9 Best WordPress Animation Plugins for an Unforgettable Website

Last updated on Aug 21, 2024 by Southie Williamson Reader Disclosure

These days, if you want your WordPress website to be successful, you need to do a lot more than simply attract customers. While there’s a lot of work to do to promote your services or products and convince clients to visit your site and view your offerings, that’s only the first step toward making sales.

If you want to convert visitors into potential clients and customers, you need to find a way to keep users engaged with your site. This means your site needs to be pixel-perfect and brimming with ways to engage your customers.

While there are plenty of ways to create an attractive website, from choosing the ideal theme to ensuring you have a broad selection of photos in your gallery, one particularly exciting option is adding subtle and professional-looking animations to your site. Today, we’ll look at some of the best WordPress animation plugins for your website.

Top Animation Plugins for WordPress

1. Envira Gallery

For visually-heavy websites, a stunning gallery is essential. Luckily, that’s where Envira Gallery shines. It’s a powerful, user-friendly WordPress gallery plugin that allows you to create beautiful, responsive photo and video galleries in less than 5 minutes.

One of Envira Gallery’s standout features is its extensive selection of animation styles. With over 50 animation options, you can add dynamic effects to your galleries that draw visitors’ attention and encourage them to explore more. Whether you prefer subtle fades or bold zooms, you’ll find an animation style that matches your vision.

The plugin also gives you complete control over animation triggers and duration. Use the drag-and-drop builder to quickly arrange your gallery content, add animations, and customize the design to fit your brand’s style, all without touching a single line of code.

You can even combine Envira Gallery’s AJAX pagination feature with animations. Pagination means that your large galleries can be split into multiple pages that load without needing to re-load the entire webpage. When combined with animation, you can create a seamless browsing experience where an animated effect happens each time visitors click a new page in your gallery. This strategic combination boosts your gallery’s visual appeal and engagement.

What We Like About It:

• Easy Drag-and-Drop Builder: Quickly create and customize your galleries and lightbox image effects. Select from popular layouts like masonry, grid, and Polaroid.
• Extensive Animation Options: Over 50 animation styles with customizable duration, triggers, and pagination effects.
• Responsive, Fast, and SEO-Optimized: Galleries load quickly, look great on all devices, and can be deeplinked to improve SEO.

What Could Be Better:

• Limited Free Version: While the free version offers an excellent basic gallery, you’ll need a premium license to unlock animations and other advanced features.

Aside from gorgeous galleries and WordPress image effects, Envira offers tons of advanced functionality, such as:

• Albums to organize and display multiple galleries
• Filterable galleries and albums using tags
• Video, audio, and slideshow support
• Social sharing buttons
• Supports content from other sources like blog posts, testimonials, Instagram posts, WooCommerce products, and more.
• Built-in image compression, automatic image resizing, and deep linking for SEO
• Watermarking, image protection, and password-protected galleries
• Client image proofing and Adobe Lightroom integration
• And lots more…

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Whether you’re displaying a simple photo gallery, a YouTube playlist, an extensive creative portfolio, or custom post types, Envira Gallery provides all the tools you need.

2. SeedProd

Creating a professional-looking website or landing page shouldn’t be complicated, and with SeedProd, it isn’t. SeedProd is our top-choice website builder for WordPress, offering a no-code way to build custom themes, pages, and landing pages.

SeedProd is known for its user-friendly interface and wide range of pre-designed templates. With over 200 professional, pre-built designs, you can quickly create landing pages or build an entirely new site from scratch. The plugin also includes 80+ page blocks, many of which allow you to add dynamic elements, like animated headlines, responsive menus, image carousels, text animations, and scrolling number counters, with just a few clicks.

Additionally, the plugin offers more than 18 animation effects that can be added to any block in the builder. Particle backgrounds let you add interactive background effects like floating snowflakes, shapes, and images.

SeedProd also seamlessly integrates with eCommerce for animated product displays. We love how fast, lightweight, and responsive SeedProd pages are. Any theme or page you design with the plugin is guaranteed to be mobile-friendly right off the bat.

