Why You Should Avoid Using !important in CSS
Poor Practice
Using the !important rule in CSS is widely viewed as poor practice because it forces styles to override all others, regardless of specificity. This can lead to harder-to-manage stylesheets and unpredictable behavior on your website. Instead of relying on !important, it’s better to use CSS specificity to control which styles are applied to elements.
Avoiding !important by using greater specificity
CSS specificity determines which styles are applied when multiple rules target the same element. It is calculated by assigning numerical values to different parts of a CSS selector. The higher the specificity, the more likely that rule will take precedence.
For instance, an ID selector has a higher specificity than a class selector, and a rule with multiple class selectors has greater specificity than one with a single class. If two rules have the same specificity, the one that appears later in the CSS file will be applied.
Rather than using !important, you can raise the specificity of your CSS selector to ensure your rule takes precedence over the styles you’re trying to override.
For example, if the rule you’re trying to override has three class names, you can use four class names in your selector to gain precedence. This approach works even if the same class name is repeated multiple times.
Elementor often generates such CSS rules. Here’s an example from a heading element.
.elementor-10630 .elementor-element.elementor-element-67519c1 .elementor-heading-title {
color: #FFFFFF;
font-family: "Roboto", arial;
font-size: 3.5rem;
font-weight: 900;
letter-spacing: 1.8px;
}
.custom-class .elementor-heading-title {
color: #444444;
}
.custom-class.custom-class.custom-class.custom-class .elementor-heading-title {
color: #444444;
}