Use WordPress Slider Plugin to Make Your Website Captivating

Presumably, you are thinking of using the WordPress slider plugin and want to know more about it. That’s why you have landed on this blog post.

Wellcome! You are absolutely in the right place. In this blog post, you will get an in-depth idea about your search query.

In the first part of this blog, we will discuss what a WordPress slider plugin is and what you need to look for in a WP slider plugin. Finally, in the last part of this blog, we will present to you our best 3 WordPress slider plugins.

So, let’s get started.

What is even a WordPress slider plugin?

A WordPress slider plugin allows you to feature and display your interactive or visual content on your webpage. You can showcase your multiple images, videos, reviews, portfolios, and many more in the form of slideshows or sliding galleries.

Website owners mainly use WP slider plugins for presenting their portfolio, eCommerce products, product promotions, or even their visually appealing images.

You can make your simple website more captivating and create a memorable visual experience using it. Also, you can use an image generator or stock photos to create unique and custom visuals. These visuals will fit seamlessly into your slideshows.

Moreover, a perfect slideshow could tell everything about you and your brand. 

What to look for in a WordPress slider plugin?

It’s crucial to analyze what’s inside a WordPress slider plugin and how it will serve you when creating your sliders. In this section, you will learn what things you need to look for before picking your WP slider plugin.

Easy to use

The first thing you need to look at about the WordPress Slider plugin is its ease of use. The plugin you are considering picking needs to be intuitive. So, it will be easy for you to set it up and navigate.

Explore the interface, whether it is user friendly or not. No matter if you are a newbie or an expert in WordPress. Sometimes, an expert can feel overwhelmed when facing a complex interface.

Typically, an easy-to-use slider plugin is geared with drag and drop builder. Drag and drop builder makes creating sliders super easy. You need to look for its availability.

Note: If you are already a WordPress nerd and want to explore more with it, then you can opt for an advanced WP slider plugin. Where you have some opportunities to do some coding and advanced customization.

Again, if you’re just stepping into WordPress, then choose one that is handy and easy to use.

Responsiveness

Do you know why it is crucial for a slider plugin to be responsive? What’s the ability of it?

A responsive slider ensures displaying your sliders correctly on desktop, mobile, and tablet. Your viewers won’t come to your site only through the desktop. In recent times, visitors have preferred visiting your website on mobile devices, sometimes tablets.

If your WP slider isn’t responsive, visitors will experience a bad experience and face difficulty while looking at your content. In consequence, your bounce rate will increase.

That’s why it’s recommended to check the responsiveness before using a plugin for your sliders.

Speed

Choosing a plugin for creating stunning sliders is a pretty good move. But don’t always focus on its design opportunities. You need to look into whether it will slow down your page load time. And slowing down page loading time negatively impacts SEO.

A WP slider plugin optimized for speed holds potential benefits for you in SEO, along with designing sliders. It’s a crucial SEO factor.

So, try to choose a plugin that is SEO friendly and has amazing design opportunities. That way, your visitors will be engaged with your content without losing interest.

Customization options

Almost every WP slider plugin allows you to customize your slider. But the options for customization aren’t the same.

Even if a slider plugin has the most advanced customizable options, flexibility is a must. Obviously, the ability to customize needs to match your expectations. The way you are expecting to spice up your slider design.

Look into the customization options properly before picking any. Furthermore, it needs to allow editing of almost every detail, like slider templates, images, videos, text, buttons, custom animations, and so on.

Layout and design

Layout and design! That’s a crucial factor to consider while choosing a WordPress slider plugin. Slider plugins are mostly popular for their unique design and layout options, which make your webpage captivating.

Well, your slider plugin needs to offer a bunch of pre-made templates, design options, animations, effects, etc. Also allowing for editing.

Don’t forget to look over whether you can make the popular types of sliders, like carousel sliders, video sliders, post sliders, product sliders, etc., or what type you want from them.

Remember, every slider may not offer you the same type, design options, or output. Each one has its own peculiarity and is made for different purposes.

Choose yours according to your expectations for the types of design, layout, and output you want from a WP slider plugin.

Pricing

Lastly, after looking into these above mentioned options, you need to come up with pricing considerations.

You can explore the free version of almost every one of the WP slider plugins. But there are pretty good limitations. The free version is only for some basic slider creation.

Again, some plugins allow a free trial for a small period of time, like 14 days or 21 days. If any slider plugin is allowing this opportunity, then grab it.

It is true that free versions will help you get a basic idea of a plugin. And a free trial will allow you to be well informed about the plugin.

Following these two steps, you need to make a decision: is it worthwhile to purchase? Will it meet your expectations, considering the price?

Presenting 3 best WordPress slider plugins

A variety of WordPress slider plugins are present on the market. Again, several WordPress plugin firms are developing new ones with more features.

In this scenario of multiple possibilities, you will be confused about which one is the ultimate one for you. So, in this section of this blog, you will look into 3 best WordPress slider plugins for you to choose from.

