Verba site behavior: transitions, tooltips, smooth scroll

This article covers functionality available to customers on the Pro version.

VerbaTheme OptionsGeneralSite holds a handful of switches that look small and change how the whole site feels. Read this one before you spend an afternoon wondering why your sticky header behaves oddly.

#Page transitions

The Page transitions group carries one master choice with three modes.

How moving from one page to the next feels. Standard is ordinary browser navigation. Animated uses the browser View Transitions API. SPA loads the next page in the background and swaps it in without a full reload.

Choosing SPA reveals its own group of detail settings underneath. What each mode costs you, and when SPA is the wrong answer, is covered in SPA and page transitions.

Test this on your real content, not on a demo. A transition mode that feels great on a five-page site can feel wrong on a long article with embeds and ads.

#Tooltips

Small styled labels the theme shows on hover and on keyboard focus. They are off by default, because they suit some sites and clutter others.

Turn them on with Tooltips in the Misc group. A styling group then appears:

Which of the theme surfaces the tooltip is painted on. Inverted, default, secondary, accent, or custom.

How the tooltip appears. Fade, slide up, blur, or scale.

Only used by the custom style. Leave them empty and the theme colors apply.

Tooltips open on keyboard focus, not only under a mouse pointer. That is why turning them on does not create a layer of information that keyboard users cannot reach.

#Smooth scrolling

Off by default. Turn it on with Smooth scrolling in the Misc group, and a group of controls appears.

How much the scroll eases. Low is close to native, high is a longer, floatier catch-up.

How far one turn of the wheel travels, as a percentage of the normal distance.

The furthest a single trackpad flick can send the page, measured in screens.

Smooth scrolling intercepts the browser scrolling, and the price is real: sticky elements can behave oddly and jumps to anchors land less precisely. It is switched off automatically on touch devices and for visitors who ask for reduced motion.

If you only want anchor links to glide, you probably do not need this. Modern browsers already do that with scroll-behavior: smooth, and it does not affect the rest of the page.

#Admin list columns

The Misc group also adds columns to the WordPress admin lists. None of these change anything a visitor sees.

Adds the view and like counts to the posts list.

Adds the category image to the categories list.

Marks sponsored posts in the posts list, so you can spot them while scanning.

#Questions

Tooltips are on but I do not see any

They appear on elements that have a tooltip attached, mostly icons and controls where a symbol needs a name. If nothing on the page has one, nothing shows.

Should I use smooth scrolling on a long-form blog?

Usually not. Long articles rely on sticky elements and anchor jumps, which are exactly what the effect makes worse. It works better on short, designed pages.

Do the admin columns slow down the posts list?

The counts come from data already stored with each post, so the impact is small. If you never look at them, turning them off keeps the list narrower on a laptop screen.

Last updated 9 Sep 2026

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