How To Add Preloader In WordPress: A Step By Step Guide

Ensuring that your site loads quickly is not an option but an essential web management element. You can do several things to load the site resources quickly, thanks to the preloader feature on WordPress! 

Adding a preloader animation to my WordPress can be the best decision for my site. This way, I get to maximize the user experience. 

Here, I will walk you through the amazing features of WordPress to keep our blog, website, online magazine, and more into a more interactive one. Of course, with the help of a preloader in WordPress.

So, what are we waiting for? Get ready to optimize the performance of our site for better search ranking and conversion!

What is WordPress? 

WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS) that allows users to create and manage all types of our websites. It’s free, simple, flexible, and offers a variety of blogging formats. 

It has more than 60 million users in more than 200 countries. The majority of whom are small businesses or individual and aspiring bloggers in our times.

We use this platform to create anything from a personal blog to an e-commerce site. There are thousands of plugins for WordPress that allow us to do anything. 

We can add social media buttons and create slideshows for managing our businesses. And they are all free! 

Before, WordPress was only a tool to create blogs. Now, we can create our website by only using this. Here is my review of its pros and cons, tips and tricks, and features to learn more about WordPress.

How Does WordPress Work? 

First, it is important to know the difference between WordPress.org vs. WordPress.com. According to the WordPress company, “WordPress.com is a service that helps you build a website using the WordPress software, while WordPress.org is the software itself, which you can use to build and maintain a website on your own.”

I also experience difficulties while using this because I am only a newbie. WordPress is used in tons of different ways. Here are some ideas:

1. Start a Blog
2. Sell Online
3. Create Your Websites
4. Create Your Best Digital Marketing Articles
5. Create Awesome Logos for Your Website

See? There are a lot of great things on how we can use WordPress! Next, let’s answer the question, what else can I do to upgrade my WordPress site?

What is a Preloader and When To Use It?

A preloader is an animated icon or a status that displays the progress of page-load in the background.

When visiting a site, it is downloading the site’s content. These different parts of the website load at different speeds.

Text, HTML code, and CSS are downloaded faster, whereas images and videos take longer to load.

If we have a few images or videos on our website, we don’t need to add a preloader. Instead, focus on speeding up our WordPress site and performance for faster page loads.

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If most of our content is images, photographs, and video embeds, our users need to wait for them to load. When a user visits our website, it may feel slow before the site even loads. 

Adding a preloader can help fill the gap during page load and show a progress indicator to our users. We can preview what our blog post will look like in WordPress by clicking the Preview button.

WordPress will open a live preview of our blog post in a new window with a preloader so that it loads faster.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way let’s look at how we can easily add a preloader to our WordPress website. 

How to Add a Preloader Animation to WordPress

Different Methods in Adding a Preloader Animation

In using WordPress, we should learn how to use it first. I am also not tech-savvy, so learning a new platform can be quite hard, especially as technology progresses.

But as I’m exploring it, I discovered that we could add a preloader animation. Internet users hate the lag when browsing. They don’t like to wait for it to load.

But screen animations play an important part in a website. It grabs the user’s attention to buy some time browsing their website.

Preload animation using WordPress can do the work of tricking the users. 

In classic HTML sites, knowing to code is a huge point for installing a preloader. However, WordPress has several available plugins that we can use to customize or add preloader animation. 

A little help on how to properly put a preloader animation is essential. Without further ado, here are some methods I use to put animation on our website.

Using WP Smart Preloader

1. Install and activate the WP Smart Preloader plugin. 
2. Upon activation, we need to visit the Settings >> WP Smart Preloader page to configure our plugin settings.

3. It would help if we chose a preloader style or page load animation. Choose from six built animations, or we can upload our custom HTML and CSS.
4. We can make the preloader appear only on our homepage by checking the ‘Show only on Home Page’ option.
5. Scroll down to the ‘Duration to Show Loader’ section. We will need to specify for how long our preloader will show. The default option is 1500 milliseconds, but as I say, we can customize our website.

6. Don’t forget to click the ‘Save changes’ button! We can now view our website to check our changes. Enjoy!

Using Preloader Plugin 

1. Install and activate the Preloader plugin. 
2. It would help if we visit the Plugin s>> Preloader page to configure our plugin settings.

3. Enter the HEX code for a preferred background color. Default option is #FFFFFF (White). We can use an online picker tool to find the HEX code of the color we want.
4. Provide a URL of the chosen preloader image. The plugin also comes in the default settings, so customize whatever we want.
5. If we want to see our animation, find a link to download our animated preloader image on a third-party website. We can upload our chosen image to our WP-content folder and paste the URL there.
6. Choose where we want to display our preloader. We can choose to display it on all pages of our website or select a specific section. Our choice.

7. Finally, we will see instructions about adding the following code to our WP theme’s header.php file.
8. <div id=”wptime-plugin-preloader”></div>

8. Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save changes’ button to save the settings.

We don’t recommend changing and adding the code to our WordPress theme. It will just get wiped off when we update it. And if we are using a child theme, it is fine to add the code of our child’s theme’s header.php file.

9. For a better solution, we recommend adding code using a separate Code Snippets plugin or just a site-specific plugin.  

Here’s the code that we will needed to add:

function wpb_add_preloader() {

echo ‘<div id=”wptime-plugin-preloader”></div>’;

}

add_action( ‘wp_body_open’, ‘wpb_add_preloader’ );

10. Just a reminder that this code will only work on WordPress themes that are compatible with our wp_body_open() function.

11. This specific method of adding code will guarantee that our codes will stay even if we update our theme in the future. 

12. And once we have added our code, we can check our website to see the changes. 

Wrapping It Up

We hope this page helped you learn how to add a Preloader to your WordPress site easily.

Instead of encountering a blank page, our views will now be greeted with an animation that may catch their fancy and keep them engaged long enough for the page to load.

Let me know your insights and experience in the comments below. 

For your next read, choose some of these posts:

• Top 8 WordPress Competitors: Which One To Choose?
• 5 Features That Make WordPress Great
• How To Set Up Your Ecommerce Business From Scratch: (Niche, Audience Selection, and Growth)

Let us know in the comment section the next WordPress powerful feature you want us to cover!