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Where Do You Go to Get Your Code? The Top 5 Snippet Websites for Web Developers

There’s a rule of thumb in web development: one hour spent in design equals ten hours spent in development. Bringing a design to life is magical, but sometimes it simply takes too long. The following are amazing websites that promise to cut your development time significantly by offering you snippets of code for free!

Bear in mind that just chucking together snippets can make for an unwieldy website, one that loads slowly and doesn’t play ball with older browsers. Some of the snippets will also be written in PHP, so make sure to check your cloud hosting provider allows scripts on to run on their servers.

Snippets of code are the lifeblood of overworked developers

CSS-Tricks

Not only does this site offer some of the best CSS tutorials around (it’s virtually canonical reading for professional web developers), it’s got a great categorized page full of code snippets in HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript and more obscure languages like htaccess. It also has a specific set of snippets for WordPress. CSS-Tricks is a bookmark must.

CSS-Tricks is basically the Rosetta Stone of the web developer community

Stack Overflow

It’s hard to think what developing in any language would be like without Stack Overflow. Horrible, probably. Packing some of the best forums around, StackOverflow is the place to go with questions, advice and curiosity. Etch the address somewhere, and remember to refer to the snippets page before coding anything, ever.

If CSS-Tricks is the Rosetta Stone, stack overflow is the index page.

CodePen

Sometimes the simplest snippet sites are the best. That’s definitely the case with CodePen, which includes an editor and clipboard functions for previewing alterations in real time. Anything posted is automatically open-source, and there are some beautiful creations hanging around. Get it in your favorites.

CodePen’s beauty is in its simplicity

Snipplr

Snipplr dubs itself as ‘Code 2.0’, and it’s easy to see why. Providing a go-to for next-generation coding, Snipplr’s search engines and tasty filter functions make for simple code-hunting success. The phrase matching is pretty good too: search code or functionality, your choice.

Snipplr is for those who love code…