How to find DOM elements that cause body overflow

Article autor
January 10, 2021
How to find DOM elements that cause body overflow
Elixir Newsletter
Join Elixir newsletter

Subscribe to receive Elixir news to your inbox every two weeks.

Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
Elixir Newsletter
Expand your skills

Download free e-books, watch expert tech talks, and explore open-source projects. Everything you need to grow as a developer - completely free.

Table of contents

Sometimes you may notice that your website displays an unintended horizontal scrollbar. You may be wondering what is the cause.

Most often this issue is caused by the DOM element being wider than a document.

You can try to find this element in the web inspector, but there is a great and easy JS solution that will console log all elements that go beyond the screen:

var docWidth = document.documentElement.offsetWidth;

[].forEach.call(
  document.querySelectorAll('*'),
  function(el) {
    if (el.offsetWidth > docWidth) {
      console.log(el);
    }
  }
);

That's it, no need to waste your time searching for overflowed elements anymore!

Work with a team that keeps learning and building better software every day.

Related posts

Dive deeper into this topic with these related posts

No items found.

You might also like

Discover more content from this category

How to redirect back to previous page in Elixir & Phoenix?

In this post, you'll learn how to easily redirect users to the previous path using the Navigation History plug.

Style spacing between repeated elements in CSS using flex gap

It's a pretty common scenario - you have to place a few elements in equal distances. E.g. unordered list items.

How to deal with timeout issue when debugging Phoenix app

There is a common scenario: You'd like to debug your Phoenix app with break!/4 or IEx.pry/0. Everything works fine, until... Phoenix server throws a timeout error statement.