Are you confused about picking the best slider plugin for your WordPress website? This article will help you out by providing a brief overview of some of the most popular options available.
Sliders or carousels can be a useful addition to your website. They serve a lot of purposes such as showcasing featured content and products, either on the homepage or other prominent pages. You can also use sliders to show customer testimonials, information about upcoming events etc. Sliders can also make your website more visually appealing if used correctly.
Keeping the popularity of sliders in mind, it is natural that the WordPress community would have a lot of free slider plugins that you can use on your website.
Smart Slider 3
Smart Slider 3 is one of the most popular and highly rated WordPress slider plugin. It comes with a beautiful and intuitive user interface that makes it easy to create different types of slides.
This plugin offers a lot of practical features:
- You can use this plugin to edit your slider in a manner similar to using page builders. The live slider editor allows you to drop multiple layers over each other and then adjust their placement using rows and columns.
- Use of multiple layers to place elements on a slide and the ability to customize the headings, text, images or buttons etc. that you place on a slide makes it possible for you to create unique slide layouts.
- Pre-built slider templates that you can start using right away without diving too deep into the plugin. This can be a huge time saver while providing decent results.
- Another advantage of this plugin is that the slides you create are responsive and look great on devices of all sizes and resolutions. The sliders you create are also touch friendly.
There are many more awesome features like dynamic slides, support for popular page builders, full WordPress integration and so on.
The MetaSlider plugin is yet another option for anyone who wants to create a slider, a gallery or a carousel in a few minutes. This plugin has something to offer for everyone from website owners to website and theme developers.
As a website owner, you can use this plugin to easily create sliders that are optimized to get your webpages ranked in search engines. The interface is simple and intuitive to use. You can pick any media files that you want to show in the slider using the media library. Providing captions and links for the slides is also doable from a single page.
As a website or theme developer, you can take advantage of the useful actions and filters built into the plugin to provide a much more tightly integrated slider to your clients out-of-box. These hooks also make it easy for you to customize MetaSlider any way you want.
The slider plugin has been developed with speed in mind and only adds very little JavaScript and CSS to your overall page weight. It is also fully responsive and works great with mobile devices.
Depicter Slider
The Depicter Slider plugin would be a great choice for anyone who wants to create responsive and performant sliders. The sliders take advantage of hardware acceleration in order to provide super smooth animations.
The support for touch navigation along with swipe gestures and responsive design makes it ideal for usage on mobile devices. The plugin allows you to integrate a lightweight and dependency-free slider in your website.
Users will be able to easily navigate through the slider using either their mouse or keyboard. There are a lot of integrated UI elements that will allow users to move from one slide to the next such as arrows, bullets, line timer etc.
The plugin also gives you access to a huge library of over 3.2 million images. 30k videos and more for free. You can also easily customize the images you download by cropping them to focus on the right subject or by applying filters with a single click.
People who are in a hurry will be able to use over 130 high quality templates to set up their own slider within minutes.
Prime Slider
The Prime Slider plugin allows you to create fully customized sliders that are compatible with almost every WordPress theme so you don’t have to worry about anything getting messed up.
The plugin offers all the usual features in its sliders such as visual appeal and full responsiveness so that your slides look great to everyone on every device, SEO optimization with UI elements like titles, links and bread crumbs.
There are a lot of free core widgets available for you to use that allow you to create sliders with unique and eye-catchy layouts. For example, the Fiestar slider template allows you to create a slider that combines the features of a post accordion to allow you to present content to readers in an interesting manner.
Similarly, you can use the Isolate slider template to showcase the products from your eCommerce store. The template adds a prominent product image, a large heading and some interactive buttons to all of your slides.
You can find a lot of these slider templates on the plugin homepage and they are useful for integrating with the content of all kinds of websites such as regular blogs, eCommerce or portfolios etc.
Testimonial Slider
Well placed user testimonials can help you increase your sales. The Testimonial Slider plugin helps you do just that by allowing you to show your user testimonials inside a slider.
The slider is fully responsive so people will be able to read the rave reviews of your products or services on all devices. It is incredibly easy for you to add a testimonial slider to any post or page you like by simply using shortcodes.
It is also possible to customize the appearance of the testimonials by changing their color, shape, image size etc. You can even make device specific changes to the testimonial layout to make them appear perfect everywhere.
You can also apply filters on the testimonials in order to only show the reviews by a specific set of people.
Master Slider
Master Slider is a free SEO friendly plugin that you can use to create responsive image and video sliders. The use of hardware acceleration makes all associated animation in the slider very smooth.
The slider enjoys a huge browser support that goes back as far as IE8. It works without any issues on all major browsers and looks great across device sizes.
The slider is easy to use and helps you create sliders quickly with its 8 starter samples. Use of hardware accelerated animation properties makes sure that slide transitions are smooth across all devices.
User can also navigate through the slides either by using a mouse wheel or with touch gestures on mobile devices. Navigation is available in both horizontal as well as vertical direction. The navigation arrows as well as the thumbnails and tabs are fully customizable.
Final Thoughts
I have provided your a brief overview of some of the most popular free WordPress slider plugins that you can use to add slider and carousels to your website today.
The best free WordPress slider plugin right now is Smart Slider 3 in my opinion. It gives you a huge set of features and options to create all types of sliders to either showcase image or blogposts etc. It gives you the right balance between features and complexity so that the learning curve isn’t too steep. You can check out the capability of the free version of this plugin with these slides.
Another great option for creating mind blowing sliders is the Depicter slider. Just checkout the available templates in the library to see what is possible with this plugin. This plugin will give you the best looking sliders if you don’t mind spending some time learning its ins and outs.