What We Like About It:

• User-Friendly Drag-and-Drop Builder: Create and customize websites and landing pages without any coding.
• Extensive Template and Block Library: 200+ page templates and 80+ Pro blocks to display static and dynamic content.
• Versatile Animations: 18+ animations can be applied to any block, including those in your online store. You can also create a parallax effect or add interactive background effects like floating snowflakes, shapes, and images using the plugin’s particle.js functionality.
• Optimized for Speed: Pages load quickly and are responsive on all devices.

What Could Be Better:

• Limited Free Version: Some advanced features, like entire theme building and premium blocks, are only available in the pro version.

SeedProd is a fantastic choice for anyone looking to quickly build a website or landing page and implement WordPress animations. With a focus on ease of use and performance, the plugin is ideal for both beginners and professionals.

3. Responsive Menu

Using WordPress animations doesn’t necessarily mean filling your pages with moving pictures and flashy effects. It’s also about enhancing user experience. A well-designed, animated menu can significantly improve users’ interactions with your WordPress site. The Responsive Menu plugin helps create an engaging, user-friendly navigation experience across all devices.

The plugin lets you create a menu that looks great and functions seamlessly on all devices. Responsive Menu offers a wide range of customizable options, including the ability to animate your menu with effects like spinning buttons, fading transitions, and color transformations.

You can choose exactly where your menu appears—pushing content or sliding in from the left, right, top, or bottom of the screen. You can also select what kind of fonts you want to use, the background color, and even add a custom background image. With over 150 customizable settings, the possibilities are nearly endless.

What We Like About It:

• Highly Customizable: With a combination of 22,500 options made up of custom animations, colors, and placement, you can tailor the menu to perfectly fit your brand.
• User-Friendly Interface: No coding skills are required, making it accessible even for beginners.
• Responsive Design: Whether your visitors are on a desktop, tablet, or smartphone, they’ll enjoy a consistent and visually appealing experience.
• Multilingual Support: It supports WPML and Polylang for multilingual sites and RTL compatibility, making it a truly global solution.

What Could Be Better:

• Learning Curve: While the plugin is user-friendly, the vast number of combinations might feel overwhelming for some users.
• Limited Free Features: Some more advanced customization options, such as button effects and animations for individual menu items, are only available in the premium version.

We recommend Responsive Menu for creating everything from a simple hamburger menu to a fully animated, custom menu.

4. Animate It!

When it comes to finding the best animation plugin for your WordPress site, you’ll want an optimized and easy-to-use tool. Animate It! is easily one of the most popular options for simple and quick CSS3 WordPress animations on your content.

The plugin makes your online content more interesting and interactive with ready-made animations. It offers several entertaining options, from flips and bounces to pulses and flashes. The toolkit provides over fifty animations that can be applied to posts, pages, widgets, and even specific Gutenberg blocks.

We love that Animate It! gives us complete control over where and how animations appear on our site. For example, you can set animation triggers for hover, click, or scroll and customize the timing and duration. It also caters to advanced users with the ability to add custom CSS classes to individual animation blocks for more personalized effects. And everything works brilliantly on smartphones, too.

What We Like About It:

• Wide Range of Animations: Over 50 CSS3 animations provide plenty of options to choose from.
• Customizable Triggers: Scroll, click, or hover triggers and control over timing and duration.
• Mobile Optimization: The ability to enable or disable animations on mobile devices ensures a seamless experience for all users.
• Ease of Use: A button in the editor makes it simple to add animations without writing code.

What Could Be Better:

• Advanced Features Could Be Overwhelming: While the plugin is feature-rich, the sheer number of options can be a bit overwhelming for beginners.
• Dependency on External Libraries: The plugin relies on the Animate.css and Animo.js libraries, which may limit advanced users who want more custom or unique animations.

Animate It! is a great choice for anyone looking to add a dynamic touch to their WordPress content.

5. Soliloquy

Whether your site is focused on photography, eCommerce, business services, or blogging, this versatile, powerful, and flexible slider plugin is a great way to upgrade your website. Like many of the best WordPress animation plugins today, Soliloquy is more about giving your customers a better experience than filling your pages full of flashing images.

However, that’s not to say that Soliloquy is boring. In fact, it includes multiple different layouts, transition effects, pre-built themes, and a lightbox display to help you launch your animation experience quickly.

You can create animated sliders for all types of content, including images, videos, testimonials, PDFs, featured blog posts, Instagram posts, and even dynamic sliders based on user behavior or other criteria. The plugin also integrates with WooCommerce for product sliders.

