How to Smooth Scroll on Clicking Links

Often developers use anchor links to help users navigate to different sections of the page. But when a user clicks one of these links the browser directly jumps to the corresponding section. This can be a suboptimal user experience. In this article, we will learn how to smooth scroll on clicking links. You can do this using JavaScript or jQuery.

How to Smooth Scroll on Clicking Links

There are several ways to smooth scroll on clicking links.

1. Using JavaScript

Most modern browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Edge & Safari offer native ways to do smooth scrolling. You can easily add smooth scrolling by adding following JS function.

document.querySelectorAll('a[href^="#"]').forEach(anchor => {
    anchor.addEventListener('click', function (e) {
        e.preventDefault();

        document.querySelector(this.getAttribute('href')).scrollIntoView({
            behavior: 'smooth'
        });
    });
});

It adds a click event listener to each link which href begins with ‘#’ which indicates a jump link not a URL link. When a jump link is clicked, the function will retrieve the value of href attribute and scroll it into view smoothly.

2. Using jQuery

You can also use jQuery to do the same thing. Here we attach a click event listener to document object. Every time there is a click on the page, it will check if the click was made to jump link. If so, then it calls animate() function to scroll to the href attribute’s value, in smooth manner.

$(document).on('click', 'a[href^="#"]', function (event) {
    event.preventDefault();

    $('html, body').animate({
        scrollTop: $($.attr(this, 'href')).offset().top
    }, 500);
});

In this article, we have learnt how to smooth scroll on clicking links.

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