John Rhea – Frontend Masters Blog

Replace Your Animated GIFs with SVGs

By John Rhea on September 15, 2025

You can animate an .svg and it will play even with an `` or `background-image`, making it a viable GIF replacement if you can pull it off!

Author

John Rhea

Undead Institute

John is quite the space cadet. He's also a storyteller with design and development skills. He designs and builds websites at johnrhea.com (and, yeah, it's space themed), counts his words carefully at 8wordstories.com and helps you kill zombies while learning web development at undead.institute. He lives near Charlottesville, VA with his wife and, like, a lot of kids (eight at last count) plus more pets than is wise to enumerate. If you see him and he’s both awake and properly dressed, you know he’s having a good day.

$839,000

Frontend Masters donates to open source projects through thanks.dev and Open Collective, as well as donates to non-profits like The Last Mile, Annie Canons, and Vets Who Code.