Keep scrolling.

1. Slider Revolution

Over 9 million websites worldwide are currently using Slider Revolution. It’s one of the most popular and best-selling slider plugins in the CodeCanyon marketplace.

ThemePunch developed this plugin and released it in 2012. This tool is jam packed with amazing features. You will be happy for sure, when exploring the advanced solutions to it. You can consider it the most powerful slider plugin for WordPress.

There is a chitchat, “Slider Revolution is an auto-choice for many web designers and developers.”

Features that make Slider Revolution great

• Slider Revolution offers 250+ cutting-edge, ready-made design templates. All the templates are editable. So, you can pick and edit the best quality option that matches your site’s theme or design.

• It has 25+ add ons for special effects like before and after sliders, particles, distortion, reveal, and so on. A tactful utilization of these addons can leave your audience amazed.

• You can advance your initial idea into some stunning designs with its 2000+ element library. In the element library, you will find background images, videos, font icons, premade layer groups, and more.

• Also, you can create stunning sliders and carousels with your media in your hand.

• It helps you create stunning and dynamic sliders, carousels, hero sections, or even an entire front page.

• With its powerful visual editor, you can create both simple and advanced content for your web page. You will have full control over almost every detail. An extra perk of it is, you don’t need any coding knowledge for it.

• Slider Revolutions is a fully responsive WP slider plugin. Sliders, carousels, and web pages—no matter what you create with them, the output will look splendidly responsive on any device.

• It comes with web page animation with smooth transitions. Its unique animation can make your web page more lucrative. You web viewers will feel like these are made with aftereffects.

• Slider Revolution provides stellar customer support. The highly qualified customer support team will be there for you 24/7, solving your issues and answering your questions.

Insider tips

This slider plugin is more suitable for expert or intermediate WordPress developers. Sometimes, it will be a bit complicated for newbies or non-technical users.

If you are in the second group, there is a learning curve for you. At first, you may find it hard to navigate. Its editor doesn’t look like the WordPress interface. Initially, you need to explore more and invest a good time in it.

One downside of this plugin is that it’s not the fastest WordPress slider plugin. Therefore, it can significantly increase your page loading as well as hurt your SEO.

Only if you are focusing on showing captivating content to your visitors, then this choice worth making for you.

Lastly, Slider Revolution is not a simple plugin. Consider it an innovative plugin for innovative WordPress developers.

Pricing

Slider Revolution doesn’t include any free versions. Let’s check the premium packages.

Starter: The pricing starts at $35 per year. You can go for a one-time payment of $89. The starter pack is for a single website.

Enthusiast: The annual package is $89 per year and the one-time package charges $227. You can use the package on three sites.

Professional: You can use the professional package for 5 websites for $139 for one year and go for a one-time payment of $365. Also, there is an option for choosing 5 to 100+ websites and the pricing will increase according to that.

2. MetaSlider

MetaSlider, a widely used WordPress slider plugin, is another popular contender for being on the list. This plugin is well known for its simplicity. Even though it’s simple, it could provide you with robust solutions for creating slides.

With over 600,000+ active installations and more than 650 reviews on WordPress repository, this plugin empowers websites to create some stunning sliders.

Let me share an interesting fact with you. Nasa is using MetaSlider on one of their WordPress sites. Plus, some major brands, such as Vimeo, Harvard, and Stanford University, trust MetaSlider. They have used this plugin to create fast and fully responsive sliders on their own sites.

Features that make MetaSlider great

• You can make some stunning slideshows like image slides, video slides, layer slides, HTML slides, product slides, post feed sliders, and carousel slides.

• This slider plugin has several lucrative templates, effects, and preset modules to choose from.

• It works seamlessly with the Gutenberg block editor. And the advantage is, you can work on each of these with the WordPress Gutenberg block editor.

• A fully responsive WP slider plugin that looks good on desktop, mobile, and tablet also. Plus, its responsive sliders are pretty engaging. So, with its assistance, you can increase the traffic’s time spent on your webpage.

• You can work with any content on your site, like images, videos, products, blog posts, news articles, and more.

• You don’t need any third-party plugins to resize your images. Its intelligent image cropping feature allows you to ensure your images are correctly sized.

• It seamlessly integrates with WooCommerce, WPML, and the Events Calendar.

• MetaSlider is lightning fast and optimized for SEO. It allows you to tag every image and use metadata. So, you can improve your SEO effort.

• If you want to show your slides on a specific date or time, there is an option for scheduling. It will be easier for you to display special deals or seasonal promotions. This feature is mostly useful if you are running an online store.

• You can use the provided shortcode or template easily to embed slideshows on your different pages and posts.

• MetaSlider will amazingly amaze you with its live theme editor. Using it, you can create slideshow themes and preview them in real time. That way, you can make your design more finely tuned to your site’s environment.

