With its Inspect Element tool, Safari lets you tinker with the front-end code of any webpage. If you want to test what a page would look like with different text or images, you can do so by altering its code with Inspect Element.

This is a simple guide aimed at beginners to explain how you can begin experimenting with Inspect Element in Safari to edit a website's text and images with minimal coding knowledge.

What Is Inspect Element?

Inspect Element is a developer tool. It's available on Safari, though also on other web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. With Inspect Element, you can peek behind the curtain of a website to reveal its front-end code, like the HTML and CSS. However, it doesn't grant you visibility of the back-end, like its databases.

Not only can you see this code, but you can tweak it too. This means that you can change the appearance of a website. You can replace an image, rephrase some text, use a different font, switch its color scheme, and more. However, these edits are local. They won't appear to anyone else except you; they disappear once you refresh or move away from the page.

Why Should You Use Inspect Element?

Inspect Element is a great tool if you're a budding web developer. You can literally see the code that powers your favorite website, tweaking it as you wish in a real-world environment. There are many fun insights you can gain from using Inspect Element.

For example, business owners can look at keywords included in a competitor's website, or designers can use Inspect Element to identify a font that they find attractive or to quickly test a different color scheme on their website.

For now, we're going to focus on editing the basics of a webpage using Inspect Element.

How to Access Inspect Element on Safari

You can open Inspect Element on Safari using the developer menu:

1. Open Safari.
2. Click Safari in the top menu bar.
3. From the dropdown menu, select Preferences.
4. Select the Advanced option.
5. Check the box that says Show Develop menu in menu bar.

After selecting this option, you can right-click on a webpage and select Inspect Element. Alternatively, you can select Develop in the menu bar, and then Show Web Inspector.

How to Find Web Elements in Inspect Element

To begin editing an element, right-click what you wish to edit and click Inspect Element. This will open the developer window, with the relevant section highlighted. You might find that the particular element you wish to element (the image or the text, say) is hidden; to locate it, use the arrows on the left to expand the nested sections.

To help narrow your selection down, click the target icon from the Inspect Element toolbar. Now, as you navigate through the code, it highlights that section on the website. Or you can use your cursor to pinpoint a section on the site. This is handy for when you want to hone in on something particular in a crowded area of a webpage.

How to Edit a Website's Text Using Inspect Element

To make a piece of text editable after finding it in a site’s source code, double-click it. You can type new text directly into the code, or delete existing text. When editing is complete for a given string of text, hit Enter, and the text on the webpage will change.

It's really as simple as that! The only times this won't work are when the text is actually part of an image, like a logo.

How to Edit a Website's Images Using Inspect Element

While images appear visually to you on the front-end, in the website code they appear as links. You can right-click and image and choose Inspect Element to jump to where that image is in the code. Website images typically have JPG, GIF, or PNG file extensions, though not exclusively.

Double-click these image strings and you can edit them, or just save them to your system if desired. If you want to replace the image, switch it out for a replacement image URL. Or you can delete the code string entirely to remove the image from view.

Dig Into Websites Using Safari

Safari's Inspect Element tool lets you easily find and change the code corresponding to text and images, which is as easy as switching out a text or URL string. Once you're done editing a website with Inspect Element, simply refresh the page and everything will be back to normal.