One of Soliloquy’s key advantages is its speed. The plugin is highly optimized for fast loading times, which is crucial for SEO. Plus, with its responsive design, sliders look great on any device, from desktops to mobile phones.

What We Like About It:

• Drag-and-Drop Interface: Customizing sliders is simple, even for beginners. You can easily create sliders or carousels, add thumbnail navigation, adjust your transitions, insert captions, and more.
• Responsive and Fast: Sliders load quickly and look great on all devices, ensuring a smooth user experience.
• Advanced Functionality: Includes lightbox features, WooCommerce integration, scheduled sliders, image protection, dynamic content sliders, and custom CSS options.  

What Could Be Better:

• Limited Free Version: While the free version offers basic functionality, some of the more advanced features require the premium version.

If you want to add WordPress animations in the form of stunning sliders that are lightning-fast, Soliloquy is the way to go.

6. Image Hover Effects

When running an image-heavy website, like a design portfolio or WordPress photography website, the most important thing to do is draw attention to your photos. After all, your pictures are what the people on your website have come to see. With that in mind, it’s worth considering an animation plugin that helps your visuals stand out when customers are scrolling over photos. The Image Hover Effects plugin is great for this, as it helps make your pictures more attention-grabbing and attractive.

Image Hover Effects is perhaps the simplest plugin available for inserting WordPress image effects. There are more than 40 different CSS3 hover effects, and getting started couldn’t be easier.

While this free plugin isn’t nearly as robust as Envira Gallery, it still offers decent functionality. You can create multiple categories of hover effects with different shortcodes, choose custom borders, set custom image sizes, add lightbox integration, and more.

What We Like About It:

• Easy-to-Use Hover & Scroll Effects: The plugin is quick to install, user-friendly, and offers over 40 hover and 10 image scroll effects.
• Fully Responsive: All effects are 100% mobile-friendly.
• Lightbox and Slider Options: Integrated lightbox features and slider functionality are nice perks.
• Integrates with Visual Composer: Provides a free extension to use the plugin with the Visual Composer page builder.

What Could Be Better:

• Limited Options Beyond Hover Effects: While the plugin offers a solid number of hover effects and a few scroll effects, it may feel limited for users looking to implement more tailored animations.
• Dependent on Shortcodes: Managing multiple shortcodes can become cumbersome if you have many images or categories to organize.

If you’re into shortcodes, Image Hover Effects is a simple plugin that offers an easy way to add an interactive touch to your WordPress photos without a steep learning curve. It can be a great addition to help your product or portfolio images stand out.

7. Greenshift

When it comes to building high-quality animations and pages in WordPress, Greenshift is another standout option. This plugin provides various animation and design tools to help you create sophisticated, dynamic content directly within the Gutenberg editor.

You can use Greenshift to add many primary effects, and the plugin offers several dynamic blocks, including animated headlines, countdown timers, and progress bars. However, Greenshift’s main selling point is its advanced and custom animations.

You can customize complex animations using advanced options like CSS transforms, shadow presets, and infinite CSS animations. Or, add background animations and parent hover transitions that respond to user interactions. You can even chain animations together and connect them with dynamic data to add a complete layer of interactivity to your content.

Compared to many other page builders, Greenshift takes a lightweight approach by generating assets on the fly and only loading them when needed, which is excellent for those who prioritize page speed. The plugin also includes customizable breakpoints, which makes it easy to design responsive layouts for desktop and mobile devices.

What We Like About It:

• Advanced Animation Tools: Enables the creation of sophisticated, custom animations directly in the Gutenberg editor.
• Performance-Focused Design: Generates assets on demand, keeping your pages lightweight and fast-loading.
• Responsive Design Compatibility: Includes customizable breakpoints and optimized mobile layouts to ensure your site looks great on all devices.

What Could Be Better:

• Steeper Learning Curve: The plugin offers many powerful, advanced features that can be challenging to master.
• Some Features Require Additional Addons: You’ll need an addon to access specialized elements (like animated blobs, reveals, mouse interactions, and text animations). Purchase is also required for GSAP-based features, including custom parallax effects, advanced triggers (like scroll, hover, click, and stagger), and advanced controls (like scroll-based interpolation and smooth state transitions).

