Of all the ways to present content elegantly on your website, few can beat sliders. If you’re looking for the best free WordPress slider plugin, you’ve come to the right place. If you just dive in the market, you’ll find out – the hard way – that there are many that overload scripts and slow down your website dramatically. In this piece, we have shortlisted the best free WordPress slider plugins with top performance and quality.
Choosing a slider is a more complicated process than most people anticipate since most WordPress sliders are badly coded. Bad code leads to a substantial increase in a website’s load time. Some low-quality WordPress sliders aren’t easy to use and will present problems for beginners. We can help you avoid all these potential problems, we have researched the best WordPress slider plugins and consolidated them into this catalog. Please go through it and make your choice. If you are looking for testimonial slider instead, Here is the list of best WordPress testimonial slider plugin.
Top WordPress slider plugins listed bellow:
- Slider Revolution
- Ultimate Blocks
- Kreatura Slider
- Master Slider
- MetaSlider
- Smart Slider 3
- Master Slider
- Soliloquy
- Ultimate Responsive Image Slider
- Slide Anything
- Video Slider
Slider Revolution
Many consider the Slider Revolution to be the best WordPress slider plugin, and the features and elements that define it don’t discredit the claims. This flexible plugin is a gem for beginner and mid-level designers who want to go for the wow-factor. The ease of use of this plugin is facilitated by the new visual editor that boasts a clear option hierarchy. The Slider Revolution has the most stunning hero sections that stand out on your web pages. You can then place elements that win conversions in these sections.
You can use the plugin for showcasing visual elements, such as sliders and carousels, and capture the attention of the most casual of visitors. Out of the box, you get a library of more than 200 premade templates, which only require personalization by adding your content. Among the 20+ addons that come with the Slider Revolution, several are mind-blowing special effects, such as ‘Before & After’ and Reveal.
Rather than strictly sticking to layer in/out animations, this plugin goes the extra mile and offers animation presents, new easing types, in-depth animation settings, and an easily understandable structure. What’s more, the Slider Revolution plugin brings you an assortment of over 2,000 media assets to suit every need. These include HTML5 videos, object PNGs, Font Icons & SVGs, premade layer groups, and assorted background images.
Ultimate Blocks
Ultimate Blocks is a Gutenberg Blocks plugin that offers a range of custom blocks to enhance the editor’s functionalities. While it’s not specifically designed for creating sliders, it has an ‘Image Slider’ block. Using the image slider block, you can create professional-looking sliders for your WordPress posts/pages.
The ‘Image Slider’ block provides customization options like selecting the transition effect, pagination, autoplay, heights, and more. It will help you to create slideshows that match the look and feel of your site. And it’s very easy to use.
Along with the ‘Image Slider’ block, Ultimate Blocks offers some other excellent blocks like Advanced Videos, Tabbed Content, Styled List, Testimonials, Call To Action, Buttons, and more. And all of these are free.
Kreatura Slider
The Kreatura Slider is a one-of-a-kind multi-purpose animation platform that enables you to showcase sliders, slideshows, and image galleries. One of the elements that make it unique is its breathtaking visual effects. The image galleries are creatively crafted to give you the best visual presentation possible. To make your work easier, especially if you’re a beginner or an intermediate user, Kreatura Slider comes with animated page blocks. You, therefore, don’t have to create one from scratch; you simply choose.
The refreshing animation engine that comes with the Kreatura Slider has more than 200 premade slide transitions. The generator offers numerous animation effects that make your sliders stand out of the rest of the content. The Kreatura Slider is centered on providing unmatchable user experience. The drag & drop visual editor comes with fantastical elements, including an undo/redo option, group selection, copy & paste layers option, and rulers with guides. The popup editor allows you to edit everything in the same place without having to scroll.
The premium slider templates are released and updated regularly, so you can expect to remain UpToDate on the latest trends in slider-tech. You can use the Kreatura Slider for professional business websites, creative work presentations, and commercial purposes – even for billboard ads.
