Are you looking for the best WordPress slider plugins? If yes, you’ve landed on the right article.
A WordPress slider can take many forms, from a simple display of your new products to high-definition animated presentations. A slider can help you give your WordPress website a new look, make the most of space and show off your content.
Now, finding a decent WordPress slider plugin that is easy to configure and doesn’t give you problems can be difficult if you don’t know where to look. There are many free as well as paid options available, so in this post, we’re going to recommend the best WordPress slider plugins.
Best WordPress Slider Plugins
Today we bring you the 6 best sliders for WordPress, many of them are responsive with parallax animations and more features that make your site attractive.
1. Smart Slider 3
With more than 900,000 active installations and a score of 4.9/5, Smart Slider 3 is one of the best WordPress slider plugins. The main reason it stands out among its competitor is the user experience. If you see the introductory video which is in the WordPress repository you can find tutorials, documentation, and above all its incredible interface.
It has a very simple slider creator which adds 6 optional layers to create a unique design by adding images, texts, and even videos from Vimeo or Youtube. Not only that, it supports page builders like Divi, Elementor, Beaver Builder, Visual Composer, etc.
In case you do not want to start everything from the scratch, it has 4 slider templates to choose from. Smart Slider 3 plugin has both free and paid versions. Saying that the free version has more than enough functions for most cases.
Highlighted Features of Smart Slider 3:
- Font and style management system
- Horizontal, vertical, and blur transitions
- 9 different animation backgrounds for slides
- Create a slider for WooCommerce products or events
- Autoplay programming options, arrows, buttons, bar, and thumbnails
Price: Free or $49 for a Single Site
2. Master Slider
Another well-known plugin among WordPress slider plugins with more than 100,000 active installs is Master Slider. This plugin has a very clean administration panel which is easy to manage once you know the available options. Also, there are a few configurations needed but they’ve great documentation to help you through the process.
It offers the possibility of hiding or showing each of the images that you’ve added to a slider. So you don’t have to show them all if you don’t want to, and you can easily change them.
Master Slider also has a Pro version that offers full-screen and width formats. You can create a post slider, product slider, or even use an HD video as a background and a lot more.
Highlighted Features of Master Slider:
- It’s 100% responsive
- Has a total of 6 different transitions
- Allows import and export of sliders
- Includes 8 predefined WordPress slider templates and several additional skins
- The creation of sliders is done in drag-and-drop mode and has a live preview tool
Price: Free or $17 for a Regular License
3. MetaSlider
Thanks to the ease of use of MetaSlider and its default options, it takes very little effort to create an attractive slider for your WordPress website. As soon as you install it, you’ll be able to create your first WordPress slider using the images from your media library (the paid version allows you to use more file formats).
In addition, the plugin offers an add-on – MetaSlider Lightbox that you can install for free. The add-on opens your slides in a separate lightbox window when the user clicks on one of them. It’ll be useful if you want to make it easier to view the content of each image that is larger than the slider.
Highlighted Features of MetaSlider:
- Add title and subtitles in the slider
- Possibility of displaying the slides in full width
- A widget to add sliders in sidebars or in the footer
- 4 different slider options with different styles, transitions
- Convert each of the images into a link to the page of your choice
Price: Free or $39.50/Year for a Single Site License
4. Soliloquy
Soliloquy is also one of the best WordPress slider plugins for lots of good reasons. Soliloquy is easy to set up and use. The best thing is, that there is a little learning curve because its options are so simple. You just have to add the images, select the size of the slider, the speed you want and voila, you can publish.
This plugin also has both free and paid versions. In the paid version it includes the option to import and export sliders within the same website or to other websites. They’re options that are great, but these are not available in the free version of the plugin.
Soliloquy plugin also falls under the fastest-loading WordPress slider in this list. If you want a fast, high-performing WordPress site, then Soliloquy is the best WordPress slider for you.
Highlighted Features of Soliloquy:
- Drag-and-drop editor
- Possibility to edit and crop the images in the slider
- Fully responsive and touch-friendly WordPress sliders
- Ability to add metadata to each of the images in the slider
- Widget to add the sliders to the different sections of your website
Price: Free or $17/Year for a Single Site License
5. Slide Anything
As the name suggests, Slide Anything allows you to add almost any item to a slider. Besides images and videos, you can also upload various HTML elements, posts, and even shortcodes.
This developer-friendly tool allows you to create a fully responsive carousel that users can swipe from any device. Also, you can add basic transition effects like zoom in and zoom out.
If you’re someone who needs a flexible tool to create complex designs. With the premium version of Slide Anything, you’ll be able to create pop-ups and also add thumbnail pagination. Hence, Slide Anything is one of the best WordPress slider plugins on this list.
Highlighted Features of Slide Anything:
- Includes a lot of cool transition effects
- Offers lazy loading to help with page speed
- Configure a different background image/color for each slide
- It gives you the ability to infinitely repeat the slides and reorder them
- Transitions include Slide, Fade, Zoom In, Zoom Out, Flip, Rotate, Bounce, etc
Price: Free or $10 for a Single Site License
6. Slider Pro
Slider Pro is another reliable premium option for the WordPress slider plugin that helps you create professional effects on your website. You can add touch slides, smooth transitions, and animated layers. There are also various navigation options and multiple layout options.
In addition, it allows you to import content from other galleries such as Flickr. If you prefer a lightweight tool with advanced customization options or a visual creative who wants to import images from other websites.
There are 5 types of demos to explore before getting started and choose the one that you like and fits your requirements. You can customize each slide with either solid color, background image, or Youtube/Vimeo videos.
Highlighted Features of Slider Pro:
- Unlimited Numbers of Slides
- Allows users to tap and slide on slides
- Includes lazy loading, API support, and caching
- Allows you to add full-width slides, which repeat endlessly
- Provides dynamic content, animation effects, video options, and a lightbox option
Price: $39
Wrapping It Up!
Sometimes, plugins can easily increase page load time by an inappropriate amount. But the slider plugins we’ve listed are optimized properly and are good at increasing user engagement. Having a working slider on the home page of your website or blog to display featured or featured content really adds more points to the overall user experience.
All the plugins listed above have their own benefits hence, you can choose any one of them. However, if you’re confused, we recommend Smart Slider 3. It has a free as well as a premium version.
We hope this article answers the questions regarding the best WordPress slider plugin in terms of performance and quality. If you want to improve your website performance then you can take a look at our article on the best WordPress caching plugins.
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