Animations transform your website from dull to highly captivating. They give websites a much-needed life.

As a blogger or WordPress site owner, you need to make your site look lively and alluring to the people who visit it. This can be easily done by introducing a few well-placed and properly executed WordPress animations.

The design and style of your website content play a tremendous role in retaining audience views. To find the best WordPress plugins that suit your needs, your business, and your website’s design, check out our top 9 picks of the best FREE WordPress animation plugins!

Animate It!

Animate It adds life to your WordPress site by endowing it with attractive and eye-catching animations. It has excellent CSS3 animations that you can easily use on your post, widget, and pages.

It offers over 50 Entry, Exit, and Attention seeker animations to grasp your audience’s attention from the get-go. It can add awesome animations to the usual WordPress actions like Click, Hover, Scroll, etc. 

All the animations come with added flexibility and customizations. You can add a delay before your animation begins and make it last longer using a timer. 

Here are the key highlights of Animate It:

50+ animation styles
Customization options
Add timers to animations
Create animation blocks for more control
Multi-language support

The plugin is available free of charge.

Advanced Typing Effect

Advanced Typing Effect WordPress Plugin is the ultimate plugin to let you play around with fonts, word animations, and typography at various cursor speeds.

It is seamless and swift, creating a smooth animation on your landing pages, articles, and widgets. You can use multiple animations on the same page by using a shortcode.  

Amongst its various customization options, you can adjust the typing speed, add a delay before starting the animation, show and blink the cursor, and leave your animations in a loop.

It can create exciting animations within only a few minutes. Create, edit and save animations as much as you’d like; this plugin is ready to fulfill all your typing needs!

Check out the key highlights of the Advanced Typing Effect WordPress Plugin:

Supports icon fonts
Provides a typewriter-like effect
Multiple animations to choose from
Option to use a ‘random’ typing speed
Supports all browsers

Its pricing begins at $12 for a single site and can go up to $85 for an extended license.

Page Animations & Transitions

With cool little animations scattered throughout your website, Page Animations & Transitions gives your WordPress site a lively and attractive feel. 

It comes with 9 unique animation effects to enhance your website. These include fade down, fade up, flip, zoom, overlay slider, and more. You can play around with the duration, color, and icon of your chosen animation. 

The best part is that it requires zero coding to implement. The platform is intuitive and easy to use, granting you a smooth experience with multiple animation types. 

Take a look at the highlights of Page Animations & Transitions:

9 unique animation effects
Intuitive interface
Delay animation timer
Control animation duration
Text & background customization

This is a free plugin. You can download and start animating right away!

Ultimate Blocks

Ultimate Blocks is your one-stop destination for all kinds of epic blocks and features. It supports a variety of animation options using different types of blocks.

Amongst its awesome blocks, you can count on the Image Slider, Countdown Timer, Progress Bar, and Button blocks to add a flair of animation to your WordPress site. 

The Progress Bar block features a colorful animation to showcase percentages or any other data you’d like. The animation shows colors filling out the line/circle when you load down the page. 

The Countdown Timer lets you add or delete days/hours/minutes/seconds as per your requirements, and it shows an animation of the time ticking by.

The Image Slider uses various transition effects to help switch between multiple images. Moreover, the Button block displays the buttons that need to be highlighted using a hover effect. 

Here are the key highlights of Ultimate Blocks:

17+ flexible blocks
Sleek animations
User-friendly interface
Enabled via shortcode
Gutenberg editor
Optimized for speed

As of now, Ultimate Blocks is available free for use.

Smart Slider 3

Smart Slider 3 features over 120 slider templates. These slides are designed to be informative, pop out, and catch your viewers’ attention with ease.

It is 100% responsive, filling out the slides to fit all devices ranging from desktops to mobile devices. It adds swift little motions to the elements of your website as it loads in real-time. 

You can customize each slider to the maximum, including images, fonts, text sizes, buttons, and typography. The plugin is incredibly flexible, so you are pretty much guaranteed to end up with a slider that perfectly fits your WordPress site. 

