How to optimize animations and transitions in a web interface to achieve a stable 60 frames per second?

Creating smooth animations is a key aspect of how users perceive a site's performance. When an animation lags or stutters, the application feels slow and low-quality regardless of data loading speed.

The main rule of smooth animation is to use only two CSS properties for transformations: transform and opacity. Changes to these properties are processed exclusively by the GPU via hardware acceleration, bypassing the time-consuming steps of layout recalculation and rendering at the CPU level.

Never animate properties such as width, height, top, left, margin, or padding. Changing them forces the browser to recalculate the geometry of all elements on the page for every single frame, which inevitably leads to dropped frame rates and interface freezes.

If you need to animate an element's size, use the transform property with the scale value instead of changing width and height. To move elements instead of top and left, use translate3d or translateX, which guarantees high performance even on weak mobile devices.

To run and control animations in JavaScript, always prefer the requestAnimationFrame function over the outdated setInterval or setTimeout. This allows you to synchronize frame updates with the monitor's refresh rate and automatically pause animations on inactive tabs.