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CSS Hero Review: Best Visual CSS Theme Editor for WordPress

Last Updated on August 31st, 2023

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CSS Hero is a powerful plugin that aims to solve a long-standing problem that no doubt plagues many a WordPress novice: Making CSS accessible to anyone and everyone, even if you’ve never so much as typed a single line of code before in your life. 

If you’ve ever found yourself struggling to make changes to your site only to find that CSS is your only option, you’ll no doubt appreciate what a difference this can make. 

After all, while style sheet language may give you absolute freedom and control to change almost every aspect of your site’s appearance, it’s simply not accessible to beginners. 

You need to know at least a bit about code if you want to do anything with it, and even if you do know the basics, it can take a while to make things work like you want them to.

CSS Hero changes that thanks to a beginner-friendly interface which makes it easy to make all the CSS changes you need on the frontend. 

Whether you’re a beginner who wants to start customizing your site with CSS or a developer looking to speed up your workflow, read our CSS Hero review for a deeper look at how this plugin lets you customize your WordPress site’s CSS.

CSS Hero Review 

CSS Hero review image

Before we even get into using CSS Hero, there’s one thing we immediately like about it: 

The developers are constantly updating the plugin to ensure it not only continues to adapt to WordPress’ constant evolution as a platform but also meets the ever-evolving needs of users. 

Latest release: CSS Hero V5 (2021)

This useful CSS tool has been around for some time now and has gone through several major updates, culminating in the latest release of CSS Hero V5 in 2021

This time around, major changes include a switch over to React, giving the plugin a powerful new engine which results in a faster, smoother editing process, as well as:

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  • Compatibility improvements to ensure it works with the majority of themes and plugins including site building tools such as Elementor
  • Enhanced history and recovery making it simple to review past edits and even go back to your latest work-in-progress in the event of a crash. 
  • A built-in HTML/CSS inspector tool to pin-point lines of code you need to tweak.
  • Simple Javascript editor making it easier to integrate Javascript code into your website directly from the front page.
  • Ability to add video backgrounds with access to free video content from Coverr
  • Inclusion of app and code themes to help design your site. 

Added CSS Features

The upgrade also delivers the inclusion of modern CSS properties such as: 

  • Align-items
  • Background-clip
  • Clamp()
  • Filters
  • Justify-content
  • text-stroke
  • Variables.

All of which can help you do even more with CSS.

How Much Does CSS Hero Cost? 

It isn’t just the updates and new features themselves that we like, it’s also the fact that all this comes at a price that should be very attractive to both WordPress newcomers and seasoned pros alike. 

At the time of writing, the company behind CSS Hero is offering a reduced rate on all four of their premium plans. 

These include: 

  • Starter Package – $19 (previously $29) for use on one site. 
  • Personal Package – $39 (previously $29) for five sites
  • Pro Package – $69 (previously $199) for 999 sites. 

All of these plans come with a one-year license, though if you prefer to pay for lifetime access right out of the gate, that will set you back $179 which allows for lifetime use on up to 999 websites. 

So far, so good then, but how does CSS Hero actually perform? 

Using CSS Hero 

Using CSS Hero 

After choosing the package that’s right for you, you can download the plugin and upload it to your WordPress site either via FTP or through the WordPress dashboard. 

From there, your next task is to simply activate the product and claim the license for the site you’re using, then you’re ready to put CSS Hero to work on your site. 

Launching CSS Hero 

Launching CSS Hero 

Unless you’re much more observant than we are, you may find yourself scrolling through the main left-hand dashboard menu trying to locate CSS Hero before realizing that launching the tool is actually done from a button at the top of your menu.

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While personally, we’d like to see it included in the main menu as that feels more intuitive, including it up at the top does make it very easy to find and launch the plugin once you know where to look.

Once launched, you’ll notice three distinct things: 

Live Site Preview 

The majority of your screen is taken up with a preview of how your site currently looks, with any CSS changes reflected in the preview in real-time.