Master Slider
Master Slider is a premium content slider with stunning and super smooth hardware accelerated transitions. This WordPress plugin supports touch navigation so that your users who prefer to use mobile phones. In fact, the Master Slider supports all major devices and is fully responsive to different orientations of device screens. You can add any kind of HTML content, including texts, images, and videos. If you aren’t used to handling sliders or need some quick, you can use the 80+ readymade templates that Master Slider comes with.
If you want to compose textual sliders, you have more than 650 Google Fonts from which you can choose the most elegant and readable combinations. Your editing work is cut out for you with the WPBakery Page Builder, which is arguably the best drag & drop page builder on WordPress. Master Slider gives you the freedom of showcasing your sliders in whichever language you choose since it is multilingual ready. It also supports multisite use.
With Master Slider, you can source your images from various sources, such as Facebook and Flickr. This plugin is perfect for use as a WooCommerce product slider since it offers enough options and angles to display your products as you wish.
MetaSlider
MetaSlider is one of the most incredible slider plugins for WordPress. It is a brilliant way to create attractive, stylish, and SEO optimized slideshows in no time at all. Its wide range of options and features set it apart. MetaSlider’s intuitive interface allows you to create stunning visuals as you add images, videos. You can showcase your latest products from your shop to sliders anywhere on-site, that automatically adapt to fit the width of the device they’re displayed on.
The free version of MetaSlider comes with 11 elegant themes that add a sophisticated and polished look to your pages. Are you unsure of the pictures that you should use on a slider? This slider plugin facilitates easy access to images in the Unsplash Library from the plugin’s dashboard. This gives you access to more than 1 million high-quality images that you can add directly to your slider.
MetaSlider has robust filters and actions that allow you to customize your sliders and match them to your specific theme. As one of the best free WordPress slider plugins, MetaSlider enables you to use standard image and carousel slide options. However, the premium version allows you more benefits, including dedicated support, animated layer slides, schedule sliders, video slides, post feed slides, and custom CSS. The inline editor also facilitates the building of custom HTML slides.
Smart Slider 3
The Smart Slider 3 is a wondrous WordPress slider plugin that is perfect for creating beautiful sliders without touching a single line of code. The plugin’s live slide editor has a beautiful interface that makes it incredibly easy to create slides fast. It gives you the freedom to edit your slides in the same way that you build content with page builders. You can enhance your sliders using layers and add to the appeal of your site.
You can edit every video, image, text, heading, and button straightforwardly with the numerous customization options. Smart Slider 3 allows you to utilize many styles and typography options to personalize your website fully. This plugin facilitates the editing of slides in a drag & drop interface, where you can put layers anywhere you want (o the slide).
Smart Slider 3 has display versions for all devices, presenting fully responsive and mobile-friendly sliders. Since the plugin is fully integrated with WordPress, you can use the media manager, widgets, shortcodes, post editor, and post permalinks. Don’t worry about its compatibility; Smart Slider 3 is compatible with all popular page builders, including Elementor, WPBakery Page Builder, Divi, Beaver Builder, and Gutenberg.
Master Slider
Master Slider is one of the best free WordPress slider plugins with unique features. Since it is SEO friendly, your sliders will help your web pages rank, and if you have products for sale on them, they’ll rank. The easy to use interface of this plugin makes it an incredible tool for content developers of all levels. Master Slider is cross-browser compatible and fully responsive so your users can view the best versions of your sliders easily.
This plugin is super-lightweight, so it makes for much faster loading pages. Since the plugin comes with clean and valid HTML5 markups, it won’t compromise your site’s smooth operation. Master Slider allows you to manage slideshows and edit auto-timing options. With this slider plugin, you can edit your slides in the same interface as you do your website – a drag & drop creator.
Master Slider offers 6 contemporary and unique skins that you can use to construct elegant slides. You also get exclusive widgets that make your sliders, even more user friendly. The shortcodes that come with the plugin make it easy to create your sliders. Your thumbnails and tabs will be fully customizable, so you can make them appear as elegant as you want.
