Back to top button WordPress plugin – Best WP scroll to top plugins review

If you decided to add a scroll to top button to your website this article is here to help you choosing the right plugin among many available. We tested and reviewed the most popular Back to top button WordPress plugins from the WP repository to make your choice easier. Read our review carefully and pick the plugin that will suit your needs perfectly.

How we tested and reviewed the Back to top button WordPress plugins

Since most Back to top button WordPress plugins relay on a simple jQuery script, there’s a wide variety of free options to choose in the WP Plugin Repository. We picked the most popular ones for our test, ranging from 10.000 to 100.000 active installations. We tested each plugin by the following criteria:

• ease of use and setting up
• customization preferences
• visual apearance
• plugin weight and impact on website loading speed

All tested Back to top button WordPress plugins serve their purpose well. Each plugin has some specific features that differentiate it from the others. We’ll point out those differences in the following reviews, to make your choice of the right Scroll to top plugin easier.

A Back To Top button is a useful feature for each site with long content posts and pages. A wide choice of plugins are available to serve that purpose. Our review will help you choose the right plugin for your specific project.

WPFront Scroll Top back to top button WordPress plugin

WPFront Scroll Top by WPFront is by far the most popular Back to top button WordPress plugin with over 100.000 active installations. It scores an 5.0 average vote among over 100 developers.

Upon installation, the back to top button needs to be enabled in the plugin preferences, located in the WP Dashboard’s Settings Tab. Among all tested Back to top button WordPress plugins, WPFront Scroll Top comes with the largest number of preferences to customize. Of course, there’s no need to go trough them all, the plugin will work well out of the box. WPFront Scroll Top is the only plugin that comes with over 80 back to top button icons to chose from. There’s also the option to upload your own button image. Most of the preferences are related to the button visual appearance and scroll behavior. Apart from that there are filtering options for disabling the button on specific pages and posts. The button appears after a custom defined offset with a customizable fading animation.

The downsides of WPFront Scroll Top are the lack of the option to use a pure text button and no support for FontAwesome icons. The plugin generates 3 server requests which is considered fairly lightweight and doesn’t affect the website loading speed significantly.

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To Top back to top button WordPress plugin

To Top by Catch Plugins is the second most popular back to top button WordPress plugin with over 50.000 active installations. The plugin scores a 5.0 average vote among many WordPress developers.

The plugin works out of the box without any need for enabling or setting up. There are only a couple of basic preferences you can quickly customize, located inside the WordPress Customizer (Appearance → Customize). To Topplugin has limited support (arrow icons only) for Font Awsome, Genericons and Dashicons with the possibility to customize their size and colors. There’s also the possibility to upload your own back to top button image. The button appears and disappears with a nice fading animation.

This plugin has the possibility to disable the button on small screens but doesn’t offer the option to disable the button on certain pages or post types. There is no option to use a pure text back to top button, which some developers prefer to use instead of image buttons. To Top back to top button WordPress plugin is fairly lightweight and fast by generating 3 server requests.

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jQuery Smooth Scroll plugin for WordPress

jQuery Smooth Scroll by Digital Liberation got into the top three most popular back to top button WordPress plugins with over 30.000 active installations. It scores an 4.5 average vote by many WP developers. And there’s one big difference between this plugin and all the tested competitors.

The developers of the jQuery Smooth Scroll plugin decided to keep the things simple. Extremely simple, actually. This plugin works out of the box and it comes with no preferences to customize at all. This makes jQuery Smooth Scroll plugin perfect for less experienced WordPress users because there is no setting up to go trough. In the other hand, some experienced developers that don’t like a messy WordPress backend with too many settings tabs and buttons will like this plugin too. They’ll always be able to customize the back to top button appearance and behavior by editing the plugin code.

The back to top button looks decent and it appears after a bit longer offset with a nice fade in animation. Due to the nature of this plugin, the only downside we could mention is that we’d expect it to be even lighter that it is. The plugin generates 3 server requests which is fairly lightweight, but due to it’s simplicity, perhaps it could be even lighter. Nevertheless, it won’t affect the website loading speed significantly.

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Dynamic “To Top” Plugin for WordPress

Dynamic “To Top” by Matt Varone, Tim Berneman is another quite popular Back to top button WordPress plugin. It has over 20.000 active installations and scores a 4.5 average vote in the WP plugin repository.

