How to Make a Custom Mouse Cursor with CSS

Have you ever visited a website and been totally blown away by its amazing features? One of them might be a cool mouse cursor that is different from the regular arrow or pointer cursors you are used to. 

In this article, I will be explaining how to make a custom mouse cursor, using CSS. Then you be will ready to vamp up your website with different creative cursors to keep your audience engaged. Ready? Let's dive in.

How to Customize a Mouse Cursor with CSS

Customizing a mouse cursor with CSS is pretty simple, as CSS already has a property to handle this. All we need to do is identify this property and use it.

As Frontend Engineers we use this property often – it is none other than the almighty cursor property. Yes, that property is what gives us the power to make a custom cursor of our choice. 

Now how do I use CSS to customize a mouse cursor? To use this, you just have to tell CSS what image you intend to use and point the cursor property to the image URL using the url value.

body {
  cursor: url('image-path.png'),auto;
}

From the code snippet above, you can see I set this on the document body, so it can apply to the cursor no matter where it moves. It has the image specified in url(). The next value of the property is a fallback, just in case the image doesn't load or can not be found maybe due to some internal glitches. I'm sure you wouldn't want your website to be "cursor-less", so adding a fallback is very important. You can also add as many fallback URLs as you can or want.