5 Best WordPress Preloader Plugins

Are you looking for the best preloader plugin for your WordPress site? If you own a website, you know how crucial it is to capture your readers’ attention early. Surveys show that if a site takes more than 4 seconds to load, users tend to exit the page, increasing bounce rate.

For this reason, web developers use creative preloaders to make visitors’ wait time feel shorter, and their experience feel more engaging. And as you’d rightly guess, there are many preloader plugins to help make things easier.

In this article, we will explain what a preloader is and discuss its importance. We will also review the best WordPress preloader plugins to help you decide.

Content:

What Is a Preloader?
Benefits of using a Preloader in WordPress
Best WordPress Preloader Plugins
Conclusion

What Is a Preloader?

Preloaders are pictures or animations displayed on the user’s browser while your website’s content loads in the background.

It provides visual feedback to users, usually with an animated loading bar. This helps to improve user experience and reduce bounce rate on your website.

You can create custom preloaders in your WordPress site using CSS code. But you’d need to be tech-savvy to use this method. Alternatively, you can use a WordPress preloader plugin to easily create customizable preloaders for your site.

Benefits of Using a Preloader in WordPress

As mentioned earlier, preloaders help improve user experience on your website. Staring at a white screen while waiting for a page to load can be unpleasant.

However, you can give visitors a visual indication that a page is loading by using a preloader animation.

Another reason is that preloaders make the load time feel short. Preloaders, especially visually appealing ones, give visitors something to look at. This helps to hold their attention for those extra seconds needed for your site to load.

Best WordPress Preloader Plugins

Before we get on to our list, please check our complete guide on how to properly install WordPress plugins if you need help installing any of the plugins we recommend.

Note: Although using a preloader plugin improves users’ experience, you should also ensure your website loads quickly. Please see our speed optimization guide for tips on improving your website speed.

With that out of the way, here is our recommendation for the best preloader plugins for WordPress.

LoftLoader

Price: Free to start. $18 for a regular license if you need more features.

One of the most preferred WordPress preload animation plugins is the LoftLoader plugin. The plugin has over 70k active installations and is actively maintained by the developers.

With LoftLoader, you can add beautiful and unique preloader animations to your WordPress website. The plugin has 4 ending animations and 7 loading animation effects.

LoftLoader allows you to add a progress indicator to the loader. You can add it as a progress bar, a counting percentage, or both. Alternatively, you can display a loading screen with an animation in the preloader background.

Additionally, the plugin has 19 different CSS animations that work well on modern browsers. It also comes with a close button feature that allows users to quit the loading screen.

LoftLoader provides an enhanced setting panel with the WordPress customizer and is responsive & fast. For more enhanced features, you can opt for the pro version.

With LoftLoader Pro, you can create your own welcome message. It also offers extra loader animations, 6 of which support custom images.

WP Smart Preloader

Price: Free

WP Smart Preloader is a free plugin that provides the essential features needed to add a preloader to your website. The plugin’s CSS spinner and throbber provide visual feedback to users while its contents load.

WP Smart Preloader plugin comes with 6 built-in preloader animations. It also allows you to create your own animated icons using HTML code and CSS.

The plugin is fully responsive and will support any modern screen. It is also cross-browser compatible and customizable.

This animation preloader plugin is beginner friendly and offers a range of customization options. It is also lightweight, as no gifs or images add unnecessary files to your WordPress hosting server.

Flat Preloader For WordPress

Price: Basic plugin is free. The pro plan starts at $22.50 for a single site.

This preloader plugin is created for users who want a beautiful preloader without customizing it. Flat Preloader is another basic yet effective plugin that gets the job done. It allows you to create a loading page with awesome gif images that are retina ready.

The plugin allows you to choose where the loading page will be displayed. Therefore, you can show it on your homepage alone or on all pages. There is also an option to add custom text that’ll show with the preloader.

Flat Preloader is a responsive plugin that works on all screen sizes. It is also lightweight, so you do not have to worry about your site speed being affected. Unlike WP Smart Preloader, it does not support customization or custom content preloader.

This plugin offers unlimited CSS loading animations. It also lets you change your animations’ background color, image, or gradient. These features, however, are only available in its premium version.

WP Page Transition

Price: €19/year for a single website.

This is one premium plugin that is worth every penny spent. WP Page Transition comes with rich UI and UX designs and provides features to improve your site’s SEO.

The plugin offers over 20 preloaders, SVG animations, and page transition templates with many customization options. The plugin also provides an easy-to-use visual builder if you prefer to create your preloader animations from scratch.

With this plugin, you can add your brand’s logo to the preloader and animate it. In addition, you get to add unlimited colors and adjust the width to your taste.

Further, you can create many page transitions and manage them easily. Also, it lets you choose which transition will be active at a specific page loading.

The plugin also allows you to adjust your content’s opacity. You can scale the text and apply 2D or 3D transforms to beautify your animations.

WP Page Transition offers many great features to ensure a smooth user experience for your site’s visitors.

Preloader Awesome

Price: Basic plugin is Free. The premium version costs $25 for a regular license.

Preloader Awesome is a highly customizable preloader plugin for WordPress websites. With this plugin, you can create loading animations for your WordPress site. The plugin provides 14 transition effects and 10 built-in animated CSS loaders.

The plugin is easy to use and allows you to create multiple preloaders for multiple pages. It offers a progress bar, status counter, and animation time.

Additionally, you can customize your loader settings. Customization options include loader size, progress bar color, loader placement, and many others.

Preloader Awesome allows you to upload images and animated GIFs. It has an easy setup process suitable for online beginners.

The plugin is mobile-friendly, cross-browser tested, and compatible with most modern WordPress themes. All of these features come with the free version. For more features, you can upgrade to its premium plan.

Conclusion

The primary aim of preloader animations is to make users’ wait time engaging. It also serves as a guarantee that the website being loaded hasn’t crashed. All of these work toward one common goal, to improve the user experience of your WordPress website.

Our list contains both free and premium WordPress preloader plugins. Overall, we hope you find one better suited for your website.

To help improve the speed of your site, you should also invest in fast WordPress themes. Thankfully, our article on the fastest WordPress themes lists available fast themes.