CSS grid is the shortest way to center elements

Published at: Jul 02 2018
Updated at: Feb 20 2022
Reading time: 2min

This post is part of my Today I learned series in which I share all my web development learnings.

Today I was tweeting about a new CSS property I discovered: place-items. ~~It is a simple shorthand for align-items and justify-content~~ – that's at least what I thought. It turns out that place-items is a shorthand for align-items and justify-items (thanks Benjamin, for pointing that out).

This discovery made me sad initially because it meant that I could not get rid of one CSS declaration in my flexbox based classes to center elements.

/* this class centers elements using flexbox 
   and is there to stay */
.center {
  display: flex;
  align-items: center;
  justify-content: center;
}

After sharing my disappointment, Benjamin mentioned something that I didn't think of before. place-items works perfectly with display: grid.

How to center elements using CSS grid

I have to admit that even when CSS grid is cross-browser supported nowadays, I didn't use it much yet. It turns out that you can use display: grid to center elements as quickly as when using flexbox.

Define display: grid on an element (see this CodePen as an example), pair the grid-declaration with align-items and justify-items and you're good to go! You just centered the child of this element.

<html>
  <body class="center-using-grid">
    <span>hello from a centered span</span>
  </body>
</html>

.center-using-grid {
  display: grid;
  align-items: center;
  justify-items: center;
}

align-items and justify-items define the align-self and justify-self properties on all direct grid children. Have a look at the devsheet below to learn about these CSS properties.

DevSheet explaining place-items in CSS

The nice thing about this approach; you can unify align-items and justify-items into a single declaration – place-items.

.center-using-grid-even-shorter {
  display: grid;
  place-items: center;
}

There are only two CSS declarations needed to center elements using CSS grid.

Is there a catch about centering elements using `display: grid` and `place-items`?

Well... there was. place-items wasn't cross-browser supported when this article was published. You had to leverage PostCSS to use it. But browser support looks way better today! 🎉