The best websites are better than pleasant—they delight. Delighting your users isn’t easy, but it can be the difference between encouraging them to stay or prompting them to leave. If you’re concerned about standing out, these WordPress animation plugins are a good place to start.
According to a WebsiteHostingRating study, there are over 4 billion internet users and almost 2 billion websites. Convincing a portion of that massive audience to find your site, stay on it, and make a purchase is more than an uphill battle. Serving your users and customers with the products and functionality they expect is foundational, but mere satisfaction won’t keep them coming back.
With these 21 WordPress animation plugins, you can make your site come alive—and ensure that your online business thrives.
1. Animate It!
The Animate It plugin lets you add CSS3 animations to content on your site. With this plugin, you can make click and hover actions interesting rather than rote. Animate It also offers more than 50 animations for entry and exit actions, which can help attract and retain users. This plugin makes it easy to add animations to your site and customize the duration of their animations down to the second.
eLEOPARD Design Studios created the Animate It plugin and offers it for free as an open-source tool.
2. Shortcodes Ultimate
Shortcodes Ultimate is a WordPress animation plugin that makes it easy to create tabs, sliders, carousels, and responsive videos. You can use it in the WordPress post editor or in template files.
Shortcodes Ultimate works with any theme and offers responsive design that works across devices. Despite this flexibility, you can add animations quickly by inserting a code snippet and getting a live preview.
Shortcodes Ultimate is available for free and is open source.
3. Reading Position Indicator
If you run a blog or publish long-form content, you might think animation plugins don’t have much to offer. Shouldn’t your text stand out on its own?
There are still ways to make your text more delightful without getting in the way of the words. With Reading Position Indicator, you can design a progress bar that shows how far users are as they read a piece. Depending on your preference, it can be a bar, which slowly fills, or a word-count display. This is especially useful if you write long-form content because it gives your readers a small incentive to finish .
(Marcin Pietrzak, a freelance web developer, offers Reading Position Indicator for free.
4. Hover Effects
It’s easy to let your website feel like a static, inert page. With the right WordPress animation plugins, however, even seemingly simple actions become opportunities for small delights.
Hover Effects is a simple but effective plugin that offers 39 different hover effects. Hovering, clicking, and transitioning can now involve effects from pulsing and wobbling to floating and sinking. Overdoing it with effects like these can make your site feel clumsy, but the right effect in the right place can really impress.
Wow-Company, a plugin developer based out of Ukraine, offers this plugin for free.
5. Page Animations And Transitions
Page transitions are another underrated opportunity to delight your users. With the Page Animations And Transitions plugin, you can add different effects to the animations on your site.
When users move between pages, the transition can fade in any direction, rotate, flip, zoom, and more. Maintaining a clean, functional UX is important, however, so this plugin also lets you exclude pages and posts so these effects don’t become overwhelming.
Page Animations And Transitions is free.
6. Smart Slider 3
Sliders are an effective way to make your site feel more dynamic without overwhelming your users with animations. Smart Slider 3 is one of the more intuitive ways to add sliders to your site. These sliders are responsive, optimized with SEO in mind, and work across WordPress themes.
Smart Slider 3 comes with a live slide editor that makes it easy to create new slides and edit them as you build pages—all without code. Depending on your vision, you can get as granular as you want, editing each layer down to the heading, image, and buttons.
Smart Slider 3 is free.
7. Slider Hero
Slider Hero is a responsive header plugin that adds background effects for hero banners, sliders, and landing pages. If you want to draw people in with your hero images, Slider Hero is a great WordPress animation plugin that can help them pop.
Slider Hero supports YouTube videos, so you can easily make background animations from videos. You can also add animated text, carousels, and call-to-action buttons.
Slider Hero is free, but there are also pro versions with more features ranging from $27/yr to $80/yr.
8. Image Hover Effects Ultimate
Don’t let your images languish as still, inert pictures. Images offer another chance to delight users—beyond the quality of the image itself.
If your site requires a portfolio or image showcase, Image Hover Effects Ultimate is a contender you should consider for your WordPress animation plugin suite. This plugin lets you add effects when users hover over images, and it’s responsive across devices and layouts. If you’ve ever had to design a website using JavaScript or you’ve hired a developer to do it for you, then you can see the value in a plugin that makes it easy.
Image Hover Effects is free, but there also are Pro versions that offer more customization features that cost $10.99/yr.–$49.99/yr.
9. Flipbox
Flipbox promises to combine an information box and a call to action in one package. Typically, neither function is all that fun for users—as necessary as a function might be for site owners—so a well-designed combo might align your needs with your users’ delight.
After you add it, a seemingly normal info box appears, but when visitors hover over it, a CSS effect transitions to a call to action. You can add a flipbox to any of WordPress’s page-builder tools and customize it with dozens of different effects.
Flipbox is free, and Pro versions cost $13.99/yr.–$89.99/yr.
