Website Scroll Animation 101: Tips, Best Practices and Examples

Website scroll animations are one of the best ways to inject excitement and interactivity into your digital content as users scroll through.

Fun fact: there are more websites in the world than cats! With so much competition online, it's important to make sure your website stands out — it needs to be visually captivating, whilst also providing an excellent user experience.

One way to enhance the user experience is by adding scroll animations to your web pages. In this article, we'll take a look at some of the best examples of website scroll animation out there, but first let's go over some of the basics, including tips and best practices for adding these to your designs in Vev, no code required.

What is a Website Scroll Animation?

A website scroll animation is an effect that is triggered when the user scrolls through a web page. These range from a simple fade-in animation to a complex animation that involves multiple elements moving in sync. Scroll animations are triggered by the micro-interaction of scrolling, and are a subtle but highly effective way to create an engaging interactive website or compelling long-form content without overwhelming your audience. The ultimate result? Website scroll animations deliver a more engaging user experience, draw attention to important content, and make your web designs feel more dynamic.

Techniques for Implementing Website Scroll Animations

When implementing website scroll animations, there are a number of ways to go about this. Here are just three techniques every designer should have in their back pocket.

Scrollytelling

Website scroll animations can be used to tell a story as the user scrolls through the page. For example, you could use an animation to reveal a new piece of information or to show the progression of a process. Using scroll animations to tell a story is known as ‘scrollytelling’. Made popular by publications like the New York Times, scrollytelling is a visual storytelling technique that combines written content, multimedia elements such as images, videos, and interactive graphics, and scroll animations to create an engaging and immersive digital storytelling experience.

As the user scrolls, new content is revealed, and multimedia elements can be used to enhance the narrative and provide context and interactivity. Check out these 12 scrollytelling examples for some more inspiration, and learn how to add pre-built scrollytelling images to your Vev project.

Scroll Speed

Using Vev’s pre-built Scroll Speed add-on allows you to control how reactive an element's position is to page scrolling to create parallax and reveal effects within your content. This website scroll animation adds depth to your page, and can be used to get your audience excited about scrolling further. This is particularly effective to use on a cluster of images, such as in a picture essay.

Fade-In Animation

“Simple but effective” is definitely the phrase that springs to mind with this next technique. Perhaps one of the most popular website scroll animations is the fade-in animation. As the user scrolls, the opacity of an element will change from 0% to 100%, subtly drawing attention to the element you are looking to showcase.

This animation can be used on text, images and other graphics to help break up the content on the screen, and create anticipation in your audience for what is to appear next. Use Vev’s animation add-on to add a scroll animation, such as fade-in, to elements in your Vev project without code.

Best Practices for Website Scroll Animations

In addition to the tips mentioned above, there are a few best practices to keep in mind when implementing scroll animations.

Test on multiple devices

It's important to test your scroll animations on multiple devices to ensure they work well on different screen sizes and resolutions, particularly when it comes to mobile.

Use performance-friendly animations

Also keep in mind that you should be using performance-friendly animations. If your website scroll animations are too complex, they can slow down the page load time and negatively impact the user experience.

Keep it simple

It's important to use animations to enhance the user experience, not distract from it. One of the most important tips for implementing website scroll animations is to keep it simple. Too many animations can be overwhelming, so we suggest sticking to one or two simple and complimentary animations to keep the user focused on what matters: the content.

Inspiring Website Scroll Animation Examples

Let’s take a look at some examples of website scroll animations that have been used to create impactful — and, in some cases, famous — designs.

Apple AirPods Pro Website

When it comes to product page design, Apple has always been a leader in the space, churning out web designs that are as popular as the products they promote. Apple's AirPods Pro product landing page uses scroll animations to showcase the product's features and create a dynamic user experience. As the user scrolls down the page, the animations reveal different aspects of the product.

From 3D product graphics and renderings that unfold and rotate upon scroll, to scrollytelling images narrating the story of the product, this page makes the most of website scroll animations to showcase their product and brand’s innovation, as well as draw potential customers in.

Vev’s Annual Report

Website scroll animations are perfect for transforming a static report into an exciting experience, as we did in our very own 2022 annual report. Our first few sections round up the year’s most impressive stats. Using Vev’s pre-built scroll speed add-on, as the reader scrolls these bold numbers scatter across the screen before disappearing out of view. Almost like an explosion, this scroll animation delivers the wow factor, drawing attention to the data and getting readers excited for what’s to come.

In our year in review, we have also used our pre-built fade-in and slide-in on scroll animations, as well as scrollytelling image and video sections to showcase the Vev team’s annual meet-up. All of these design components were added with no code, meaning our design team were able to make this fun report themselves — no static prototype and developer hand-off, and therefore maximum creativity!

The Ocean Agency

The Ocean Agency stuns with their use of website scroll animation. From the moment you land on their website and start to scroll, a horizontal parallax effect takes over, slowly transforming the background color from white to black, and moving the images at various scroll speeds. Further down the page, the brand story is told through bold text and bright images which fade-in on scroll, allowing the narrative to slowly unfold at the reader’s pace.

ServiceNow

ServiceNow’s Sustainability in the Technology Industry report is an interactive masterpiece that uses website scroll animations to transform a once static PDF into an engaging experience. Made in Vev by Message Lab, the report opens with boxes that are drawn around key copy, with staggered animations that are triggered by scroll.

The report section headers utilize Vev’s pre-built sticky position and scroll speed add-ons to create high-quality, bespoke animations, such as the first section header which is decorated by two acrobats who, upon scroll, move (or swing) up and down on the screen. The report also includes Q&A sections that fade-in on scroll, as well as animated charts which are also triggered into action on scroll.

The use of all of these scrolling animations is well thought out and used with purpose to aid the flow of the long-form content, keeping the attention of readers and creating focal points and distinct sections.

WaterAid UK

Website scroll animations can be used with great impact to tell stories visually, as seen in the report on Climate change and community resourcefulness in Sierra Leone by WaterAid UK. There are large amounts of text, but this has been broken up with scrollytelling images that transition with text floating above them upon scroll. This editorial piece also uses sticky position so that next to the larger sections of text, images scroll and switch in and out, helping to tell the story in a more interesting, visual way.

Partnerstudio

The 2022 annual report from Partnerstudio, made in Vev, uses scrollytelling images like the previous example. As well as this, animated number counters spring into action upon scrolling into view, drawing attention to the key stats that help to tell the story of Partnerstudio’s year.

Data makes up a huge part of annual reports, so using data visualizations such as animated number counters is a great way to draw attention to these often overlooked stats. The report also does this through graphs and charts that are animated on scroll, such as a pie chart that fades in segment by segment once it is in view.

WHF

The World Heart Federation’s World Heart Highlights 2022 , also made in Vev, is another annual report making use of website scroll animation to transform this content type from the traditional static PDF format to an animated, interactive digital story. As the reader scrolls, text and images fade-in. The report also uses Vev’s pre-built horizontal scrolling sections to create distinct sections in the content, as well as give reader’s breaks from the more common vertical flow.

Add Scroll Animations to your Website with No-Code

With pre-built sections, components, and animation add-ons, the Vev editor provides everything designers need to bring static prototypes to life. Easily create animated, interactive web designs without touching any code, and then publish it anywhere on the web in a click.