One feature I have always wanted to add to my website is they “typing” effect. It’s that thing where you animate text so you can show it being typed one character at a time. I’ve always liked the look, but never used it.

A conversation on Twitter late Saturday night brought my attention to the Ignis WordPress theme. This theme has one notable feature, and it’s the typing effect. I love the effect but don’t like this theme (it isn’t well made), and so in order to satisfy my curiosity I decided to pull together a list of plugins, tools, scripts, and other ways one might implement the typing effect and other text animations.

Note: I have only tested the two free WP plugins. They worked reasonably well; you can see the Typing Effect plugin in action over at my project site, Third Body Press.

WP Plugins

There are at least 3 plugins that can pull off the typing effect. One costs $12 over on Envato Market, but others are free. I plan to start with the free plugins, and then maybe try the paid option.

• Envato Market
• Typing Effect
• Typed.js

Crunchify

If you like doing things the hard way,  Crunchify explains how to hand code the typing effect.

Animate It!

This is a free plugin that lets you add CSS animations. It can’t do the typing effect I want, but it can make your text and image bounce, fly around, etc.

Animate.Css

WPMU Devs has a post that explains how you can animate text the hard way by installing JS and CSS files and then writing your own code. That is usually more work than I want to invest, but it could be useful in some situations.

Bashooka

Bashooka has a roundup post that links to 15 WP animation plugins. This goes beyond text animations to include page transitions and other tricks. Again, it’s not what I want today, but I am including it in case it proves useful tomorrow.