CSS View Transitions: A New and Easy Way to Animate Your Website

In this post, we explore a new CSS animation feature currently being rolled out, known as CSS View Transitions. We’ll take a look at how CSS View Transitions make it easy to add smooth, engaging animations to any WordPress or WooCommerce site.

Last week, we attended WordCamp Cape Town 2023 in South Africa. The local WordPress community absolutely delivered with inspiring speakers, delicious food, and breathtaking views! We attended fantastic talks by local thought leaders, covering everything you’d hope to hear about at a WordCamp. These included wonderful stories of how people built their businesses with WordPress, how WordPress changed their lives, and numerous insights surrounding publishing and e-commerce. One standout presentation was a talk on CSS View Transitions by Schalk Venter.

Titled The Future of Animation on the Web, it featured a nostalgic recap of the internet’s beginnings, its evolution, and its current state. Reflecting on past technologies like Flash and Lightspeed highlighted our progress and the significant changes the web has undergone. The talk also emphasized the simplicity and power of CSS View Transitions which I though was super exciting and worth sharing with you since it can easily be added to any event site.

What are CSS View Transitions?

CSS View Transitions are a new API introduced to enhance web animations, making it easier to create smooth transitions between different states of a webpage. This feature allows developers to define transitions between different views or elements on a page without needing complex JavaScript or manual animation coding.

The following video demonstrates how page and element transitions can be added to a standard WordPress and WooCommerce website. When transitioning between pages, the new page will fade in while the old page fades out. When filtering the products page, items with the same transition name will animate to their new position. This is all achieved using only a few lines of CSS!

Key Features of CSS View Transitions

• Declarative Syntax: Define transitions directly in your CSS without relying heavily on JavaScript.
• Cross-Browser Support: Supported by most modern browsers, with Firefox support expected soon.
• Performance Optimization: Transitions are optimized for performance, providing a smoother user experience.

Basic Example

What makes CSS View Transitions so exciting, is how easy it is to apply them to your site. For example, simply adding the following CSS to your site will make the browser seamlessly fade between page loads, instantly creating a smoother, more app like experience.

@view-transition { navigation: auto; }

Animating Specific Elements

You can then take it a step further and animate an item between page loads by specifying the item’s name. For instance, the following code will create a transition effect for a thumbnail of a post with an ID of #post-1234. The thumbnail will elegantly animate from the post list page to the post view page, all using a single line of code.

#post-1234 .wp-post-image { view-transition-name: item-1 }

Browser Support And Standards Status

The API is still fairly experimental and currently supported by the latest versions of Chrome, Edge, Opera, and the Android Browser. Safari has shown positive interest, and there is an open ticket for Firefox adoption. We need to wait for formal support from these last two browsers before using the API in a production environment.

Practical Use Cases for WordPress and WooCommerce

1. Product Pages: Enhance the user experience by animating product images between the product listing and product detail pages.
2. Navigation Menus: Create smooth transitions between different sections of your website, making navigation more intuitive and engaging.
3. Content Updates: Animate changes in your content, such as blog post excerpts or featured images, to provide a more dynamic experience for your readers.

Conclusion

CSS View Transitions are a great tool to add to your kit and something I suspect we are going to see a lot more of in the near future. They offer a simple yet powerful way to enhance user experience through smooth, engaging animations. Whether you’re working on a personal blog, a business website, or an e-commerce platform, CSS View Transitions can help you create a more polished and interactive web presence.