Unlike other Back to top button WordPress plugins, Dynamic “To Top” doesn’t offer a any choice of button icons but the default one. In the other hand, the plugin settings (located inside the Appearance tab) offer a wide variety of visual styling options. The default look of the back to top button is quite modest. Nevertheless, if you spend some time customizing the appearance settings, you can achieve very nice visual results. Dynamic “To Top” plugin also offers the possibility of using custom text inside the button, which many users could find very useful. Furthermore, you can choose between a couple of scroll animations and customize the scrolling speed.

Dynamic “To Top” plugin is perfectly optimized for speed. It generates only 2 server requests which is considered very lightweight. If website loading speed means a lot to you and every millisecond counts, you should consider using this plugin as your back to top button solution.

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Smooth Scroll Up back to top button WordPress plugin

Smooth Scroll Up by Konstantinos Kouratoras is another back to top button WordPress plugin worth considering. It has over 10.000 active installations and an 5.0 average vote by many developers. As each tested plugins so far, Smooth Scroll Up has some specific features of it’s own that could influence on your choice.

Apart from the default button image, Smooth Scroll Up offers the possibility to upload your own button image. Full support for Font Awesome is integrated so you can also choose from a wide variety of FA icons. There’s also the option to use custom text buttons in a couple of predefined designs (text link, pill, tab). Unfortunately, there are no visual styling preferences, but there’s a built in CSS editor where more experienced developers can apply their own visual styles to the button. There’s another difference between Smooth Scroll Up and most other back to top button WordPress plugins. Except the standard fade in/out button animation, you can choose the slide in/out animation that looks quite nice.
Smooth Scroll Up offers some filtering options by which you can disable the button an mobile devices or on specific pages and posts. Depending on the plugin configuration, it generates 2-3 server requests, which is consider quite lightweight. Users that optimize their websites for loading speed might consider this back to top button WordPress plugin as their choice.

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Scroll Top back to top button plugin for WordPress

Last but not least on our test, Scroll Top by Idenovasi has over 10.000 active installations and a 4.5 average vote. With a trick or two of it’s own, maybe it’s the right back to top button plugin for your specific project.

Once installed, the back to top button needs to be enabled in the plugin preferences, which you can find in the WP Dashboard’s Settings Tab. The set up is quick and easy, since there are not much preferences to customize. You can choose between three button icons and customize their colors but there’s also the option to use custom text inside the button. Scroll Top back to top button plugin offers both fade and slide animations. Some additional visual styling can be done trough the built in CSS editor.

Unlike other tested plugins, Scroll Top offers the possibility to define a target HTML object id, which you want to scroll to. So if you for example define for example #main as target, clicking the button will take you to the beginning of the page content instead to the very top of it. This could be a useful feature for some projects. This back to top button plugin is also very lightweight and with only 2 generated server requests it won’t significantly impact the website loading speed.

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Which back to top button plugin should you use?

As you noticed reading the reviews, all tested back to top button plugins will do their job well. In the other hand, each plugin has some specific features of it’s own which some developers could find useful. So, instead of declaring an overall winner, here’s a recommendation list that shows which plugin will suit which project the best.

• WPFront Scroll Top: when visual appearance matters the most – lots of visual customizing options and 80+ button images to choose from
• To Top: good all around solution with not too many preferences, but still pretty customizable
• jQuery Smooth Scroll: the “no settings” plugin for those who need a quick install & go solution
• Dynamic “To Top”: very lightweight plugin with custom text button option and lots of visual customization possibilities
• Smooth Scroll Up not to many visual customization possibilities, but full Font Awesome support, custom image upload, a couple of text button styles and slide in/out animation, quite lightweight
• Scroll Top: very lightweight, with custom text option, sliding animation and scroll to target id function, fewer visual customization options

Create your own back to top button with JavaScript

As we mentioned earlier, back to top button plugins are based on simple JavaScript or jQuery scripts. If you’re not satisfied with any of the plugins we suggested or you simply avoid using to many plugins in your projects, try making your own back to top button.

If you feel comfortable and experienced enough to edit WordPress template files, check our Scroll To Top Button JavaScript Tutorial. It’s pretty simple and no advanced knowledge of JavaScript is required. And the best thing is that our JavaScript back to top button is extremely lightweight and in doesn’t generate additional server requests. It won’t affect your website’s loading speed at all.