Sticky Position (Bar) with CSS or jQuery

By . in Coding. Updated on .

The idea of ‘sticky position’ is to make elements on a website stick and remain visible. Those elements will initially be in their position, and then in the event of scrolling down the webpage, their position will be following the scroll.

In Facebook, this technique has been applied to their sidebar; when we scroll down the page, you will find that it follows the scroll and thus remains visible.

Over all the years, this practice is done using JavaScript or jQuery, as follows.

The jQuery Way

In this example, we will create a simple webpage that consists of the header, the navigation and the content.

<div class="wrapper">
	<div class="header">
		Header
	</div>
	<div class="nav">
		Navigation
	</div>
	<div class="content">
		<p>Candy canes tart pie biscuit. Cupcake liquorice cake dessert tootsie roll 
		applicake pastry. ...</p>
	</div>
</div>

And, we will apply the sticky position to the navigation.

But first, we will define the styles in the stylesheet, like so.

.sticky {
	position: fixed;
	width: 100%;
	left: 0;
	top: 0;
	z-index: 100;
	border-top: 0;
}

Then, we will apply that class to the navigation conditionally with jQuery.

$(document).ready(function() {
var stickyNavTop = $('.nav').offset().top;

var stickyNav = function(){
var scrollTop = $(window).scrollTop();
     
if (scrollTop > stickyNavTop) { 
    $('.nav').addClass('sticky');
} else {
    $('.nav').removeClass('sticky'); 
}
};

stickyNav();

$(window).scroll(function() {
	stickyNav();
});
});

Finally, you can see the demo from the link below.

All right, this way is probably a bit convoluted for those who are not familiar with jQuery as a whole. Alternatively, to achieve the same effect is a bit easier with jQuery – you can use a plugin, ScrollToFixed. Or else, let’s take a look at another way with CSS.

The CSS Way

Recently, Webkit introduced a new position value that is simply called sticky, and it does the same thing the jQuery code above does. However, since this sticky value is still determined as experimental feature, we need to first enable this feature.

Assuming that your current Chrome is version 23 and above, you can type the following in the address bar: chrome://flags. Otherwise, you need to first update it.

chrome flags

Then, find the following section, Enable experimental WebKit features on the list and set this feature to Enable.

experimental feature

In the stylesheet, we simply set the navigation position to sticky. But, since it is only available on Webkit, it will only work with the prefix, like so.

.nav {
	position: -webkit-sticky;
	top: 0;
	z-index: 1;
}

Now, the navigation should act in the same way as we did with jQuery. See the demo below in Google Chrome Canary to see it in action.

However, as mentioned above, this feature is experimental and yet applicable in any current browsers.

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