Keeping HTML footer at the bottom of the window if page is short

Question

Some of my webpages are short. In those pages, the footer might end up in the middle of the window and below the footer is whitespace (in white). That looks ugly. I'd like the footer to be at the bottom of the window and the limited content body just gets stretched.

However, if the webpage is long and you have to scroll to see the footer (or all of it), then things should behave as normal.

What's the proper way to do this with CSS? Do I need Javascript/jQuery to make this happen?

I only care about IE9+ and modern versions of other browsers. The height of the footer can change from page to page too, so I'd like to not rely on the height.

Answer 1

Check out this site. He has a good tutorial on how to do this with css.

I copied his css just in case Matthew's site is taken down.

html,
body {
   margin:0;
   padding:0;
   height:100%;
}
#container {
   min-height:100%;
   position:relative;
}
#header {
   background:#ff0;
   padding:10px;
}
#body {
   padding:10px;
   padding-bottom:60px;   /* Height of the footer */
}
#footer {
   position:absolute;
   bottom:0;
   width:100%;
   height:60px;   /* Height of the footer */
   background:#6cf;
}

EDIT

Since the height of the footer is different from page to page, you could get the height of the footer and then adjust the #body padding-bottom with javascript. Here is an example using jquery.

$(function(){
    $('#body').css('padding-bottom', $('#footer').height()+'px');   
});  

Answer 2

Give this a try.

It is a copy of the styles that Github uses to keep it's footer at the bottom of a page. It is a little hacky, and requires you to know the height of your footer (which may not work for your use case)

Markup

---

<div class="wrapper">
<div class="content"><p>Page Content</p></div>
<div class="footer-push"></div>
</div>

<footer>
  <p>footer-text</p>
  <img src="http://placekitten.com/100/100" alt="footer image">
</footer>

CSS (well, scss)

---

// our page element

html {
height:100%;
}

body {
height:100%;
}
.wrapper {
background:gray;
min-height:100%;
height: auto !important; // the magic!
height:100%;
margin-bottom:-158px; // the height of our footer + margin
}

.footer-push {
clear:both;
height:158px; // the height of our footer + margin
}

footer {
background:rgba(#a388a3,0.8);
margin-top:20px;
height:138px;
}

The important things here seem to be:

• Setting height: 100% on containing elements (esp html and body)
• Knowing the height of your footer, and accounting for it with a "push" element
• using the combination of min-height height: auto !important and height:100%

Hope that helps!