8 Best WordPress Animation Plugins 2020 (Compared)

Are you looking for an animation plugin for your WordPress website?

Adding animation to your website is a great way to engage your audience. Animations are fun to watch; adding a visual component can make any topic interesting.

But, adding animation to your website can be tough if you’re not into programming. That’s why many users rely on animation plugins: they make things quick and simple.

In this article, we’ll tell you about some of the best WordPress animation plugins you can choose from. But before we do, let’s see how your website can benefit from adding animation.

Why Add Animation to Your Website?

Apart from making your site’s pages more interesting, adding animation can have many benefits for your business. Here are just a few:

• Make Your Site Stand Out: Adding animation to your website can help it stand out from your competitors, giving it an edge over other websites in your niche.
• Engage Your Audience: Adding animation to your content makes things interesting so you can easily engage the audience on your website for longer. It also encourages them to explore your site for more visually interesting content.
• Improve Your SEO: By engaging your audience on your website for longer, you can decrease your bounce rate and increase your page views. This can be a major factor in improving your SEO.
• Boost Your Conversions: By engaging your audience with animations, you can inspire them to take action on your website, instantly boosting your conversions.
• Bring Your Content to Life: Adding animation to your website brings life to your content. It also makes it easier for you to explain your content more excitingly to your users.

With so many advantages of adding animation to your website, why wouldn’t anyone want to add them? That’s why we made a list of the best WordPress animation plugins that can make adding animation to your website a smoother process.

How We Tested and Reviewed Animation Plugins

Animations can add engagement and interactive elements to your WordPress site. But with so many animation plugins out there, choosing the right one can be tricky. Here’s how we analyzed animation plugins to find the perfect fit for you:

• Real-world Testing: We didn’t just install these plugins and call it a day. We integrated them into our own WordPress sites and used them on various projects. This lets us see how they perform across different scenarios, from simple text animations to complex interactive elements.
• Popular Picks: We also tested some of the most popular animation plugins to see if they live up to the hype. We analyzed their ease of use, the animation effects they offer, and how well they integrated with our existing WordPress themes and plugins.
• Your Needs: We know animation needs vary. That’s why we considered factors like learning curve, performance impact, and customization options. This way, we can recommend an animation plugin that provides the visual flair you desire without compromising your site’s performance or user experience.

Now, for anyone who does not have the time to go through the entire article, here is a table that will help you check out features and pricing at a glance.

You can also click the name of the plugin to jump to its section in the post.

Name	Key Feature	Free Plugin?	Get Started
🥇 SeedProd	Drag and drop animations with pre-built blocks	✅	Starts from $39.50/year.
🥈 Soliloquy	Generate animated sliders from posts, testimonials, and more	✅	Starts from $19.50/year.
🥉 Smart Slider 3	Create layered animations	✅	Starts from $49 for licensing.
4. Animate It!	Customizable animation durations	✅	Free.
5. Slider Revolution	Hundreds of pre-designed templates	❌	Starts from $35/ year.
6. Master Slider	Smooth transition effects	❌	Starts from $39 for licensing.
7. Smart Product Viewer	Detailed 360° Product Views	❌	Starts from $25 for licensing.
8. Responsive Menu	Customize animation type and speed	✅	Starts from $49.00/ year.
Bonus: OptinMonster	Control who sees your animated campaigns	❌	Starts from $5.63/ month.

1. SeedProd

SeedProd is the best animation plugin because, as a page builder, it allows you to create visual effects directly while designing your page. As a result, the animations do not look out of place, improving the page’s visual appeal.

During testing, we discovered that SeedProd offers a wide variety of ready-made animation blocks. You can use the drag and drop interface to place these animation blocks anywhere on the page, making customization easy.

On top of this, when you select the animation block, you can customize it further.

For example, with the Animated Header block, you can change the styling and shape of the title, ensuring your page is unique and eye-catching. You can also set the duration of the animation and the delay before it appears.

Apart from that, you get other animated blocks like image carousels, background videos, and slideshows. These ensure you quickly add visual effects to your page without coding.

Apart from animation blocks, SeedProd allows you to animate any block.