• Its integration with Vimeo and Youtube is an extra perk for making it great. Yes, you can easily include responsive, high definition YouTube and Vimeo videos in your slideshows.

• Not only that, you can make stunning video slideshows with videos from your WordPress media library and videos from almost any external service. What’s more? It allows you to display images from Unsplash.

• Its touch enabled feature works nicely both on mobile and tablets. Also, it lets you hide slides or display different slides when viewed on mobile.

Insider tips

MetaSlider is beginner friendly, eliminating the complexities of the Slider Revolution plugin.

If you are among the folks looking for an easy-to-use WordPress slider plugin, go for MetaSlider. Certainly, it’s a simple tool with some advanced features.

Moreover, MetaSlider also puts a special emphasis on SEO support. It’s more lightweight than several other WP slider plugins. So, it won’t hurt your page’s loading time.

Again, you can add alt text and a title to your images that you will embed in your slider. Doing so will allow your visitors to discover your website quickly.

For coders, MetaSlider is a prominent choice. It gives coders access to customize elements utilizing HTML and CSS.

Again, WordPress designers who have deficiencies in coding also prefer this WP slider plugin, as it is more beginner friendly and more intuitive.

Pricing

MetaSlider offers a free version for its users. The premium packages are comparatively lower than many other WordPress slider plugins. Also, its pricing plan is pretty simple, like the plugin.

Let’s look at the pricing plan.

1 site license: $39.50 per year.

5 site licenses: $49.50 per year.

Unlimited site licenses: $99.50 per year.

3. Smart Slider 3

Meet the third plugin in the rundown, Smart Slider 3. It’s more than just a WordPress plugin.

It’s probably the best performing WordPress slider plugin in the WordPress repository. The plugin has over 9,00,000 active installations and its 5-star review count is 1000+.

So yeah! People like this WP slider plugin. Mainly for its stunning design opportunities and simple navigation options.

​​So, it’s your time to say hello to simplicity and make your creative vision come to life.

Features that make Smart Slider 3 great

• Smart Slider 3 is a fully user-friendly and intuitive WordPress slider plugin.

• It’s a fully responsive, touch enabled slider plugin. So, your visitors can enjoy your slider game on desktop, phone, or tablet. Even with high-resolution image sliders, your WordPress website will remain responsive.

• For a WordPress designer, its template collection is like a treasure. You can pick any template from their collection and make changes that better fit your web pages. That way, you can make the template uniquely yours.

• With its drag and drop editor, it makes your life easier to create some eye-catching sliders. You can easily add and remove elements with ease. Also, it lets you work with multiple layers, such as images, headings, text, buttons, Vimeo, and YouTube.

• Smart Slider 3 excels when you are showing dynamic content on web pages.

• You can apply custom fonts, styles, background animations, 3D parallax effects, and navigation to increase its uniqueness.

• It allows you to customize your designs more effortlessly, and all that is possible without doing any coding.

• Like MetaSlider, you will find a cropping tool to resize and fit your images to the content.

• It has a variety of slider animations and effects, with cool transitions between sliders.

• It allows you to view your changes in real-time. Therefore, you will have the opportunity to preview your content before publishing it.

• Smart Slider 3 is seamlessly integrated with Elementor, Divi, Brizy, Beaver Builder, WPBakery Page Builder, Gutenberg, and more.

• This plugin is handy for SEO practices. You can optimize your images and maintain a better page loading time. What’s more? This WP slider plugin fluently supports the WebP image format. So, you can compress your images without sacrificing quality and speed up your page loading time.

• There is an import and export option in Smart Slider 3. With its help, you can transfer your previously created design effortlessly to your multiple WordPress websites.

• The plugin stands out from other slider plugins for its strong community group, informative video tutorials, and personal support.

Insider tips

If you want to practice the similar power of Slider Revolution, then Smart Slider 3 is an ideal choice for you. Plus, it’s more lightweight and intuitive. You can consider it a viable alternative to the Slider Revolution.

Even if you are a newbie to WordPress, your learning curve will be more effortless.

Although it has an intuitive interface, Smart Slider 3 has an array of toolbar options. At first, it may seem complex to you. When you get used to it, it will be fun to create some stunning visuals.

Lastly, talk about its page builder integration. This feature gives this plugin an extra perk. With its integrated page builder, you can expand your creative thinking in the best possible way.

Pricing

Smart Slider 3 allows for a free version with a limited feature set. Their pro version is divided into two packages: Standard and Premium. Two packages offer one-time payments.

Standard: The standard package starts at $49 for a single site.

Premium: Smart Slider 3 charges $99 for 3 sites, $149 for 5 sites, and $249 for 10 sites.

Wrapping up

Finally, we are confident enough that you have the steps to deal with WordPress slider plugins. You can pick any of our suggested 3 best WP slider plugins with absolute clarity. We picked them after a comprehensive analysis of what’s best for you.

We appreciate you investing your time in reading this blog. Good luck!