For those looking to create high-end animations and custom page layouts within the Gutenberg editor, Greenshift is an excellent tool with top-notch performance. That said, it’s not ideal for beginners or less tech-savvy users.

8. Typing Text

Sometimes, the best animation effects are the simplest ones. Large blocks of text can make it easy for visitors to overlook your key messaging, but Typing Text can give those important text strings some extra oomph. The plugin allows you to create an animated effect where words are typed out one letter at a time.

The plugin’s interface is straightforward and integrates seamlessly with the Gutenberg editor. All you need to do is insert the Text Typing block and add your words or sentences. You can also configure settings in the block sidebar, such as font, delays, and typing speed.

You can add a prefix or suffix to your text, giving you more control over how your message is presented. One of our favorite features is the automatic shuffle, which is really handy for typing multiple words on a loop.

What We Like About It:

• Simple and Effective: Adds a visually appealing typing animation to your text without requiring any coding knowledge.
• Customizable Settings: You can add static text before or after the typewriter effect, control font, text color, type speed, back speed, and delays, and enable fade-out or shuffle effects.
• Easy to Use: Integration with the block editor makes the plugin versatile and beginner-friendly.

What Could Be Better:

• Limited to Typing Effect: While the plugin does its job well, it’s focused solely on the typewriter animation.
• No Support for HTML Tags: Although you can change the font, size, and color of your text, the plugin doesn’t have functionality for HTML tags such as headings and subheadings.

Although you won’t want to use this plugin for large chunks of content, it can be an incredible tool for drawing attention to crucial elements like a CTA (call-to-action) or mission statement.

9. Blocks Animation

Sometimes, adding little animated touches to your website can be a great way to make it more unique and interesting. Fortunately, you don’t need to know coding to maximize your animation possibilities. Adding little touches to your site pages is much easier with a plugin like Blocks Animation.

This highly flexible and intuitive solution for WordPress is packed with great ways to add attractive, CSS-based animations to your website using the block editor. The good thing about this plugin is that the animation effects aren’t too flashy or dramatic. Blocks Animation uses gradual movements to make your content naturally engaging.

Despite its simplicity, Blocks Animation provides several customization options, such as adjusting the animation duration, delay, and repeat settings. This flexibility makes it an excellent choice for users who want to enhance their site with elegant animations but prefer the block editor.

What We Like About It:

• Seamless Integration with Block Editor: Native integration within the Gutenberg block editor makes it easy to add animations without disrupting your workflow.
• Wide Range of Animations: Offers a variety of CSS-based animations that can be easily applied to any content block.
• Customizable Settings: You can tweak animation duration, delay, and repeat settings to better suit your content.

What Could Be Better:

• Limited to Block Editor: While it works well within the block editor, it’s not a good fit for users who prefer the Classic editor or other page builders.
• Basic Animation Options: The plugin is limited to essential animations.

Blocks Animation could be your ideal tool if you want a quick, simple, and free way to add fading, zoom, and other effects in the block editor.

What Is the Best WordPress Plugin for Animations?

Envira Gallery is an excellent choice for enhancing visual content with image animation in WordPress. The plugin allows you to create stunning, responsive galleries and offers 50+ WordPress image effects, like fade, slide, zoom, and roll, to make your galleries more interactive.

On the other hand, if you’re looking to build fully animated pages or landing pages, SeedProd is a powerful option. With its drag-and-drop interface and extensive library of blocks, SeedProd makes it easy to add animations to any part of your site, from animated headlines to background videos and parallax scrolling. This plugin is perfect for creating high-converting, visually compelling pages that load quickly and look great on any device.

Aside from these 2 options, our list has plenty of other great plugins. When choosing a WordPress animation plugin, you’ll want to consider your website goals, animation needs, price range, and technical expertise.

You made it to the end!

We hope this article helped you find the perfect WordPress animation tool to create a dynamic visual experience that boosts engagement and makes your content pop. Whether you want to add subtle effects to your galleries, build fully interactive landing pages, or create custom animations in the block editor, the right plugin can make all the difference.

What’s your favorite plugin for animations? Let us know in the comments below! If you enjoyed this article, check out our review of the Best WordPress Carousel Plugins + How to Use Them Correctly.

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