How to replace a DOM element

Published Dec 02 2018

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Say you have a DOM element, which you have a reference to (maybe retrieved using querySelector()).

To replace it with another DOM element, you can call the replaceWith() method on the first element, passing the second element as argument:

const el1 = document.querySelector(/* ... */)
const el2 = document.querySelector(/* ... */)

el1.replaceWith(el2)

Since Edge <17 and IE11 do not support it, you should transpile it to ES5 using Babel if you plan to support those browsers.

Another solution is to lookup the parent and use the replaceChild() method, which is much older and supported by all browsers:

const el1 = document.querySelector(/* ... */)
const el2 = document.querySelector(/* ... */)

el1.parentNode.replaceChild(el2, el1)

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