💨Super Quick CSS: Smooth Scrolling

Transform Your Website's UX With This One Liner

html {
  scroll-behavior: smooth;
}

If like me you've got a single page website and your using bookmarks (anchors tags that reference an element by id), allowing user to navigate to different sections of the website. Then you need to add this CSS property scroll-behavior: smooth;, which will smoothly scroll the page content into view.

Working Example

Below the CodePen demonstrates the smooth scrolling of the content when you click one of the navigation links.

Demo

Before - Without Smooth Scrolling

After - With Smooth Scrolling

Things To Note

The scroll-behavior property doesn't seem to work on the body element, so best to add it to the html element.

This property isn't currently support by all browsers, but this shouldn't stop you using it as it won't break and defaults to the standard behavior.

https://caniuse.com/#feat=mdn-css_properties_scroll-behavior

Comments

[Beicker]

I was playing with your code (on codepen.io) and i didn't see any difference between using that line and not using it. I don't know, maybe i am too noob or my browser (chrome) is the problem.

In the second case, ¿what browser can i use for it? Thanks for repplying me.

[Carl Saunders]

I've added some animated gifs to show the before and after UX of applying the scroll-behavior: smooth property. Hopefully this'll make it clearer if your browser doesn't support this feature.

After - With Smooth Scrolling

[Beicker]

Oh i get it. What i was doing is scrolling with my mouse. I didn't clicked the links. I already see the difference. Thanks for the GIFs.

[Carl Saunders]

Glad adding the GIFs cleared up what was happening.

[Hung Nguyen Manh]

You should try again <3
scroll-behavior supported Chrome and Firefox.

caniuse.com/#search=scroll-behavior

developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/W...

[Nejc]

I tried chrome mobile and desktop and it works - I wonder why the effect persists even if you remove it though

[Carl Saunders]

Did you make the changes via CodePen or locally? As could be a caching issue. My other CodePen without the property works as expected.

[ohmyzense]

I love this! Thanks so much for the share on this little tip.

[Mohammad Fazel]

That was nice, thank you!

[Carl Saunders]

No worries, wish everything was this simple to implement. There's really no excuse not to implement this.

[lamka02sk]

Thank you for the article! Never heard of this cool feature before.

[Carl Saunders]

No worries, glad you found it useful.