Having a well-looking website isn’t enough to stand out. The endless online ocean requires more. You need not only quality content, but an original way to present it.
In other words, you need to make sure your content keeps website visitors engaged. How? By adding sliders to your site. Sliders don’t only grab the attention but help you make your site more engaging, interactive and more fun.
Whether you want to highlight the latest posts, publish online sales or display your most popular content in the stylish fashion, sliders can be your helping hand.
Although many WordPress themes already come with some sort of slider support, you may as well want to consider external plugins equipped with a broad range of additional features.
If used properly, sliders can transform user experience or even boost conversation rates. For this reason, it’s important to find a plugin that flawlessly fits your theme.
For starters, make sure your plugin of choice covers these three basic things.
Responsiveness
As increasingly more people use small screen devices, it’s essential to choose a fully responsive slider plugin.
Sliders that fit perfectly on such devices will improve user experience and make sure you make the most of every visit on your website.
Ease of use
To have your sliders easily created, skip complicated plugins. Instead of losing time on figuring out how to use your plugin, focus on a simple, yet a feature-rich solution.
Always go for the slider plugin with a neat, user-friendly interface.
Speed
Some slider plugins can slow down your website. To stay at a top of the game, choose a slider tool that is powerful and lightweight at the same time.
5 Free Slider Plugins for WordPress
Having in mind that choosing the perfect plugin may a bit difficult, especially for WordPress beginners, we’ve handpicked some of the best ones for you.
1. Slider Revolution
With over 335k sales on Envato Market and a constantly-growing community of happy customers, Slider revolution is a real rock star among slider plugins. The perfect combo of numerous features and easy customization is the reason behind its popularity.
In a nutshell, Slider Revolution lets you create and customize different types of sliders with an intuitive drag-and-drop editor. The plugin has multimedia support. This means you can integrate images, videos, social media feed, as well as WordPress posts and custom posts, to your slides.
The best part is you can fully customize the slider’s style, choose animations and set transitions depending on your needs. In case you don’t want to create sliders from scratch and spend time on customization, there is a set of pre-built slider layouts you can choose from.
After you import the template that perfectly matches your goals, you can start building your sliders.
On top of this, Slider Revolution features a free object library containing all from background images, font icons, and SVG to transparent PNG objects. This is an ideal add-on if you want to go one step further and easily insert professional-looking elements on your slides.
What is also important about the Slider Revolution is its flexibility. The latest version of the plugin integrates website templates from Themeplicity. This means you can even create one-page websites without knowing a single line of code. Finally, Slider Revolution is fully responsive and retina ready.
Your sliders will look amazing an all screen sizes and device types including desktops, notebooks, tablets, and smartphones. Plus, you have all the power in your hands to separately customize how your layers will look on different devices.
Now, if this plugin has the potential to become your new favorite website’s asset, learn about it in more depth and check out a detailed Slider Revolution tutorial.
Features that make the Slider Revolution the best WordPress slider plugin:
- Powerful drag & drop editor
- Animations & transitions
- Zero coding knowledge needed
- Responsive & retina ready
- Multimedia support
2. Smart Slider 3
Another great slider plugin known for its exceptional workflow is Smart slider 3. Created to work with every WordPress element including the Media Library, shortcodes, widgets and posts, this plugin will make slider creating fun.
The first thing that caught our attention is its drag and drop interface with real-time preview. Smart Slider 3 allows you to drop layers one after another and organize them in rows and columns. All without coding knowledge and complex steps.
In case you want to save time, use the ready-made layouts included with this plugin. Simple go to its Slide Library and choose the design that goes with your website’s look & feel. Whether you want to create image, video or post sliders, Smart Slider 3 will allow you to edit their every aspect.
From headings, text, and image, to button types and video styles. As for the features, Smart Slider 3 is also worth your attention. Included with the plugin is a large collection of background animations, ideal for creating interactive sliders.
Moreover, the free version comes with a dynamic post slider – use it to highlight recent posts or featured posts.
