A Plugin to add awesome collection of Loaders and Spinners. Delightful and performance-focused Pure CSS animations.
As of April 2026, WP Smart Preloader is a WordPress posts plugin with 6.0K+ active installations and a 4.4/5 rating from 25 reviews. It has been downloaded 205K+ times in total. Requires WordPress 2.8+ and PHP false+. Available on WordPress.org since 2015. Last updated 1 year ago — may have compatibility concerns. Downloads are down 27% this week. Top alternative: WP Shortcodes Plugin — Shortcodes….
WP Smart Preloader is a Simple CSS spinners and throbbers made with CSS and minimal HTML markup. It offers visual feedback in the event of content being loaded, thereby managing expectations and reducing the chance of a user abandoning your wordpress website.
You will find following features with this plugin:
Did work out of the install…but, it is on a timer, vs watching for when the actual heavy loading page completes. I also needed it to run on a particular page and not the whole site.
Once I added the code below to my functions.php file and adjusted the timing it works great. I also like the included loading image #1 better than other preloaders.
add_action('wp_footer', function(){ ?>
<script>
(function($){
$(function () {
setTimeout(function() {
jQuery('body .smart-page-loader').fadeOut(500, function() {
jQuery('body .smart-page-loader').css('opacity', 0);
});
}, 1500);
});
})(jQuery);
</script>
<?php
});
It will cause a blank page to be displayed if Javascript is turned off.
best preload plugin
This plug-in does exactly what you’d expect. Love it. I installed it on my site.
| WordPress | 2.8+ requiredTested up to 6.6.5 |
| PHP | false+ required |
frontend script
Plugin data sourced from WordPress.org. Analysis and metrics by PluginSift.