useElementVisibility

React Element Hooks that tracks the visibility of an element within the viewport. A wrapper of useIntersectionObserver

useElementVisibility provides a simple boolean indicating whether a DOM element is currently visible within the viewport. It is built on top of useIntersectionObserver and abstracts away the complexity of the Intersection Observer API. It returns a tuple of [isVisible, stop] where stop is a function to disconnect the observer.

When to Use

• Triggering animations or lazy-loading content when an element scrolls into view
• Implementing “read receipt” or “seen” tracking for feed items or notifications
• Conditionally rendering or pausing resource-intensive components when they are off-screen

Notes

• SSR-safe: Returns false during server-side rendering since no DOM is available.
• Customizable: Accepts standard IntersectionObserverInit options (root, rootMargin, threshold) for fine-grained control over when visibility triggers.
• See also useIntersectionObserver for full access to IntersectionObserverEntry data, and useDocumentVisibility for page-level (tab) visibility.

Usage

function Demo() {
  const ref = useRef<HTMLDivElement>(null);
  const [visible, stop] = useElementVisibility(ref);

  return (
    <div>
      <p>Info on the right bottom corner</p>
      <div
        ref={ref}
        style={{
          borderWidth: 2,
          borderStyle: "solid",
          padding: "1rem",
        }}
      >
        Target Element (scroll down)
      </div>
      <button
        onClick={() => {
          stop();
        }}
      >
        Stop
      </button>
      <div
        style={{
          borderWidth: 2,
          borderStyle: "solid",
          padding: "1rem",
          position: "fixed",
          bottom: 0,
          right: 0,
          zIndex: 100,
        }}
      >
        Element {visible ? "inside" : "outside"} the viewport
      </div>
    </div>
  );
};

API

useElementVisibility

Returns

readonly [boolean, () => void]: A tuple with the following elements:

• is the current element visible.
• stop observer listening function.

Arguments

BasicTarget

export type BasicTarget<T extends TargetType = Element> = (() => TargetValue<T>) | TargetValue<T> | MutableRefObject<TargetValue<T>>;

TargetValue

type TargetValue<T> = T | undefined | null;

TargetType

type TargetType = HTMLElement | Element | Window | Document | EventTarget;