Sticky footers

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.

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.

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.

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.

• Basic concepts of Grid Layout