Sliders can play a very important in the overall design of your website. If you have a corporate or business site, or a portfolio, sliders can obviously showcase important work and portfolio pieces. However, even if you are running a blog, sliders can be used to present your content in an attractive manner.
For all practical purposes, homepage sliders are losing their charm in favor of content-centric design and minimalism. Yet, if used wisely and judiciously, sliders can enhance and improve your overall content presentation. In this post, I will be taking a look at some of the top slider plugins for WordPress users.
Meta Slider
Meta Slider lets you drag and drop images from your folder and add slide captions, SEO fields, and links. It gives you four slideshow types to choose from, which include Flex Slider, Nivo Slider, Responsive Slides, and Coin Slider.
Meta Slider also comes with SEO support, Lightbox support, and custom shortcodes.
Meteor Slides
Meteor Slides lets you create flexible and responsive slideshows with ease. It comes loaded with custom shortcodes, custom widgets, as well as special themes and 20 unique transition styles to choose from.
The plugin also features navigation options, metadata to configure more with jQuery and Cycle Options and settings for customization. Meteor Slides is localization ready.
Soliloquy Slider
Soliloquy is one of the most popular slider plugins for WordPress users (and is also used by Torque), and it comes loaded with an amalgamation of dynamic asynchronous AJAX preloading technique.
It is supportive of all screen sizes and gives variety of configurable points to pick from. Soliloquy features SEO-friendly support with over 50+ docs to make your life easier
Nivo Slider (Premium)
Nivo Slider comes with four custom transitions and support for multiple themes. A premium offering, Nivo Slider will grab only 15 kb of your memory and fits for both personal and commercial use.
Slider Revolution (Premium)
Slider Revolution lets you edit Sliders, Carousels, Hero Scene, and even the Front Page in just seconds. It is one of the best selling plugins on Code Canyon, for the simple reason that it easily creates one-page web presentations with no coding thus enabling even the beginners to present their ideas properly.
You can even personalize your navigation elements, and the plugin is fully responsive. The sliders are SEO optimized, and fit well with any theme.
Layer Slider (Premium)
Layer Slider powers more than 250,000 websites based on WordPress and can be used to create image galleries as well as content sliders. It features more than 200 preset 2D and 3D slider transitions, real-time previews, Google Fonts, and custom animations.
Layer Slider comes with detailed documentation, support lazy loading of images, and conditional loading of scripts, and offers 13+ skins to customize your slider. Plus, it is also loaded with accelerated CSS3 for better page load speeds.
Cyclone Slider 2
Cyclone Slider uses custom posts and custom settings for its sliders. It is translation ready, supports RTL languages, and offers unlimited personalization effects.
The plugin comes with custom shortcodes, responsive slides, and other fine-tune features.
Smooth Slider
Smooth Slider can show slideshows for Pages, Media, Images and Custom Post Types, and easily add a carousel with the help of shortcodes, widgets and template tags. It features six transition styles along with slider preview in the admin panel, and is SEO optimized.
Slide Deck 2
Slide Deck 2 uses content from YouTube, Flickr, WordPress, and Pinterest to output slides without any coding.
As such, it supports text, images, videos, and custom HTML for creating responsive sliders, and gives your website a handy image or video slider within minutes.
vSlider
vSlider lets you create multiple image sliders, animated headers and custom portfolios. It comes with four different layout styles, nine image transition effects, custom buttons, and navigation styles, etc.
You can get the first or featured image from a page or post and customize its width, height, and the radius and border of the slides. It includes navigation buttons and can take care of image quality and resize images automatically. Be warned, though, this plugin has not had an update for the past two years, so it might be advisable to avoid it.
What do you think of these slider plugins for WordPress websites? Got any that I missed? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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