7 Best Free & Premium WordPress Slider Plugins You Need to Try
Interactive content that keeps website visitors engaged is a great way of promoting products, boosting sales and sharing the latest business news. By adding sliders to your site, you can grab the attention and highlight relevant info. Fortunately, with so many WordPress slider plugins on the market, you can do it fast & easy, without knowing a single code line. All you need is a responsive, easy-to-use and fast plugin option that will be your helping hand.
If you don’t know where to start, check out our selection of 5 best WordPress slider plugins:
Even though you’ll need to download Elementor to be able to use it, Qi Addons for Elementor is well worth the effort – the plugin contains fourteen different sliders. A large portion of them, slightly less than half, are available with the free version of the plugin, too – although you’ll want the premium version to squeeze out the best from this Elementor widget bundle.
The sliders provided by the plugin differ by style and use case. The before/after slider is a great tool for creating visual comparisons, while the slider switch is a tool you’d use to present two images, one of which would be in a separate frame. If you only want to showcase images in a device-shaped frame, you’d find a widget for that, too. You could also use a hover-aware slider to let users interact with the sliders on your website.
With Qi Addons for Elementor, you get all the sliders you want, with all the customization options you need. Not for nothing, but you’re also getting a variety of other addons you can use to make your website more attention-grabbing.
Features that make Slider Revolution the best WordPress slider plugin:
- Drag & drop editor
- Animations & transitions
- Zero coding knowledge needed
- Responsive & retina ready
Over 319k sales on Envato Market, Slider Revolution is one of the best-known and most widely used slider plugin for WordPress. With numerous features and easy customization, it’s not surprising this plugin is so popular among both WordPress beginners and experts.
Slider Revolution allows you to create and customize various types of sliders with a simple drag-and-drop editor. This means you can use a different kind of content including images, videos, social media feed, besides WordPress posts and custom posts. On top of that, you can customize the slider’s style, animations, and transitions as per your needs. In a case you want to go one step further and learn the practical tips about this plugin, the good news is you can always find check out detailed Slider Revolution tutorial.
What is also important about this plugin is that it’s not only for WordPress Sliders. Thanks to its rich options, you can now create one-page websites with zero coding knowledge. Slider Revolution is fully responsive, meaning your sliders will look amazing on all screen sizes and types including desktops, notebooks, tablets, and smartphones. Plus, you can separately customize how your layers look on various devices.
Features that make Slider Revolution the best WordPress slider plugin:
- Drag & drop editor
- Animations & transitions
- Zero coding knowledge needed
- Responsive & retina ready
Made to work with any WordPress theme, this plugin will turn slides’ creating into fun. SEO optimized, fully responsive and completely intuitive, Smart Slider 3 is a great choice for everyone who wants to easily add, edit and remove slides without coding knowledge.
Packed with powerful Live Slide Editor, this plugin allows you to drop layers one after other and organize them with rows and columns. Moreover, if you don’t want to create your own slides, there is a Slide Library with pre-made layouts you can use to present your work. Choose a specific design or go with a blank slider to create any kind of image, video or post slider. The great thing about this plugin is its flexibility, meaning you can edit every heading, text, image, button or video, thanks to various customization options.
Another great option is Autoplay timing that will help you time your slides following your needs. There is also a large collection of slide background animations which is essential if you fancy dynamic, interactive content. Included with Smart Slider are 9 super smooth background animations.
Although the free version of this plugin covers all crucial features for easy slide creation, there is also a pro option with some really cool options. For example, included with Smart Slider 3 pro are built-in lightbox, built-in image editor and layer animation builder. Also, 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
- Slide Library
As number one slider plugin, with more than 700k installs, MetaSlider is trusted by so many users worldwide for a reason. What sets it apart from other WordPress slider plugins is the fact it features simple and intuitive interface ideal for complete beginners, developers or professionals. All you need to do to create stunning image sliders is select photos from Media Library, and drag and drop them into place. Furthermore, set the slide captions, links and SEO fields all from one page. You can as well use intelligent image cropping option or set image crop position. But this is not all. In a case you need inspiration, MetaSlider gives you access to free photos via Unsplash.
In addition, this plugin also has 11 free professional sideshow themes and loads of slideshow configuration options including transition effect and speed. Another functionality worth mentioning is drag and drop slide reordering, which will definitely save your time.
At last, MetaSlider is Gutenberg ready and very fast since it requires only the minimum JavaScript/CSS on your page.
Features that make MetaSlider the best WordPress slider plugin:
- 11 sideshow themes
- Image cropping option
- Slide captions, links, SEO fields
- Transitions effects
If you just want to create a simple slider, then Ultimate Blocks is the plugin you’re looking for. It’s a Gutenberg blocks plugin that comes with 18 content blocks for the Gutenberg editor.
The plugin offers a simple Image Slider block that lets you add images into a slider. The plugin is very simple yet offers some very cool customization options.
You can set a pagination style along with the slider animation for your slides. There is also an option to enable autoplay and set the autoplay duration in the plugin.
The plugin also lets you add a caption and URL to each slide in the slider. Moreover, you can even set the height of the slider.
Since the Ultimate Blocks plugin is free, it’s a very good option for users who want to create a simple image slider using Gutenberg.
The plugin is very lightweight and yet offers a lot of customization options which is quite impressive.
Features that make Ultimate Blocks the best WordPress slider plugin:
- Image Slider
- Enable/Disable Autoplay
- Add Captions/Links to Slides
- Customize Slide Animation
- Enable/Disable Pagination
- Easy to Use
- Fully Responsive
Creators of this plugin understand that bloggers and website owners need a quick and simple option for adding sliders. For this reason, they developed Ultimate Responsive Image Slider Plugin, flexible, easy-to-use, and responsible slider plugin.
Packed with multiple image uploader, this plugin makes it easy to add numerous image slides into a single slider. Moreover, you can publish unlimited slider on your website.
Thanks to its neat and clean setting dashboard, you can easily customize elements as per your requirements. For instance, you can set slider’s width and height, display navigation buttons or enable autoplay slides. Additionally, you can show or hide the image slider title or set the slider order (Ascending, Descending and Random) depending on your preferences. You can, as well, choose the font style or customize the distance between two slider images. Finally, Ultimate Responsive Image Slider Plugin is multilingual translation ready, meaning it works in every language in the world.
Features that make Ultimate Responsive Image Slider the best WordPress slider plugin:
- Multiple image uploader
- Clean setting dashboard
- Option for slider title
- Choosing the sliders’ order
One of the most popular WordPress slider plugins, comes with easy-to-use visual editor that lets you create and customize stunning sliders. Beside sliders, you can, as well, create galleries, carousels and over 200 animations effects including parallax scrolling and slide transitions. Moreover, with LayerSlider you can build even a full website.
What makes this plugin amazing is the fact it’s equipped with 18 sliders skins and a wide array of premium slider templates that can be used not only for your personal needs but for professional business purposes as well. In addition, you can choose from 3 different slider navigation types.
The good news for everyone who needs to present loads of information is this plugin includes a content slider. It allows you to pull content from posts and pages and share it with your audience.
In the end, LayerSlider has professional support and frequent updates so you can be sure your purchase will pay off.
Features that make LayerSlider the best WordPress slider plugin:
- Drag & drop animation effects
- Content slider
- Content slider
- 3 navigation types
Let’s sum up
We hope our selection of the best WordPress slider plugins will help you find the right match for your website. Pay attention to ease of use, available options and animation types in order to choose the plugin that works the best for you and start building amazing sliders with complete ease!
We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!
