Adding a stylish and well-designed slider to your website is a great way to attract traffic and achieve more conversions for your business. When done correctly, sliders work to enhance your website by making it more engaging, more interesting and more interactive. Choosing the right slider for your website can prove difficult at times, as there are so many options available on the market. Therefore, to save you time and money, we have assembled this list of the top WordPress slider plugins to use on your website.
How to Choose the Right WordPress Slider Plugin
Adding sliders to your website helps to make it more attractive and eye-catching. However, one thing that you should be careful of, is that some slider plugins can affect the speed and functionality of your website. Because of this, it’s important to be very careful to select a slider plugin that seamlessly integrates with your site.
When it boils down to it, there are three basic things that you should look for in a good slider plug-in.
Firstly, make sure that the slider you select is fully responsive, meaning that it will adapt to the many screen sizes and devices that your audience will be using today. Responsiveness is such an important feature nowadays and should not be overlooked. It’s important to consider all devices, such as hand-held mobile phones and tablets, as well as laptops and desktop computers when choosing your slider plugin, otherwise, you may miss out on targeting a wide proportion of your potential website traffic.
The second thing you should consider is the ease-of-use of the plug-in. There are many plugins available on the market but only a handful of these offer user-friendly interfaces and easy-to-use functionality. It’s best not to pick a complicated plugin, especially if you are new to using sliders to display content on your website. After all, the longer it takes you to learn to use the plugin, the less time you have to focus on other aspects of your site.
The third and possibly most important thing to consider is speed. It’s often said that slider plugins can drastically slow down your website by increasing the load time of your webpage. If a slider slows down your site, there’s not much point in using that plugin, as website speed is very important when it comes to SEO, user experience, and business growth and development.
So, when looking for a slider plugin for your e-commerce store, make sure to keep these three things in mind – responsiveness, ease-of-use, and speed.
With that in mind, here is our list of the top 12 slider plugins available for WordPress.
Soliloquy
Soliloquy is probably the best responsive WordPress slider plugin available right now. When we installed and tested the plug-in, it easily satisfied the three main requirements listed above. Soliloquy is developed by a team of experts that are highly experienced in WordPress and use their knowledge of top-quality coding and the latest technologies to build a plugin that offers the latest and greatest slider building features.
Soliloquy features a straight-forward and user-friendly interface that allows users to create sliders with the greatest of ease. It integrates seamlessly with your WordPress interface and allows you to use images from your media library. It’s super easy to add images, configure your desired settings, and then publish.
Once your slider has been created, it’s easy to embed the slider in your pages and posts by using the Add Slider button, located above your post editor. Of course, you can also add the slider to different areas of your website by the use of a shortcode, widget, or template tag.
Soliloquy sliders look amazing and your customers will love them.
Smart Slider 3
Smart Slider 3 is one of the most powerful and elegant sliders available for WordPress. There is a free version of this plug-in available that offers SEO optimized sliders that are fully responsive and work with any WordPress theme. You will also get a dynamic post slider with the free version, that allows you to highlight recent or featured posts.
If you are searching for more functions and features, the pro version allows you to edit your files just as you would with a page builder. It features a very easy-to-use drag and drop layout that makes building a beautiful slider quick and easy. It also features 6 unique layers that help you to build a highly customized WordPress slider.
Take a look at it today and see why more and more web designers are opting for Smart Slider 3.
Slider Revolution
Slider Revolution is the number 1 selling WordPress slider plugin. It is developed for the CodeCanyon marketplace and features a powerful visual editor that makes it easy to create and customize stunning sliders in WordPress.
It’s a fully responsive plugin, so your sliders will look fantastic on all devices and screen sizes. It is also what is known as a true multimedia support slider, meaning it is possible to use images, videos, social media feeds, WordPress posts, and custom posts in your sliders.
While this plugin utilizes many powerful features to make your sliders really stand out, it does lack a little in the usability department and isn’t quite as user-friendly as some other plugins on this list. An example of this is that you’ll have to add your sliders via shortcodes instead of the more user-friendly option of using an Add Slider button or something similar. Another thing to note is that the Slider Revolution interface looks quite different from the rest of the WordPress design, which can be a little tricky for beginners.
But despite these couple of usability issues, it’s easy to see why Slider Revolution is the most popular slider plugin available for WordPress, with lots of customization options and the ability to post many types of media.
LayerSlider
Also found on the CodeCanyon marketplace, LayerSlider is a popular plugin with many powerful options and features that allows you to create stylish sliders, animated landing pages, image galleries featuring effects, page blocks, or even a full website if you so desire.
It is similar to Slider Revolution, in that it features a drag and drop interface, with which to build your sliders. Again, the interface isn’t as easy-to-use for beginners but with a little bit of practice, you’ll get the hang of it in no time.
The main advantage of this plugin is that it allows you to add a variety of animations and transitions to your sliders. These look great and really expand the user experience of your customers. There are more than 200 pre-defined slide transitions, parallaxes, and animations. You’ll also find a large variety of premium slider templates that can be used for building websites, presenting creative portfolios, and many other tasks.
RoyalSlider
RoyalSlider is another slider plugin found on the CodeCanyon marketplace. It’s a popular and high-selling plugin that is easy-to-use but features fewer customization options, animation effects, and transitions than the previous two CodeCanyon plugins. It does, however, feature everything you need to create sliders for your WordPress website.
