: 50%;
  top: 50%;
  -moz-transform: translate(-50%, -50%); /* Firefox */
  -ms-transform: translate(-50%, -50%);  /* IE 9 */
  -webkit-transform: translate(-50%, -50%); /* Safari and Chrome*/
  -o-transform: translate(-50%, -50%); /* Opera */
  transform: translate(-50%, -50%);

  /* optional size in px or %: */
  width: 100px;
  height: 100px;
}

Here a fiddle that shows that it works

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4 Comments

The second link is effectively broken ("This Web page is parked for FREE...").
@PeterMortensen I improved my answer by replacing the link with a new one with similar solution and by adding the code to the answer to prevent such problems in the future (link only answers are no good). Also removed the link to the first solution because it wasn't that great actually.
This worked for me. It also works when you do not specify width of div in css and when you also decide to specify the width in css. Thank you.
This solution is easily the best, in my opinion. Why does it have so few votes? The only thing I would change to it is to remove the browser-specific CSS extension declarations: transform does the job alone these days.
31

You can also use it like this:

<div style="width: 60%; margin: 0px auto;">
    Your contents here...
</div>
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1 Comment

This answer is useful when you don't want to set the width to a fix pixels of 800px. The size can be 80% and it will cover 80% of the screen size available, which seems more dynamic.
23

Simply use the center tag just after the body tag, and end the center tag just before body ends:

<body>
    <center>
        ... Your code here ...
    </center>
</body>

This worked for me with all the browsers I have tried.

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5 Comments

The <center> tag was deprecated in html 4
It may have been depreciated, but it's still the simplest solution and works on all browsers.
@BillMasters May be it is working now but at some time in future it will become obsolete.
@MohammadUsman I think this tag would survive longer than some fancy ES6 module npm dependency shit.
<center> is the savior we all need.
20

This can be easily achieved via flex container.

.container{
 width: 100%;
 display: flex;
 height: 100vh;
 justify-content: center;
}

.item{
 align-self: center;
}

Preview Link

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Comments

13

Add this class to the div you want centered (which should have a set width):

.marginAutoLR
{
    margin-right:auto;
    margin-left:auto;
}

Or, add the margin stuff to your div class, like this:

.divClass
{
    width:300px;
    margin-right:auto;
    margin-left:auto;
}
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2 Comments

PS, this is margin: 0 auto;
@ChrisAplin This works for me fine as is. Did you downvote because of this? Not necessary. Someone downvoted this for no apparent reason this is working fine for me I use it everywhere.
12

Use the CSS flex property: http://jsfiddle.net/cytr/j7SEa/6/show/

body {                       /* Centered */
  display: box;
  flex-align: center;
  flex-pack: center;
}
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2 Comments

So this doesn't work on IE?
This is the old Flex syntax which is not used/supported now.
8 
.middle {
   margin:0 auto;
   text-align: center;
}

/* it brings div to center */

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1 Comment

this aligns the text into the div too
7

Some other pre-existing setups from older code that will prevent div page centering L&R are:

  1. Other classes hidden in external stylesheet links.
  2. Other classes embedded in something like an img (like for older external CSS print format controls).
  3. Legend code with IDs and/or CLASSES will conflict with a named div class.
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Comments

6

Centering without specifying div width:

body {
  text-align: center;
}

body * {
  text-align: initial;
}

body div {
  display: inline-block;
}

This is something like <center> tag does, except:

  • all direct inline childs elements (eg. <h1>) of <center> will also positioned to center
  • inline-block element can have different size (comapred to display:block setting) according to browser defaults
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1 Comment

just <div style="text-align: center;"> is enough
6

Use justify-content and align-items to horizontally and vertically align a div

https://developer.mozilla.org/de/docs/Web/CSS/justify-content https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/CSS/align-items

html,
body,
.container {
  height: 100%;
  width: 100%;
}
.container {
  display: flex;
  align-items: center;
  justify-content: center;
}
.mydiv {
  width: 80px;
}
<div class="container">
  <div class="mydiv">h & v aligned</div>
</div>

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1 Comment

This should be the accepted answer....
6

Use the below code for centering the div box:

.box-content{
    margin: auto;
    top: 0;
    right: 0;
    bottom: 0;
    left: 0;
    position: absolute;
    width: 800px;
    height: 100px;
    background-color: green;
}
<div class="box-content">
</div>

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1 Comment

this worked best for me, easiest and the most straight forward way to align div in center of page
6

If you have some regular content, and not only one line of text, the only possible reason I know is to calculate margin.

