Not a good practice is to add an exact time wait which usually is done by the Thread.sleep() method.

Or you can create a method in order to pass seconds for the explicit wait, but again this is not a best practice:

public void waitSeconds(int seconds){
	try {
		Thread.sleep(seconds * 1000);
	} catch (InterruptedException e) {
		e.printStackTrace();
	}
}

Selenium WebDriver provides some out of the shelf methods that will help you write code that will wait only as long as required.

WebDriverWait in combination with ExpectedCondition is better than what an ExplicitWait can be achieved:

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
driver.get("http://somedomain/url_that_delays_loading");
WebElement myDynamicElement = (new WebDriverWait(driver, 10)).until(ExpectedConditions.presenceOfElementLocated(By.id("myDynamicElement")));

This waits up to 10 seconds before throwing a TimeoutException or if it finds the element will return it in 0 – 10 seconds.

Or you can use a generic method in order to wait for elements to be present or visible:

public void waitForElement(int seconds, String waitConditionLocator){
	WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, seconds);
	wait.until(ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(By.xpath(waitConditionLocator)));
}

or

public static boolean isElementPresent(By by, WebDriver driver) {
	boolean present;
	try{
		driver.findElement(by);
		present = true;
	}catch (NoSuchElementException e){
		present = false;
	}
	return present;
}

or

there’s an alternative way by checking the count using FindElements which won’t throw an exception:

if( driver.FindElements(By.CssSelector(exportCssSelector)).Count‌() > 0) {//element exists}

WebDriverWait by default calls the ExpectedCondition every 0.5 seconds until it returns successfully. A successful return value for the ExpectedCondition function type is a Boolean value of true, or a non-null object.

Expected Conditions

There are some common conditions that are frequently encountered when automating web browsers. Listed below are a few examples for the usage of such conditions. The Java, C#, and Python bindings include convenience methods so you don’t have to code an ExpectedCondition class yourself or create your own utility package for them.
Element is Clickable – it is Displayed and Enabled.

WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 10);
WebElement element = wait.until(ExpectedConditions.elementToBeClickable(By.id("idOfElementToBeClicked")));

The ExpectedConditions package (Java) (Python) (.NET) contains a set of predefined conditions to use with WebDriverWait.