There is also a pro-Smart Slider 3 option, packed with some really cool, advanced elements that will boost your sliders. To name a few, let’s only mention a built-in lightbox, built-in image editor and layer animation builder. Lastly, it’s packed with over 50 background animations to choose from.
Features that make Smart Slider 3 the best WordPress slider plugin:
- Content slide builder
- Dynamic Slides
- 9 Slide Backgrounds
- Font and Style manager system
- Highly customizable
3. Layer Slider
This advanced slider plugin is made with the idea to help you create attention-grabbing sliders with ease. What sets it apart from other similar plugins is its powerful toolset.
Packed with versatile options, Layer Slider lets you create not only sliders but image galleries, landing pages, and page blocks as well. In other words, it’s much more than yet another plugin out there.
For instance, it features over 200 pre-defined animation effects including slide transitions, parallax, etc. Another strength of Layer Slider is its set of customization options.
The plugin is bundled with 18 slider skins, as well as tons of pre-made slider templates. This is a huge thing if you prefer ready-made solutions ready to rock your presentation. Included with Layer Slider are Skin PDS files. Thanks to the designers can create personalized skins more easily.
But, the real value of this plugin is its content slider. It’s ideal for presenting lots of information in a limited space.
This means you can pull content from posts and pages to make it more attractive to readers. In the end, Layer Slider incorporates powerful drag and drop interface that will both save your time and energy.
Features that make Layer Slider the best WordPress slider plugin:
- Visual Slider builder
- Drag & Drop slider builder
- Slider Preview
- SEO friendly slider
- 200 Animation effects
4. Master Slider
Master slider is fully responsive, feature-rich plugin equipped with all the necessities for easy slider creation. This tool supports smooth transitions and touch navigation that is one step further when it comes to the mobile experience.
Moreover, Master Slider is translation-ready, and packed with an extended API for WP developers. A large feature base makes a core of this plugin. Despite this, it won’t slow down your website. It’s made to prioritize the performance so you may be sure it won’t affect the loading times.
Master Slider is build based on proven WordPress development practices, so it works great with any WordPress theme. Apart from this, the plugin supports an older version of Internet Explorer and works smoothly across other web browsers.
If all this isn’t enough, you can switch to pro version anytime. It not only integrates sliders for WooCommerce, Facebook and Flickr but also brings options for the background image and parallax effects.
Features that make Master Slider the best WordPress slider plugin:
- SEO friendly
- Easy to Use Interface
- Smart Loading Assets
- 6+ Interactive Slide Transitions
- Superlative Lightweight Outputs
5. Slider by Soliloquy
With over 1.000.000 downloads, Soliloquy continues to sets standards. At its core is the idea that user experience is the number one priority. Its creators put in an extra effort to ensure that Soliloquy is fully responsive and mobile-friendly.
In addition to this, it’s highly optimized for web and server performance. This easy-to-use slider tool comes bundled with all the essential features to create beautiful sliders in minutes. Firstly, it integrates a powerful drag-and-drop builder that supports both video and image sliders.
Secondly, Soliloquy is stacked with a large set of free templates. If for some reason, you don’t want to design anything, you will have professional slider layouts at your disposal.
For example, you can go with Carousel style if you want to create slideshows for carousel images, videos or galleries. On the other hand, you can decide for Instagram slides if you need a slideshow based on your Instagram feed.
Also, there is a PDF slides option, suitable for displaying your presentation slides on your website. In the end, Soliloquy supports product slider displays from WooCommerce stores ideal for featuring products of any kind.
Features that make Soliloquy the best WordPress slider plugin:
- Numerous transitions
- Easy to customize and extend
- Beautiful Templates included
- SEO friendly & very fast
Let’s wrap it up
Interactive content is no longer a matter of choice. It’s the first thing visitors will notice when they visit your website. Luckily, with so many professional, easy-to-customize slider plugins, you can create eye-catching slides with complete ease.
Made to fit the different user’s needs, the slider plugins we talked about definitely deserve your attention. Just choose the one that covers all the options you find important and start building breath-taking sliders today. We promise it’s fun!