Soliloquy
Soliloquy saves you the trouble of hiring help to create beautiful sliders on your site. The plugin has been optimized for the best web and server performance to boost your SEO and conversions. Soliloquy is 100% responsive and mobile-friendly. The plugin has been equipped with proper HTML markup that interprets into fast speed and Google friendly display. You will also have an assortment of premade templates that you can simply apply and edit a little to personalize.
If you want to use your slider plugin on a WooCommerce website, you can depend on Soliloquy since it is compatible with the platform. You can filter your sliders by category, availability, price, featured, or any other criterion. If you want to display specific products, Soliloquy also supports this. If you want your featured content to appear in slides, you can depend on this plugin and showcase photo galleries, testimonials, products, and even blog posts.
You can use the lightbox feature to display images and galleries; the lightbox opens your images in a fullscreen mode that is easy to browse on all devices. You can even create slideshows for carousel videos, galleries, and images. Soliloquy makes your work easier by facilitating the creation of slideshows from testimonials, galleries, Instagram images, and blog posts.
Ultimate Responsive Image Slider
Ultimate Responsive Image Slider is an entirely responsive image photo slider plugin that combines simplicity with modernity. You can add countless image slides in a single slider with multiple image uploader. You can even add multiple images into a single slider. This means that your images will take less page space. If you want to make your blogs more sophisticated, you can add an infinite number of sliders on your blog pages. The Ultimate Responsive Image Slider allows you to create image galleries that enhance the aura of your website.
This slider plugin allows you to customize everything about your slides, including height, width, slide thumbnails, auto play slides, and navigation buttons. You can showcase your sliders withing an individual page or in post content. The Ultimate Responsive Image Slider gives you an easy way of editing your sliders via an incredible setting dashboard. A neat and clean admin panel is available for configuring this image slider plugin.
You can enable and disable (show and hide) the slider title and the slider description whenever you want. You can also create the alternative description tag of your image and slider to make them all truly SEO friendly. You can even create unique font and background colors for your slider that match the rest of your website.
Slide Anything
As its name suggests, Slide Anything enables you to create slides with images, text, HTML, shortcodes, carousels, etc. This plugin comes with the Owl Carousel 2 jQuery plugin, which lets you craft the most beautiful, touch-sensitive, responsive carousels, and sliders. This slider plugin supports touch and drag and boosts the mobile browsing experience as well as the use of a desktop mouse. Since it is fully responsive, it allows you to define the number of slides to showcase with different breaking points, so users of different devices can view different numbers of slides.
Slide Anything supports modern browsers, but it also has CSS2 fallbacks that cater for older browsers. It uses hardware accelerations with CSS3 3d transitions. The lazy loading feature makes that images on slides are only loaded when the slides they are on are displayed. Slide Anything is one of the best free WordPress slider plugins, with infinite looping – the last slide is showcased smoothly after the last one.
The pro version of Slide Anything has modal popups; video embed popups (from YouTube and Vimeo), HTML code popups, and WordPress shortcode popups. Hero Slider is available with this version – it fills out the width and height of the plugin.
Video Slider
Video Slider is an excellent way of creating exceptional video sliders without the need for programming skills. Among its stunning elements is the overlay color, which appears as background for slide titles and descriptions. You can personalize the color to match other elements on the slide. You can choose the number of slides you want to showcase on the slider, which will depend on the number of videos you will create. Video Slider gives you the freedom to choose the speed at which the slideshow will move.
You have a lot of animations to choose from for your sliders. You can enable or disable the navigation buttons for your sliders; their color is also at your discretion. Besides letting you customize the color of your title; Video Slider also allows you to show or hide the title and description of each slide. The plugin comes with additional font options to use for your videos’ names, titles, and descriptions.
The sliders’ borders and shadows have advanced settings that allow you to customize the style and design of each slider. Each video is allowed to have its own content, header, description, videos, buttons, and links.
Bottom Line
There you have it – the best WordPress slider plugins on the planet. You can’t go wrong with these plugins since we have tested all of them for the best performance. A slider can be a gamechanger for all kinds of websites. The beauty and functionality that they bring are perfect for various purposes, including WooCommerce product displays. Just take the one you prefer and have fun.
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