This gives you the flexibility to animate what you want on the page, ensuring you grab the users’ attention to a specific part of the page, like the call to action button.

Once you select a block, move to its Advanced Settings and navigate to Animation Effects. Here, you will find over 18+ animation effects you can use with any block.

The effects are categorized according to their impact. This lets you know what to expect from the animation effect. These include the “Attention Seekers” category, where you find effects like Bounce, Pulse, Rubber Band, and more. Other animation effect categories include Back In, Fade In, Zooming, and Rotation.

On top of that, a preview is applied when you select an animation so that you can see how it will work on your live page.

If you are looking for a more interactive feel, then “Particle Background” is the solution.

Particle Background is a design feature that allows you to add dynamic and animated backgrounds with particles or small moving elements to your landing pages.

With SeedProd, you can add particle background effects like particle shape, color, and size. You can also customize the direction, speed, and number of particles. Apart from this, you get default styles like Polygon, Space, Snow, Christmas, and more. If you have coding experience, you can add your own Particle Background effects using  JSON.

As mentioned, SeedProd is the best website and landing page builder for WordPress. With this plugin, you can quickly create a custom WordPress theme, make a website, and set up high-converting landing pages for your website.

This page builder is also optimized for speed to ensure your animated pages load super fast. Plus, every page you create is responsive, so it’ll look good on desktops, tabs, and smartphones.

Pros:

• SeedProd’s flexibility allowed us to animate any block, not just animation blocks. This means we can draw attention to important elements like call-to-action buttons or headers that need more emphasis.
• We love how SeedProd, through its drag and drop builder, lets us create animations directly as we design our page. The visual effects blend perfectly into the layout and site.
• With the live preview, we can immediately see how the animation effect will look on a live page.
• Even with animations, pages we built with SeedProd load quickly and are fully responsive on all devices.
• We could place animation blocks wherever we wanted on the page, saving us a ton of time.

Cons:

• Having so many customization options for animations can be overwhelming for beginners.
• The free version of SeedProd comes with limited features.

To learn more, check out this detailed SeedProd review.

Get started with SeedProd here.

Pricing: Offers a forever free plugin. The Basic Plan starts from $31.60/ Year.

2. Soliloquy

Soliloquy is one of the best animation plugins. It stands out for its simplicity and powerful slider animation features. Its simple drag-and-drop interface allows you to create stunning sliders in minutes without writing a single line of code. 

Apart from that, Soliloquy comes with over 100 configurable hooks and filters, allowing you to customize sliders to match your exact needs. 

You can create thumbnail navigation sliders to improve featured user navigation. Or even lightbox sliders, which cover the entire screen, making it easier for your users to view the content.

You can also choose from pre-made slider templates and themes, ensuring that you quickly build the sliders without coding or expert help.

This slider plugin supports a wide range of media, not just image sliders. As a result, you can create video and PDF sliders, making it highly versatile for different content types. 

The advantage of this is that you can fit a lot of content in a small area on your page.

For example, it allows you to showcase your latest blog posts, add a video gallery, or create a carousel of product images on any website section. This can help you create a landing page or a squeeze page with more content without crowding it.

One key strength of Soliloquy we experienced during testing is its focus on performance and security. 

Unlike many slider plugins that bloat up your site and slow down it, Soliloquy is optimized for speed. This is because it uses a dynamic Ajax preloading technique. This ensures your sliders load quickly without affecting overall site performance. 

Pros:

• With its drag and drop builder, we could create stunning animations and slider designs in minutes.
• The 100+ customizable hooks and filters ensured we have complete control over our sliders’ design and functionality.
• Soliloquy lets us create not just image sliders but also video and PDF sliders.
• The pre-made slider templates and themes help us quickly build professional-looking sliders without hiring a designer.
• We don’t have to worry about how our sliders look on mobile devices because Soliloquy automatically creates responsive sliders.
• Thumbnail navigation improves user interaction. This gives visitors an easy way to browse without feeling overwhelmed.
• It allows for easy content integration, allowing us to showcase our latest blog posts or create a product carousel quickly.

