What are the implications of using "!important" in CSS?

Question

I've been working on a website for a few months, and a lot of times when I've been trying to edit something, I have to use !important, for example:

div.myDiv { 
    width: 400px !important;
}

in order to make it display as expected. Is this bad practice? Or is the !important command okay to use? Can this cause anything undesired further down the line?

Answer 1

Yes, I'd say your example of using !important is bad practice, and it's very likely it would cause undesired effects further down the line. That doesn't mean it's never okay to use though.

What's wrong with !important:

Specificity is one of the main forces at work when the browser decides how CSS affects the page. The more specific a selector is, the more importance is added to it. This usually coincides with how often the selected element occurs. For example:

button { 
    color: black; 
}
button.highlight { 
    color: blue; 
    font-size: 1.5em;
}
button#buyNow { 
    color: green; 
    font-size: 2em;
}

On this page, all buttons are black. Except the buttons with the class "highlight", which are blue. Except that one unique button with the ID "buyNow", which is green. The importance of the entire rule (both the color and font-size in this case) is managed by the specificity of the selector.

!important, however, is added at a property level, not a selector level. If, for instance, we used this rule:

button.highlight {
    color: blue !important;
    font-size: 1.5em;
}

then the color property would have a higher importance than the font-size. In fact, the color is more important than the color in the button#buyNow selector, as opposed to the font-size (which is still governed by the regular ID vs class specificity).

An element <button class="highlight" id="buyNow"> would have a font-size of 2em, but a color blue.

This means two things:

1. The selector does not accurately convey the importance of all the rules inside it
2. The only way to override the color blue is to use another !important declaration, for example in the button#buyNow selector.

This not only makes your stylesheets a lot harder to maintain and debug, it starts a snowball effect. One !important leads to another to override it, to yet another to override that, et cetera. It almost never stays with just one. Even though one !important can be a useful short-term solution, it will come back to bite you in the ass in the long run.

When is it okay to use:

• Overriding styles in a user stylesheet.

This is what !important was invented for in the first place: to give the user a means to override website styles. It's used a lot by accessibility tools like screen readers, ad blockers, and more.

• Overriding 3rd party code & inline styles.

Generally I'd say this is a case of code smell, but sometimes you just have no option. As a developer, you should aim to have as much control over your code as possible, but there are cases when your hands are tied and you just have to work with whatever is present. Use !important sparingly.

• Utility classes

Many libraries and frameworks come with utility classes like .hidden, .error, or .clearfix. They serve a single purpose, and often apply very few, but very important, rules. (display: none for a .hidden class, for example). These should override whatever other styles are currently on the element, and definitely warrant an !important if you ask me.

Conclusion

Using the !important declaration is often considered bad practice because it has side effects that mess with one of CSS's core mechanisms: specificity. In many cases, using it could indicate poor CSS architecture.

There are cases in which it's tolerable or even preferred, but make sure you double check that one of those cases actually applies to your situation before using it.