Sticky footers
Baseline: Widely supported
Baseline is determined by this web feature being supported on the current and the previous major versions of major browsers.
A sticky footer pattern is one where the footer of your page "sticks" to the bottom of the viewport in cases where the content is shorter than the viewport height. We'll look at a couple of techniques for creating one in this recipe.
Requirements
The Sticky footer pattern needs to meet the following requirements:
- Footer sticks to the bottom of the viewport when content is short.
- If the content of the page extends past the viewport bottom, the footer then sits below the content as normal.
The recipe
Note: In this example and the following one we are using a wrapper set to min-height: 100%
in order that our live example works. You could also achieve this for a full page by setting a min-height
of 100vh
on the <body>
and then using it as your grid container.
Choices made
In the above example we achieve the sticky footer using CSS Grid Layout. The .wrapper
has a minimum height of 100%
which means it is as tall as the container it is in. We then create a single column grid layout with three rows, one row for each part of our layout.
Grid auto-placement will place our items in source order and so the header goes into the first auto sized track, the main content into the 1fr
track and the footer into the final auto sized track. The 1fr
track will take up all available space and so grows to fill the gap.
Alternate method
If you need compatibility with browsers that do not support Grid Layout you can also use Flexbox to create a sticky footer.
The flexbox example starts out in the same way, but we use display:flex
rather than display:grid
on the .wrapper
; we also set flex-direction
to column
. Then we set our main content to flex-grow: 1
and the other two elements to flex-shrink: 0
— this prevents them from shrinking smaller when content fills the main area.
Browser compatibility
css.properties.grid-template-rows
BCD tables only load in the browser
css.properties.flex-direction
BCD tables only load in the browser
css.properties.flex-grow
BCD tables only load in the browser
css.properties.flex-shrink
BCD tables only load in the browser