jQuery insertBefore – Insert Element Before Another Element

We can use the jQuery insertBefore method to move an element before another element, or to insert a new element before another element.

$("#div2").insertBefore("#div1");

Let’s say I have the following HTML:

<div id="div1">
  <p class="p1">This is paragraph 1</p>
  <p class="p2">This is paragraph 2</p>
  <p class="p3">This is paragraph 3</p>
</div>

If we want to move paragraph 3 before paragraph 1, then we can use the jQuery insertBefore() method to do this with the following Javascript code.

$(".p3").insertBefore(".p1");

The result would be as follows:

This is paragraph 3
This is paragraph 1
This is paragraph 2

If you are using WordPress, don’t forget to change the $ to jQuery as below:

jQuery(".p1").insertBefore(".p3");

Using the jQuery insertBefore() Method to insert HTML before a DIV

We can also use the insertBefore() Method to insert new HTML before another element. Take the following HTML:

<div id="div1">
  <p class="p2">This is paragraph 2</p>
  <p class="p3">This is paragraph 3</p>
  <p class="p4">This is paragraph 4</p>
</div>

Say we wanted to add a new paragraph to #div1, right before class “p2”. We can use the insertBefore() method to do this.

$('<p class="p1">This is paragraph 1</p>').insertBefore(".p2");

The result would be as follows:

This is paragraph 1
This is paragraph 2
This is paragraph 3
This is paragraph 4

Hopefully this article has been useful for you to understand how the jQuery insertBefore() method works.