Cons:

• Some of the best features, like lightbox sliders and thumbnail navigation, require separate premium addons.
• You need the Soliloquy Pro to unlock all its features.

For more information, read this Soliloquy review.

Get started with Soliloquy here.

Pricing: Offers a free version of the plugin. The pro plan starts from $19.50/ Year.

3. Smart Slider 3

Smart Slider 3 is another powerful WordPress plugin that lets you tell your stories through beautiful sliders. To make it more appealing, this plugin lets you add layers to your sliders. You can structure your layers into rows and columns to make them appear more organized.

It also offers different animated backgrounds for your sliders to give them a unique look. To help you start your designs more quickly, Smart Slider offers starter sliders that are ready to be used right away. The plugin supports images and videos and is fully optimized for SEO.

Pros:

• We love how Smart Slider 3 lets us organize layers into rows and columns. This gives us more control over the layout and design.
• The many animated background options allow us to add extra flair to our sliders, making them visually appealing and unique.
• The pre-built starter sliders are a time-saver, letting us quickly get a head start on our design without starting from scratch.
• Smart Slider 3 is fully optimized for SEO, ensuring our sliders don’t negatively affect our site’s search rankings.
• It supports both images and videos, giving us the flexibility to create various engaging content.

Cons:

• You only get a limited number of features in the free version.
• While using the advanced features and layer options, we found the interface a bit overwhelming at first.

Here’s an in-depth Smart Slider 3 review.

Get Started with Smart Slider 3 Here.

Pricing: Offers a free version of the plugin. Make a one-time payment for the pro plan starting from $49.

4. Animate It!

Animate It! is a free WordPress animation plugin that lets you add cool animation effects to your content. It uses CSS3 animations and you can add your own custom CSS as well.

With this plugin, you get attention-grabbing animation effects that instantly engage your audience.

It also offers options to apply animations when a user clicks on or hovers over a specific area on your WordPress site. This lets you create button or image hover effects.

You also get to control the duration for different animations. So, for instance, you can create text animations for your site with the delayed animation.

There’s more; you can use the custom Animate It! block to apply animations on other Gutenberg blocks.

The plugin supports German and Spanish, too. That means you can expand your reach to a broader audience.

Pros:

• Animate It! is completely free, making it accessible for everyone.
• We can use the vast library of CSS3 animations and even add our custom CSS, giving us flexibility and control over how animations look.
• We like that we could trigger animations by hovering or clicking, adding an interactive element that captures user attention easily.
• Animate It! supports multiple languages, which helps us reach a broader, global audience.

Cons:

• It can be difficult to create advanced animations.
• It offers a limited number of animation options.

Get started with Animate It! here.

Pricing: Free.

5. Slider Revolution

Slider Revolution is another unique WordPress animation plugin that offers easy ways to build rich & dynamic content for your websites. It offers hundreds of templates designed to give your site a perfect look.

You can use this plugin to create sliders & carousels, hero headers, content modules, and a lot more. You can also use images, videos, icons, and other visual elements to make your site stand out. The plugin offers in-depth animation settings and animation presets so you can have full control over the animations you use.

Pros:

• The 250+ template selection allows us to create beautiful, dynamic content without design expertise quickly.
• Its advanced animation controls give us complete control over every animation detail. This means we can create complex and professional sliders with ease.
• It supports multiple content types like images, videos, icons, and text. This allows us to create dynamic sliders.

Cons:

• With so many customization options, it can feel overwhelming for beginners.
• We notice that using too many sliders can slow down our site’s performance.

Get started with Slider Revolution here.

Pricing: Starts from $35/ Year.

6. Master Slider

Master Slider is a robust animation plugin that lets you add premium images and content sliders with super smooth transition effects. The plugin supports touch navigation with swipe gestures that offer a great user experience on your website.

You can also have dozens of ready-to-use sample sliders. You can also have 6 different interactive slider transitions and manage the timing of the slideshows too.

To make your content more engaging, it lets you use the parallax effect while scrolling, too. Each layer can be animated, too. With these animated layers, you can insert or embed HTML-formatted texts, links, images, and videos directly into your slides. You can also add unique animation parameters such as effect, animation duration, delay, etc.

