How to Add a Parallax Effect to Your WordPress Website

Parallax effect is a modern web design tool that aims to engage your audience and keep it on your WordPress website for a longer time. Basically, parallax effect is created by the difference of the scrolling speed between a background image and an overlay content. Background image scrolls much slower and this difference creates an illusion of depth for the whole user`s impression on your website`s design.

Parallax effect is widely used within most of the modern premium and free WordPress themes. It is especially popular for portfolio type of websites and some small business web representatives. These types of websites prefer to use the landing pages over and try to impress a user from the first sight and keep him or her engaged through the whole content of the page which could be very long-scrolling and contain lots of content blocks.

Today we will pay our attention to the process of creating parallax effect on any WordPress website. We will consider three of most effective ways to create parallax effect: with the help of WordPress themes, plugins and CSS coding opportunities.

Premium WordPress Themes with Parallax Effect

Nowadays there are thousands of premium WordPress themes that includes parallax effect as one of the feature from a long list. We will share the most prominent (and best selling) examples of such themes with you in the section below. Observe and choose that best suites the needs of your potential audience and website`s style.

Enfold — Responsive Multi-Purpose Theme

Enfold is a really versatile premium theme that can cover every need of a WordPress admin. The theme includes a wide variety of ready-to-use content: from icons and color schemes to full demos for different websites` topics. Here you can choose the prepared page demos with parallax effect and build your own design with easy and beginner-friendly visual editor.

Bridge — Creative Multi-Purpose WordPress Theme

Bridge is also a multipurpose tool but with the focus on creative personalities and their web projects. These theme is perfect for portfolio web sites and other online representatives. It uses parallax effect as one of the important tool for creating ready-to-use page demos and as the opportunity to use the effect as the additional for your own design. Bridge also offers wide variety of options for online stores and web magazines.

Jupiter — Multi-Purpose Responsive Theme

Jupiter is the premium WordPress theme that aims to provide the easiest tools for building your own web designs for sites and blogs. It also includes lots of predefined page demos as the examples of what you can do with Jupiter and the basis for your own unlimited creativity. Jupiter uses parallax effect as one of the basic tools for creating perfect portfolio websites, online stores and magazines, and lots of other types of modern websites.

WordPress Plugins for Creating Parallax Effect

If you already have the WordPress theme you like very much and do not want to change, than parallax effect can be added to it by means of various plugins. There free and premium option of WordPress parallax plugins and we will show you the examples for the both groups. The choice is yours, as always.

The Parallaxer WP — Parallax Effects on Content

The Parallaxer WP is the premium tool for your WordPress website. It allows you to easily set up parallax effects on images, videos and sliders. The plugin also supports mobile versions of your web design with parallax effect. This tool uses the shortcode generator for easy and fast addition of parallax effect onto your WordPress website. It is also compatible with Visual Composer plugin, which gives you unlimited possibilities to create your own backgrounds for parallax effects.

Advanced WordPress Backgrounds

Advanced WordPress Backgrounds is the free tool for creating parallax background of your own. This plugin will add a special button to your WordPress post editor called by the name of plugin — Advanced WordPress Backgrounds. By clicking this button, you will open the menu for setting up effects on background images. Here you can select the image from a gallery, set parallax type and speed. After making all the selections the shorcode for the parallax effect will be automatically added to your WordPress post.

Changing CSS to Add Parallax Effect

The process of changing CSS for adding parallax effect to your WordPress website may seem difficult for novice users, but in fact it is pretty easy to handle even without web development knowledge and skills. You need to do 3 simple steps for adding background image with parallax effect to any of your WordPress website`s pages or posts.

First of all, download the image you want to use as the background to your WordPress media gallery. Than copy file URL in the image`s menu. You will need this URL for inserting to CSS file responsible for the parallax effect.

Second step includes adding the following HTML tags inside your WordPress post or page: div class=”parallax” and div class=”parallax-content”.

And finally the third step is to copy the following CSS code to a new file, save it with .css expansion and download it to other WordPress theme`s files via FTP:

.parallax {  
background-image: url("http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/my-background-image.jpg");
height: 100%; 
background-attachment: fixed;
background-position: center;
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-size: cover;
margin-left:-410px;
margin-right:-410px;
}
 
.parallax-content { 
width:50%;
margin:0 auto;
color:#FFF;
padding-top:50px; 
} 

Do not forget to change the URL to the right one from your gallery. After that you can visit your WordPress website to see the changes!

Final Words

We hope that these pieces of advices will help you to create a modern and beautiful WordPress website with parallax effect. And we also hope that both you and your users will enjoy the result of such changes!