Here are the key highlights of Smart Slider 3:

120+ slider templates
Add layers to sliders
Customization options
Fully responsive
Cool animation effects

It has three pricing tiers: Free, Standard ($49), and Premium ($99). We recommend the Premium plan for support for up to 3 websites if you own multiple sites. 

Also Read: Best WordPress Slider Plugins

LoftLoader

LoftLoader adds a special touch of animation to your website right before it fully loads. It is a lightweight and code-free plugin with exciting animation options.

It allows you to add different loaders to different website pages to keep things interesting. Depending on your preferences, you can enable or disable the loader on certain pages. It is fully responsive and retina ready.

You can customize your loader color, background image, and animation style. You can play around with your logo or favorite icons and set it as the loader, creating a sense of brand consistency throughout the website. 

Check out the key highlights of LoftLoader:

4 end & 7 loading animation effects
Pure CSS3 animation
Compatible with all browsers
Supports custom images
Translation-ready
Multi-page enabled animations

LoftLoader’s free version comes with basic functionalities. Its premium version is priced at $26 for one website support.

Animator – Scroll Triggered Animations

Animator creates quick and stylish animations for your WordPress pages. These animations are displayed as the page is loading, creating an interactive environment on your website.

It comes with over 25 preset animations to keep your audience engaged. The animations come to life once a user scrolls down your web pages, which triggers the motion. They can be enabled without any coding whatsoever, giving your website a professional-looking finish in no time. 

You can play around with the speed, style, delay, and repeat options to make your animations pop even further. You can also set specific animations for particular devices for maximum user experience.

It also has a Custom Animation Builder to help you create your very own unique animations. With all these options, you surely can animate your website to the fullest!

Here are the key highlights of Animator:

25 animated elements
Multiple animation styles
Customizes speed, style & delay
Custom animation support
Option to loop animations

While Animator is initially free, you can try its Personal plan (priced at £19.99) for lifetime support for 1 website. You can also try the Developer plan (priced at £39.99) for lifetime unlimited site support.

Blocks Animation

Blocks Animation lets you focus on and design little portions of your WordPress site. Every block represents a specific function of your web page, and this plugin adds the magic of animation to all your blocks. 

You can add various effects to your blocks including bounce, fade, shake, swing, wobble, and more. You can customize each animation by setting the speed of your animation and fixing a certain time limit for the animation delay. 

It has over 10,000 active installations and counting. The user interface is relatively simple and intuitive, and can easily be navigated by beginners and professionals alike.

Take a look at the highlights of Blocks Animation:

Intuitive user interface
Multiple animation effects
Customized animations for each block
Perfect for photo/gallery layouts
Helps your blocks stand out 

This plugin is currently available for free.

Image Hover Effects 

Image Hover Effects offers over 40 hover effects to add to your WordPress portfolio and galleries. Alongside image descriptions, it uses CSS3 animations to enhance your website visually.

Its process flow is relatively simple. You can upload an image directly into the dashboard, then add additional details. Enter image title, caption, custom height & width, source link, font size and font color. You can also configure it to open a new window once the image has been clicked. Finally, you can add the perfect animation from the library of hover effects available here. 

Though this plugin serves as an animation tool, it’s a great thing to try out for artists and small businesses looking to showcase their products. It has a nice grid layout and customization options to display your work, and the animations are the icing on the cake!

On top of the aforementioned features, you can get a nice shortcode of your gallery and add it to all of your WordPress pages to maximize views!

Check out the key highlights of Image Hover Effects:

Over 40 CSS3 effects
Flexible lightbox options
Perfect for portfolios & galleries
Over 10 scrolling animation
Shortcode generator
Lightweight and quick

Image Hover Effects has a free version with limited functionalities. Its paid plans begin at $10.

Conclusion

We hope that our list of the 9 Best WordPress animation plugins has given you a few great ideas on how to make your WordPress site more vibrant and appealing.

We would love to hear your feedback on the plugins listed in the article, what features you like, and what features you’d like to see improved. Please feel free to leave your comments about our list, or about any other animation plugins that you’ve found helpful. Thank you for reading, and happy blogging!