How to find DOM elements that cause body overflow

Article autor
September 9, 2025
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 install local npm package in a project

In some cases, like for testing purposes, you might want to use an npm package stored on a local machine. Here is how you can do that with one simple command.

How to revert commit in Git

Did you ever create a commit that you wish never happened? Let's be honest - we all did. There is an easy way to revert it in Git.

Manually update Apollo cache after GraphQL mutation

Ensuring that GraphQL mutations properly update your Apollo client's cache can be a bit tricky - here's how to manually control that.