RoyalSlider focuses mainly on usability and increased performance. It features an intuitive user interface and a lazy-loading option that helps to improve the speed of your page, making it a better plugin for SEO optimization.
It’s also very easy to integrate your Instagram and Flickr photos with your WordPress slider by using the RoyalSlider plugin. Plus, it supports YouTube and Vimeo, allowing you to add videos and create more interesting and engaging sliders
With RoyalSlider, you’ll be creating fantastic looking sliders in no time.
Slider by WD
Slider by WD is a free premium WordPress plugin designed to help you create beautiful and responsive sliders. It builds fast-loading and SEO-friendly sliders that can be added to your website pages, sidebars, theme headers, posts, and virtually any other location on your website, with ease and simplicity.
The free version of Slider by WD makes it possible to add both image and video sliders and features a range of transition effects. If you decide to upgrade to the paid premium version, you’ll find other useful features at your disposal, such as filmstrip, carousel, and parallax effects. With the paid version, you’ll also be able to create multifunctional sliders that feature text, images, videos, hotspots, and social media buttons.
One of the key features of this plugin is its swipe control for touch screen devices, enhancing the user experience of those on phones and tablets. It also features a good range of slider embedding options, however, these options are not as user-friendly the Soliloquy plugin, the difference being, with Slider by WD, you have to copy and paste the shortcode in order to embed the slider in posts and pages, whereas, with the Soliloquy plugin, you can add the slider directly from the Post editor.
WonderPlugin Wordpress Slider
WonderPlugin ss a simple, easy to use, and responsive WordPress slider plugin that is available in both free and paid-for versions. The big downside of the free version is that it will add a watermark to your sliders that links to the developer’s homepage. Because of this, we would always recommend that you consider the premium version of this plugin.
WonderPlugin Wordpress Slider has support for images, MP4, YouTube, Vimeo, and WebM files, as well as for WordPress posts. It’s possible to build both horizontal and vertical slideshows to embed on your site and the embedding process is easy and hassle-free.
Like some of the previous plugins, it also features beautifully-designed transition effects such as, the built-in lightbox effect, which helps to create sliders that catch the attention of users. One of the biggest advantages of this plugin is that it features a wizard-style user interface that enables easy, step-by-step slider building.
Smooth Slider
The Smooth Slider plugin allows users to build sliders and carousels that are attention-grabbing and function smoothly and attractively. This plugin has been specifically developed for the WordPress CMS, giving it a very easy-to-understand, simple-to-use user interface that will feel familiar to any WordPress user.
You can use this plugin to build a range of sliders such as post sliders, image sliders, and video sliders. Simply utilize the images located in your WordPress Media gallery and add them to the slider to start building. To help you make your sliders look unique, this plugin allows you to customize the typography, background color, effect, transition speed, slider height and width, and much more.
Once you’ve got your slider looking the way you want, add it to your site by using a short code, template tag, or widget. It’s also possible to export the sliders, as they are, to other sites.
Master Slider
Master Slider is a stylish WordPress touch slider plugin that allows users to navigate the slider using a swipe motion. It’s mobile-friendly, fully responsive, and adaptive to all screen sizes and devices.
It’s a fantastic plugin, that gives users the option of transforming content such as images and text into layers. It supports a wide range of media files, including images, videos, WooCommerce products, Facebook albums, Flickr galleries, and WordPress posts. It also features more than 90 pre-built sliders that can be used throughout your site.
Master Slider also comes integrated with visual composer, making slider building easy, thanks to the drag and drop frontend editor.
MetaSlider
MetaSlider ss a powerful, yet easy-to-use slider plug-in that allows users to build fully responsive slideshows quickly and simply. It has been developed with a wide range of interesting features such as thumbnail navigation, video support, animated layer slides, post feed slides, and much more.
In MetaSlider, you’ll find the power of 4 different plugins combined into one super slider plugin – Flex Slider, Nivo Slider, Coin Slider, and Responsive Slides. It is also compatible with all the popular WordPress plugins and themes.
It comes in both a free and premium version, allowing you to try the plugin before you buy.
Meteor Slides
This is a free slider plugin available for WordPress that can be downloaded from the official WordPress plugin repository and can be used on as many websites as you wish. Meteor Slides allows users to create simple image slideshows, in a straight-forward and easy manner.
It’s a mobile-friendly plugin that works on any device and screen size and also supports touch navigation for hand-held devices. Sliders are embedded in your site by way of shortcode, widgets, or template tags.
It may not come with as many features or functions as most other slider builders on this list but it is a solid, easy-to-use plugin for those only looking to build simple image sliders. If you are looking to build sliders featuring videos, feeds, or other content mentioned in this article, you’ll have to look elsewhere than this plug-in.
FlexSlider
The last plugin on our list, FlexSlider, is also a free-to-use WordPress plug-in that allows users to create fully-responsive jQuery sliders.
With this plug-in, it’s possible to create both vertical and horizontal sliders and add fade animations to them. FlexSlider supports all popular browsers, features touch navigation, and is compatible with jQuery.
It’s an easy-to-use, simple jQuery slider builder that can be used for building basic sliders.
Sliders are a great way to make your website stand out from those of your competitors and expose your users to a wider range of content. This list aimed to help you choose the perfect slider plugin for your website, depending on your need for functions and design. We hope this article helped you to make an informed decision.