Here is an example:

HTML

<div id="supercontainer">
  <div id="middlecontainer">
    <div class="common" id="first">first</div>
    <div id="container">
      <div class="common" id="second">second</div>
      <div class="common" id="third">third</div>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

CSS

body {
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
}

.common {
  border: 1px solid black;
}

#supercontainer {
  width: 1200px;
  background: aqua;
  float: left;
}

#middlecontainer {
  float: left;
  width: 104px;
  margin: 0 549px;
}

#container {
  float: left;
}

#first {
  background: red;
  height: 102px;
  width: 50px;
  float: left;
}

#second {
  background: green;
  height: 50px;
  width: 50px;
}

#third {
  background: yellow;
  height: 50px;
  width: 50px;
}

So, #supercontainer is your "whole page" and its width is 1200px.

#middlecontainer is div with content of your site; it's width 102px. In case the width of content is known, you need to divide the page's size to 2, and subtract half of content's width from the result: 1200 / 2 - (102 / 2) = 549;

Yes, I'm also seeing that this is der grosse fail of CSS.

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Comments

6 

parent {
    position: relative;
}
child {
    position: absolute;
    left: 50%;
    transform: translateX(-50%);
}
<parent>
  <child>
  </child>
</parent>

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Comments

5 
body, html {
    display: table;
    height: 100%;
    width: 100%;
}
.container {
    display: table-cell;
    vertical-align: middle;
}
.container .box {
    width: 100px;
    height: 100px;
    background: red;
    margin: 0 auto;
}

http://jsfiddle.net/NPV2E/

"width:100%" for the "body" tag is only for an example. In a real project you may remove this property.

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1 Comment

I recommend Andrei's solution. Working fine in center with all aspects.
4

Simple http://jsfiddle.net/8pd4qx5r/

html {
  display: table;
  height: 100%;
  width: 100%;
}

body {
  display: table-cell;
  vertical-align: middle;
}

.content {
  margin: 0 auto;
  width: 260px;
  text-align: center;
  background: pink;
}
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Comments

4

This also works in Internet Explorer, but auto margins do not.

.centered {
    position: absolute;
    display:  inline-block;
    left:     -500px;
    width:    1000px;
    margin:   0 50%;
}
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1 Comment

I tried it out: jsfiddle.net/nqEar/show On my monitor (1920px) on Chrome 22 it is not centered.
2

If your center content is deep inside other divs then only margin can save you. Nothing else. I face it always when not using a framework like Bootstrap.

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Comments

2

In my case, the phone screen size is unknown, and here is what I did.

HTML

<div class="loadingImg"></div>

CSS

.loadingImg{
    position: fixed;
    top: 0px;
    left: 0px;
    z-index: 9999999;
    border: 0;
    background: url('../images/loading.gif') no-repeat center;
    background-size: 50px 50px;
    display: block;
    margin: 0 auto;
    -webkit-border-radius: 50px;
    border-radius: 50px;
}

JavaScript (before you need to show this DIV)

$(".loadingImg").css("height",$(document).height());
$(".loadingImg").css("width",$(document).width());
$(".loadingImg").show();
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Comments

1 
<body>
    <div style=" display: table; margin: 250 auto;">
        In center
    </div>
</body>

If you want to change the vertical position, change the value of 250 and you can arrange the content as per your need. There is no need to give the width and other parameters.

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Comments

1

For some reason, none of the previous answers worked for me really. This is what worked for me and it works across browsers as well:

.center {
    text-align: center;
    height: 100%;

    /* Safari, Opera, and Chrome */
    display: -webkit-box;
    -webkit-box-pack: center;
    -webkit-box-align: center;

    /* Firefox */
    display: -moz-box;
    -moz-box-pack: center;
    -moz-box-align: center;

    /* Internet Explorer 10 */
    display: -ms-flexbox;
    -ms-flex-pack: center;
    -ms-flex-align: center;
}
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Comments

1
  • Get the width of the screen.
  • Then make margin left 25%
  • Make margin right 25%

In this way the content of your container will sit in the middle.

Example: suppose that container width = 800px;

<div class='container' width='device-width' id='updatedContent'>
    <p id='myContent'></p>
    <contents></contents>
    <contents></contents>
</div>

if ($("#myContent").parent === $("updatedContent"))
{
    $("#myContent").css({
        'left': '-(device-width/0.25)px';
        'right': '-(device-width/0.225)px';
    });
}
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