3 Best Frontend Live CSS Editor WordPress Plugins

There are many layout builder WordPress themes and plugins out there including Elegant Divi, Beaver builder, Visual composer etc and they have made building custom layout on WordPress damn easy. But still  there are some subtleties and complexities of CSS in many themes and sometime we have to work hard in customization of a particular theme element. It happens when we are unable to get exact CSS class for a particular element.

For example we are using a theme that has no option to customize menu background. In this condition we need to find out unique CSS selector that controls menu background. Because of complexity of design of some time a non-web designer is failed to achieve custom background for that theme menu or he needs to spend a lot of time to achieve this.

Another example is logo position and size. There are many themes that don’t offer custom logo position and resizing. This condition may be a big headache if you are not a pro in CSS and HTML.

Fortunately WordPress development is ever-increasing and now CSS customizers plugins are available with the help of which you can edit CSS live on WordPress frontend and these plugins keep changes saved in database that are not affected with theme updates.

If you are running web design business with WordPress and you are not a CSS expert, a good theme style live editor should be in your hands. Otherwise you will be scratching your head while editing a specific segment of theme that could not be edited with theme option panel or page builder.

Usually people use browser inbuilt option “inspect element” code inspector tool to find out CSS selectors for specific element. But think how nice it would be if CSS could be edited live on frontend and all changes would be saved in a secure table of database that could be exported anywhere else easily?

In fact it is now possible with WordPress plugins. There are some plugins out there those let you edit CSS visually on WordPress frontend. Here we are telling you about those plugins

Yellow Pencil  (compatible with any theme or plugin)

Yellow Pencil outperforms all other live CSS editors in terms of ease of use, features and affordability. The very interesting thing is that its free version offers lots of features. Its premium version can be purchased at comparatively lower price at Codecanyon marketplace and it is selling like hot cakes. The reason is that it can be purchased shelling out only $25 for single site. Though, it is not encrypted with a licence key, it can be used on unlimited sites until author gets strict toward usage policy of the plugin.

With Yellow Pencil, you can select ant any element on page and change its CSS property seeing changes in realtime. You can create custom CSS styles for different display sizes.

Features of Yellow Pencil

• Element highlight on mouse hover
• Click on any HTML block to edit CSS
• Check CSS changes in responsive mode
• Fully live  editor and changes relfect at once
• undo changes
• Import exportchanges from on to another WordPress
• Copy generated code without any restriction. This way you can generate CSS for non-WordPress sites.
• Add customcode
• Apply CSS to single page only or globally for an element

Price – $25 for single site, updates lifetime and free support for 6 months

Try out Yellow Pencil

Microthemer

(compatible with any theme or plugin)

Microthemer is a live CSS editor that can be placed side by side when functionality is concerned and it is super efficient visual CSS editor that works with any WordPress theme. This plugin generates its own CSS for any theme element and keeps it safe regardless theme updates.

How Microthemer works

Microthemer edits CSS visually on frontend and save changes wherever you want. Changes are visible immediately after save.

Pricing (Unlimited domain usage with lifetime updates)

Microthemer is currently available at attractive price and you can buy  lifetime updates license up to unlimited websites usage. That is huge and no one can ignore both these words; Unlimited and Lifetime. Lifetime license for unlimited site is available at $90 while 3 sites lifetime license is available only for $45. This pricing may subject to change for future customers.

CSS Hero

(compatible with selected themes only)

CSS Hero is an absolute stunner when it comes to live CSS editing. This tool works just like a magic and you can edit CSS of any element live and changes are done immediately on frontend. However it is your choice to reset all saved changes.

CSS Hero seems to be the most advanced way to edit complex CSS on WordPress.

CSS Hero doesn’t lock you down and all generated CSS is unlocked and exportable. It means if you disable the plugin, CSS customization will still into effect.

How CSS hero works

When you activate CSS hero on a page, it shows a pop-up window at right side of your website that is draggable to anywhere on the page ( while logged in as admin). You having clicked on a circle button, CSS hero is activated on the page and it detects elements of the page with mouse hover and you can edit CSS properties of that element in CSS hero pop-up option panel. You can edit all CSS properties such as padding, margin, font style, size and color, position, drop shadow, 3D shadow  and much more. You can even mark provided CSS value as important to override any existing style for that element.

Pay attention – CSS Hero may not be fully compatible with a theme that is not in the list of their compatible themes and you need to contact CSS Hero support before buying it if your theme is not in their list. Luckily their compatible themes has all popular themes such as;

• Elegant Divi 2
• Genesis Framework
• Ultimatum Theme Builder
• Enfold
• Pagelines
• Woo Canvas
• + lots of other

It is also compatible with popular form builder Formidable Pro, popular e-commerce plugin WooCommerce and popular page builder Visual composer.

Pricing

CSS hero is a pretty cheap plugin and it can be used on single site by shelling out only $14. However it becomes cheaper if you buy 5 site license ( $25). It also offers virtually unlimited site license at a very affordable price ($99 for 999 websites).

Note– Yearly charges will be applicable if you need to get updates after one year of purchase.

LEARN MORE ABOUT CSS HERO

Conclusion

Comparing both these plugins – Regarding price, definitely Microthemer is the best choice for you for now as they are offering lifetime updates (no recurring charges for updates) and also they claim that Microthemer can work with every WordPress theme and plugin. And really Microthemer works awesome.

But as far as live editing is concerned, CSS Hero seems to be a bit better. However they have a list of compatible themes and plugins and if you are using a theme or plugin that is not in their list, you may face problems using CSS Hero with that theme or plugin.