Selenium Locators — XPath vs CSS vs ID (2026 Cheat Sheet)

Last updated 2026-07-20 · 13 min read · By Avinash Kamble, reviewed by Priyanka G.

Selenium ships 8 locator strategies and every one has a right time to use it. Choose wrong and your suite becomes maintenance-heavy; choose right and you'll match Playwright's stability in Selenium 4. This cheat sheet distills 8 years of framework-lead experience into one page.

Key takeaways

• 8 Selenium locator strategies with performance benchmarks.
• XPath vs CSS — the real speed difference (spoiler: 2ms).
• 25 examples across Java, Python, and JavaScript bindings.
• The relative-XPath patterns that survive DOM refactors.

Contrary to legend, XPath is not meaningfully slower than CSS in Selenium 4. Our benchmark on Chrome 128 across 10,000 lookups:

By.id           1.1 ms
By.cssSelector  1.4 ms
By.xpath        1.8 ms  (relative)
By.xpath        3.9 ms  (absolute)

Optimize for readability first, performance last. Use our XPath/CSS generator to convert one to the other.

driver.findElement(By.id("email")).sendKeys("a@b.com");
driver.findElement(By.name("password")).sendKeys("secret");
driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("button[type='submit']")).click();
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//button[normalize-space()='Sign in']")).click();
driver.findElement(By.linkText("Pricing")).click();
driver.findElement(By.partialLinkText("Order #")).click();
driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("[data-testid='cart-count']")).getText();
driver.findElements(By.cssSelector("table tr")).size();
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//tr[td[contains(., 'Priyanka')]]//button")).click();
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//label[.='Country']/following-sibling::select")).click();

driver.find_element(By.ID, "email").send_keys("a@b.com")
driver.find_element(By.NAME, "password").send_keys("secret")
driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "button[type='submit']").click()
driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//button[normalize-space()='Sign in']").click()
driver.find_element(By.LINK_TEXT, "Pricing").click()
driver.find_element(By.PARTIAL_LINK_TEXT, "Order #").click()
driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "[data-testid='cart-count']").text
len(driver.find_elements(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "table tr"))
driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//tr[td[contains(., 'Priyanka')]]//button").click()
driver.find_element(By.XPATH, "//label[.='Country']/following-sibling::select").click()

• Text: //button[normalize-space()='Save']
• Contains: //div[contains(@class,'card')]//h3
• Following-sibling: //label[.='Email']/following-sibling::input
• Ancestor: //button[.='Cancel']/ancestor::tr
• Nth: (//table//tr)[3] (avoid — prefer table filtering)

See the W3C XPath 3.1 spec for the full grammar and our Selenium interview questions for how locators are tested at senior interviews.