CSS Editor 

To the left, you’ve got the CSS editor. Here, you can choose to use either the graphical interface which includes a series of dropdown menus for editing everything from backgrounds and typography to list styles and positioning.

Alternatively, more advanced users can type code directly into the code editor at the bottom.

A third option here is to use the Inspector tab.

This allows you to select any element of your website and view the CSS code behind it.

Top Menu 

The top menu offers a whole host of different options. 

First of all, you can switch up the live preview to reflect how your site will look on different devices.

Moving along, you’ll find buttons to undo and redo options, plus an entire history of your changes. 

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You can then click on any of those stored changes to revert back to that version of your site. This proves very helpful if you run into an error that you don’t know how to fix, as you can simply jump back to the last properly working version. 

Elsewhere in this menu, the project tab has its own very handy options, including Variables to help you manage commonly used values from a single location, and an Edits browser to take a quick, at-a-glance look at all of your ongoing edits, and checkpoints, which let you save changes without publishing live to your site.

Finally, the tools tab provides the ability to restyle your site’s login page, view how your site will look when you’re logged out, and more. 

Making Edits With CSS Hero 

Making Edits With CSS Hero 

Making edits with CSS Hero is literally as simple as selecting the element you want to change in the live preview and then using either the graphic interface or the code editor to change what you need. 

If you want to change the typography of a single block of text, for example, simply select that block and then open up the typography menu which allows you to use just about any font you can think of, with integrated support for both Google Fonts and Typekit. If you have your own custom font, you can even upload that directly to your site for use with CSS Hero.

It’s not just text either. 

In total, CSS Hero includes graphic interface sections for:

  • Background
  • Typography
  • Borders
  • Border-radius
  • Padding
  • Margin
  • Lists
  • Extra (stuff like box shadow, visibility, float, etc.)

What’s nice is that there’s also a search box so that you can quickly find a specific property. This allows you to quickly and effortlessly change the CSS of your entire site without having to bother with any troublesome code if you don’t wish to. 

Using Snippets 

CSS Hero Review: Using Snippets

Another very useful feature is the use of Snippets to apply multiple complex changes across your site.


For example, if you wanted to give your text a blue background, change the color, and make it italic, you can do that for one text box and save it as a snippet.

The next time you want to apply all the same changes to another text box, there’s no need to do it manually, you simply apply that snippet to that text box, and all the work is done for you. 

Other Key CSS Hero Features 

So far, we’ve looked at the basic features that most regular WordPress site owners are likely to use to make changes to their site. 

However, CSS Hero has a lot more to offer which really ensures you enjoy maximum control over your site. 

Additional features include: 

Media Query Manager 

Allows you to apply different styles for different devices (for example, one set of image properties for a laptop and another for mobile)

CSS Code Exporter

Allows you to use the tool to make all of your required changes and then export that CSS so that you can use the same styles on other websites, or even delete CSS Hero and still use the code you’ve created.

Hover Styles 

The recent upgrade to CSS Hero now includes a new feature that allows you to preview and customize hover styles simply by selecting the Show Hovers mode.

CSS Hero – The Easier Way to Take Control Of Your Website 

We started this review by talking about how frustrating it can be when making changes to your WordPress website requires tinkering with the CSS without any prior coding experience. 

The one thing we love most of all about CSS Hero is that it instantly takes all of those frustrations away and makes it as simple as it can possibly get to truly fine-tune every last little detail of your website to your exact liking.

Yet while this is undoubtedly a very beginner-friendly plugin, more experienced users will no doubt find a lot to like too. 

The code editor, inspector, and advanced features all make very useful for professionals, meaning that no matter what your level of skill and experience, CSS Hero is sure to be a worthwhile investment. 

Try CSS Hero

A team of WordPress experts that love to test out new WordPress related software, WordPress plugins and WordPress themes.