Smooth Scrolling To Internal Links With jQuery

jQuery allows you change the way you interact with your website with very little code. jQuery has an animate function which allows you to animate anything that jQuery does, including scrolling. Animate scrolling creates a better effect to the visitor than to just job to a place on the page. There are many websites that will use internal links to jump to different parts of the page this is done by using a # and then the element id in the anchor tag.

<a href="#services">Jump to services</a>

<div id="services">

</div>

Doing the above creates a link that will move the page to the services div when you click it. But it jumps to this position and if it's far down the page it's not the nicest effect to the visitor. It's better if you can actually scroll to this position to help the visitors see where this is positioned. In jQuery if you set an animation on the scroll event then it creates a scrolling effect in the browser.

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

	    var target = this.hash;
	    var $target = $(target);

	    $('html, body').stop().animate({
	        'scrollTop': $target.offset().top
	    }, 900, 'swing', function () {
	        window.location.hash = target;
	    });
	});
});

Add the above in your $(document).ready function in your jQuery file and all links which start with a # will have an animated scroll to the target.

#Stop Anchor Being Included In URL

From the above code you will see that the URL changes on the click event to show the anchor at the end of the URL. If you would like to remove this from the URL on the click event then you simply need to remove the last callback function in the animate function.

$('html, body').stop().animate({
     'scrollTop': $target.offset().top
}, 900, 'swing');