You can also display your sliders in the form of galleries. The sliders support animated layers and are search engine optimized. Because of its responsive nature will also look wonderful across all devices and is compatible with all browsers.

You can get started for free with the lite Master Slider plugin in the WordPress repository.

In a nutshell, the plugin is a responsive and SEO-friendly image and video slider plugin that looks amazing across devices.

Pros:

• Touch navigation with swipe gestures is a great feature to improve user experience, especially on mobile devices.
• We love that there are dozens of ready-to-use sample sliders, which help us get started quickly.
• Each animation layer can be animated, adding depth to our slides.
• We can create sliders without worrying about negatively impacting our search rankings.

Cons:

• Beginners may experience a learning curve with its slider builder.

Get started with Master Slider here.

Pricing: Regular license starts from $39.

7. Smart Product Viewer

Smart Product Viewer is a great animation plugin that’s designed specifically for WordPress. This allows a customer to see your product in detail with a full 360° spin view. Customers can also view the product to understand how it works in an animated way.

The 360° spin as a scroll animation, on mouse click and even on finger touch for iPhone/iPad and Android devices.

Using the shortcodes generator, you get full control over the layouts, colors, and styles. You can also add 360-degree animation views to your page scroll or the sidebars as widgets.

With this plugin installed, you can let your customers spin the product simply using their mouse. It includes navigation styles and color combinations to choose from.

Pros:

• The 360° Product View feature lets us showcase products from all angles, providing more visual details.
• Users can spin products using their mouse, which creates an interactive experience.
• We have full control over the layouts, colors, and styles, allowing us to match the product viewer to our site’s branding.
• You can add 360° views to sidebars using widgets, ensuring you can place them anywhere on the page.

Cons:

• The 360° view feature can be difficult to use on content-based websites.
• Limited animation options.

Get started with Smart Product Viewer here.

Pricing: Regular license starts from $25.

8. Responsive Menu

Responsive Menu is another free plugin that lets you add animation to your website menus. It offers animation options that let your menu slide over the top or push the content when a visitor lands on your web page.

You can select the animation type and speed for your menus and buttons. It even supports background images for your menus. It’s super responsive and looks good on all screen sizes.

Pros:

We can add background images to our menus, giving them a more polished and professional look.

Offers Push and Slide Animations. This flexibility allows us to place the menu slides over the content or push it aside.

Cons:

• Limited animation effects make it difficult to create complex visuals

Get started with Responsive Menu here.

Pricing: Offers a free plugin. The pro plugin starts from $49/ Year.

Bonus: OptinMonster

OptinMonster isn’t a standard WordPress animation plugin. Instead, it’s a powerful marketing tool that lets you add animations in the form of lightbox popups, slide-ins, scroll boxes, and coupon wheels.

It’s the best way to generate leads and get people to sign up for your newsletter.

When you sign up for OptinMonster, you get a user-friendly dashboard to create and track all your animated marketing campaigns. There are also tons of templates to choose from and a drag and drop builder to customize them. This lets you create lead generation campaigns that add an animated effect to your site.

The best part is that you get to choose who sees these popups and other campaigns. You can use this functionality to target by mobile devices, geographic location, scroll depth, exit intent, and so much more.

Learn about OptinMonster here.

These are some of the best WordPress animation plugins you can choose from. We hope you found this article helpful. If you have any more questions, check out the commonly asked questions below.

FAQs: Best WordPress Animation Plugins

That’s It! You are now better positioned to pick an animation plugin for your business. Apart from adding animations to your website, another great way of engaging your audience is to add image galleries. If you’re interested in adding one, here’s a list of gallery plugins that can make your site more visually engaging.

On top of that, here are other articles you may be interested in reading.

• Smash Balloon Review: Is This The Best Social Media Feeds Plugin?
• How to Create AI Images for Your WordPress Site
• 9 Best TikTok Plugins for WordPress

Like animations, the articles listed above will also help you learn how to improve engagement. The first article talks about Smash Balloon and shows you how to add different types of feeds. The next article walks you through how to create AI images directly in WordPress. While the last article lists the best TikTok plugins.