What are waits in Selenium, and how do you use WebDriverWait in Python?

September 30, 2025

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In Selenium, XPath is one of the most powerful locators to find elements on a webpage. XPath (XML Path Language) lets you navigate through elements and attributes in an XML/HTML document.

Excellent question 👍 This is one of the most important topics in Selenium because waits make your tests reliable.

🔹 What are Waits in Selenium?

Web pages often load elements dynamically (via JavaScript, AJAX, etc.), so Selenium may try to interact with an element before it appears.
Waits are used to pause the script until conditions are met (like an element being present, clickable, or visible).

🔸 Types of Waits

Implicit Wait
- Applies globally to all elements.
- Tells Selenium to wait for a given amount of time before throwing NoSuchElementException.
```
driver.implicitly_wait(10)  # Wait up to 10s for elements to appear
```
Explicit Wait (WebDriverWait) ✅ (most powerful)
- Waits for a specific condition to happen before continuing.
- More flexible and recommended.
Fluent Wait
- Like explicit wait but allows you to define polling frequency and ignore exceptions.
- In Python, this is mostly handled via WebDriverWait + conditions.

🔹 Using WebDriverWait in Python

Selenium provides WebDriverWait + expected_conditions to handle explicit waits.

Example:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get("https://example.com/login")

# Wait until the username input is visible (max 10s)
username_box = WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(
    EC.visibility_of_element_located((By.ID, "username"))
)

# Wait until login button is clickable
login_button = WebDriverWait(driver, 10).until(
    EC.element_to_be_clickable((By.ID, "loginBtn"))
)

# Interact with elements
username_box.send_keys("myUser123")
login_button.click()

driver.quit()

🔹 Common Expected Conditions

Some useful ones from selenium.webdriver.support.expected_conditions (aliased as EC):

presence_of_element_located() → Element exists in the DOM.
visibility_of_element_located() → Element is present and visible.
element_to_be_clickable() → Visible + enabled.
title_is() / title_contains() → Wait for page title.
alert_is_present() → Wait for an alert pop-up.

✅ Summary:

Implicit wait = global, simple, but less precise.
Explicit wait (WebDriverWait) = best practice, waits for specific conditions.
Always prefer WebDriverWait to make your tests stable and avoid flaky failures.

👉 Do you want me to also show you a comparison of implicit vs explicit wait with code examples so you can see when to use each?

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