How to Use Lottie Animations on Your Website (2026)
Add lightweight, scalable Lottie animations to your website. Learn how to preview, customize, and embed Lottie JSON files with embed code.
- Add lightweight, scalable Lottie animations to your website.
- What Is a Lottie Animation?.
- Why Lottie Over GIF or Video.
- Covers previewing and customizing animations.
- Covers embedding lottie on your site.
What Is a Lottie Animation?
Lottie is a JSON-based animation format created by Airbnb's design team. It renders vector animations exported from Adobe After Effects (via the Bodymovin plugin) on web, iOS, and Android. Unlike GIFs or videos, Lottie animations are resolution-independent (they scale to any size without quality loss), tiny in file size (typically 5-50 KB compared to megabytes for equivalent GIFs), and fully controllable via JavaScript — you can pause, reverse, change speed, and respond to user interactions programmatically.
Why Lottie Over GIF or Video
File size is the primary advantage. A 5-second loading animation as a GIF might be 500 KB. The same animation as Lottie JSON is typically under 20 KB — a 25x reduction. Lottie animations render at native resolution on any screen, so they look crisp on retina displays without doubling the file size. They support transparency natively (no green-screen workarounds). They can be interactive — play on hover, scrub with scroll, respond to clicks. And they're accessible — you can add ARIA labels and respect prefers-reduced-motion media queries.
transform and opacity for smooth 60fps performance. These properties are handled by the GPU compositor and skip expensive layout recalculations.Previewing and Customizing Animations
The Lottie Player lets you drop a .json file and instantly preview the animation. Control playback speed (0.25x to 2x), pause on any frame, and scrub the timeline to inspect timing. The bounce mode (alternating direction) creates seamless loops for loading animations. You can find thousands of free Lottie files on LottieFiles.com — download the JSON file and drop it into the player to preview before adding it to your project.
width, height, top, or left. These trigger layout recalculations on every frame and can drop performance below 60fps.Embedding Lottie on Your Site
The simplest approach is the lottie-player web component: add a script tag for @lottiefiles/lottie-player and use the lottie-player HTML element with a src attribute pointing to your JSON file. For React projects, use the @lottiefiles/react-lottie-player package. For more control, use the lottie-web library directly — it gives you access to playSegments(), setSpeed(), and frame-level control via the enterFrame event. Host the JSON file alongside your other assets — it's just a static file, no special server setup needed.