10. Responsive Tabs with Accordions
Most website owners assume tabs are purely functional, enabling your users to navigate but not providing an experience worth remembering. With the Response Tabs with Accordions plugin, you can create responsive, tabbed panels that support transition animations.
This WordPress animation plugin makes it easy to add tabs with effects. From one page, you can add titles, content, and customizations and align your tabs wherever you want.
Oxilab, a WordPress plugin development company, provides Responsive Tabs with Accordion for free.
11. Page Loading Animation
Slow page-load times drive users away. According to one study, nearly 50% of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less. If you can’t achieve that—and even if you can—the right plugin can make load times easier to deal with.
Page Loading Animation is a WordPress plugin that allows you to add animations that can display for users waiting for your website to load. Making users wait isn’t ideal, but even a small distraction can make time seem to pass by faster—hopefully, without any notice.
Page Loading Animation is free.
12. Tabs
Another way to make your tabs more interesting is with the Tabs WordPress animation plugin. This plugin is designed with the widely popular Bootstrap framework in mind, so it’s responsive and user-friendly across a range of sites and mobile devices.
With this plugin, you can add vertical and horizontal tabs, add tabs on multiple pages and posts, and customize them all with a huge range of colors and fonts.
Tabs is free.
13. Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode
Building delightful sites for your users is an ambitious goal, but that ambition can’t overcome the harsh realities of website ownership. Sometimes, you have to take down a page for maintenance; other times, you can’t produce a new page fast enough.
Luckily, there’s a WordPress animation plugin for these occasions too. With Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode, you can make even stand-in pages a joy to see.
Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode is free.
14. Popup Maker
Pop-ups have a deservedly bad reputation, but, done right, they can help you acquire, retain, and inform your users. The advantage of pop-ups is that they can display information you don’t want to exhibit on your site at all times. For some sites, that might mean a newsletter call to action that you don’t want to distract all users with; for others, it might be a GDPR warning, ensuring that users are informed about how you use their data.
With the Popup Maker plugin, adding pop-ups to your WordPress site is easy. This plugin also has a variety of customization features, enabling you to create any type of content overlay and change its theme, position, and targeting.
Daniel Iser, a WordPress developer, makes this plugin available for free.
15. Responsive Menu
With the Responsive Menu plugin, you can build colorful, elegant menus that include customizable animations. This plugin offers over 150 options, but you can implement them without any coding experience.
Responsive Menu is free, but there’s also a Pro version that comes with 20 more button animations.
16. Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons
If you’re not integrating social media into your site, you’re missing out on an easy opportunity to amplify your brand and your customers’ positive experiences. Making it easy for your customers to share your site can turn them into brand advocates. Other consumers are more likely to trust their friends’ recommendations than anything else, so the more you can encourage organic amplification, the better off you’ll be.
One easy way to do that is to add the Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons plugin to your WordPress site. With this plugin, you can add share icons for RSS, email, Facebook, Twitter, and more than 200 other social networks. Sixteen different designs, on top of other customizable animations, further enable you to make the icons fit smoothly into your site’s design.
The Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons plugin is free.
17. WEN Skill Charts
Gamification is when you apply game-design elements to things that aren’t normally games. By adding mechanics that show progress or growth to your users, you can make them feel engaged and active—even if they aren’t slaying virtual dragons.
WEN Skill Charts is a WordPress animation plugin that enables you to design and implement skill bars and circles to show users their stats and progress. This is especially useful if your site offers courses or other learning materials, but with some creativity, you can find other game-like use cases.
WEN Solutions, a plugin development consultancy, offers this plugin for free.
18. Ultimate Hover Effects
If you’re looking to make your images more eye-catching and dynamic, the Ultimate Hover Effects plugin has more than 85 effects to add. Ultimate Hover Effects comes with a bunch of customization options, too, allowing you to shape each effect’s width, height, and order.
Ultimate Hover Effects is free.
19. Parallax Scroll
Parallax scrolling is when the background of a site moves more slowly than the foreground as the user scrolls, creating a 3D effect that makes even the most mundane action—scrolling—more interesting.
Parallax scrolling has been a trend for a while, but, like other animations, it can be cumbersome rather than stylish. With the Parallax Scroll plugin, you can shape the animation to what works best for your site. You can create a parallax-scrolling background for header text, a full section, or single elements of your pages.
Parallax Scroll is free.
20. Pojo Builder Animation
If you use POJO themes, the Pojo Builder Animation plugin will be a useful asset to your web design arsenal. This plugin adds effects like fading, zooming, bouncing, and more when users hover over your web content.
Pojo Builder Animation is free, and many POJO themes are also free.
21. Tumult Hype Animations
And if you’re a user of Tumult Hype, the Tumult Hype Animations plugin is a similarly easy download. With this plugin, you can easily embed animations into posts and pages via short codes. You can also copy the embed code to use your WordPress site as a Tumult Hype animation host.
The Tumult Hype Animations plugin is free, but Tumult Hype is $49.99.
Are there any WordPress animation plugins we missed? Let us know in the comments below!
