In this article, we will compare the top 6 Best WordPress Slider Plugins based on their design, ease of use, and overall features. The goal is to find the best WordPress slider plugin in terms of performance and quality.
Most WordPress sliders are slow. If it is not properly coded, a slider can significantly increase your page load time. If you do not have a good WordPress hosting service, then your server may respond even slower than normal.
The other problem with WordPress slider plugins is ease of use. Most of them are bloated and come with a learning curve for beginners.
Last but not least, you want to make sure that your WordPress slider is mobile responsive. A lot of them are not.
So how do you go through hundreds of slider plugins and check for all of this? Well, you don’t have to.
Below, I’ll share what each WordPress slider can do, as well as a hands-on look at the interface. Because this is more of a roundup post, I won’t be able to show you every nook and cranny of each plugin. But I will try to hit all the highlights so you get a good idea of how things work, as well as how each plugin balances ease of use with a depth of functionality.
By the end, my goal is that you’ll know one which of these plugins is right for you.
Let’s get straight to the slider plugins, starting with…
Our six best slider plugins for WordPress are:
đź’Ą Transition Slider
đź’Ą MetaSlider
đź’Ą Soliloquy
đź’Ą Smart Slider 3
đź’Ą LayerSlider
đź’Ą Slider Revolution
🏅 Which WordPress Slider Plugin Should You Use?
| FREE | PRO | |
|---|---|---|
|
Transition Slider |
âś… |
$27 |
|
MetaSlider |
âś… |
$39 |
|
Soliloquy |
âś… |
$19 |
|
Smart Slider 3 |
âś… |
$35 |
|
LayerSlider |
❌ |
$25 |
|
Slider Revolution |
❌ |
$29 |
đź’Ą Transition Slider
Transition Slider is not so popular, but the reason is that it is very new in the WordPress market. You can find the premium version on the CodeCanyon page, where it has been making its way to the first pages very quickly lately. There is also a FREE version that can be found on WordPress.org, and it stands out in that it offers a lot of features in the free version, unlike other slider plugins.
Wherever you can find the Transition Slider you will see that it is rated with a 5-star rating. Since it has not yet reached its maximum and popularity few people know about it, but people who use it are very happy that the plugin has a lot of features, it has a nice design and its speed is amazing!
Transition Slider Feature List
- Responsive design (SEO-optimized) so that your sliders work great no matter which device a visitor is using.
- Pre-built templates that help you create a great-looking end product even if you’re not a designer.
- A powerful WebGL animation engine, including a huge number of predefined combinations of transitions between slides.
- Built-in controls to help you quickly align elements in their proper position.
- Full-width and Fullscreen support
- Drag and drop slide reordering
- Built-in Gutenberg block, Widget, and Shortcode
- Lightbox on click functionality to create a lightbox view of slider elements.
- Lots of navigation options including thumbnail navigation.
- Parallax effect
- Deep linking
- Mouse wheel navigation
- Autoplay
- Free basic support
- and many others…
One of the greatest qualities of the Transition Slider is that it offers unprecedented WebGL transitions between slides. You have not seen such effects in previous WordPress slider plugins.
Everything that the Transition Slider offers in the FREE version, you can also find in the PRO, and the only thing you will find in the PRO is a much larger number of Premium Templates, Import / Export sliders, additional device options.
đź’Ą MetaSlider
MetaSlider offers a more lightweight approach to building sliders, which is great if you’ve felt overwhelmed by the lengthy feature lists / crowded interfaces of the plugins above.
All of the sliders that you build are responsive and touch-enabled. And MetaSlider also puts a special emphasis on SEO support, including options to easily manage image metadata.
Another slider plugin with a non-native user interface that looks different than the rest of the WordPress screens. It is easy to use, but many of the options are hard to locate.
It starts with a template selection and automatically imports some demo slides for you to start with. You can then delete those slides and replace them with your own.
It has beautiful templates and can be easily inserted into WordPress posts, pages, and sidebars by using the shortcode, Gutenberg block, and template tag.
Master Slider works best with WordPress themes that automatically load jQuery on each page load. If your theme doesn’t do that, then you will need to change plugin settings and force it to load assets on page load.
MetaSlider Feature List
- 4 different slider types: Flexslider, Responsive Slides, Nivo Slider, and Coin Slider.
- Lightbox support with the free MetaSlider Lightbox add-on.
Quite a big disadvantage of this slider is that in the FREE version it offers very basic things. So, for example, the Layer editor is only included in the PRO version.
đź’Ą Soliloquy
Soliloquy is a popular responsive slider solution for WordPress that offers more than ten slider types, including a carousel, featured content, lightbox, video, Instagram, Pinterest, PDF, WooCommerce, thumbnail, and more.
The lite version of Soliloquy can be used to create a standard image slider. Once you’ve uploaded some images, you can organize them using drag and drop. There’s an edit icon for each image, which loads up options to define the image title, alt text, caption, and URL. You can then insert your slider into your website using shortcodes, or into templates using PHP code.
In the slider options area, you can select one of two themes, define the size of slides and choose the transition speed between slides. Most other settings in the slider page are reserved for slider types that are only in the premium version of Soliloquy, so are restricted.
Soliloquy Feature List
- Pre-built slider themes to help you quickly create something beautiful.
- Dynamic content based on posts, pages, or any custom post type.
- Lightbox functionality to create a lightbox slider.
Also another slider plugin that offers most of the features in the PRO version.
đź’Ą Smart Slider 3
Smart Slider 3 is one of the most popular slider plugins for WordPress. This WordPress slider plugin has a free version that offers fully responsive, SEO optimized sliders for any WordPress themes. The free version also comes with a dynamic post slider that lets you highlight recent posts or featured posts.
With the pro version of the plugin, you can edit your slides just as you do with page builders. Its easy-to-use drag and drop features let you easily build a slider the way you want. It also comes with 6 unique layers for building a highly customized WordPress slider.
Smart Slider 3 Feature List
- Layer animations, including a timeline feature to see how everything fits together
- Ken Burns effect and other background animations
- Built-in image editor
- 16 different types of layers, including videos, buttons, etc.
- 5 types of sliders, including a carousel, accordion, and showcase.
However, it packs a lot of options which may not be as easy to discover for beginners. The overall user experience is satisfactory and you can easily add a slider into posts and pages using the default block, shortcode, and template tag.
đź’Ą LayerSlider
LayerSlider is another popular plugin in the CodeCanyon marketplace. It’s an advanced plugin with lots of powerful options to let you create sliders, image galleries with effects, animated landing pages, page blocks, or even a full website.
Similar to Slider Revolution, LayerSlider also has its own drag and drop interface for building sliders. So, when you’re starting out with it, you may need to spend a few days learning its interface.
The strength of the plugin is that it lets you add a variety of transitions and animations in your sliders. You can use more than 200 pre-defined slide transitions, parallax, and different animations. Plus, you can find a multitude of premium slider templates that you can use for your personal needs, professional business websites, presentation of your creative work, etc.
LayerSlider Feature List
- Pre-built templates that help you create a great-looking end product even if you’re not a designer.
- The option to insert dynamic content into sliders, including content from any post type.
- Responsive design
- Layer editor
Also another slider with a big drawback, you can try all these nice features only when you buy a slider. So there is no FREE version. How will you know if something is right for you before you spend money?
đź’Ą Slider Revolution
Slider Revolution is by far the biggest selling WordPress slider plugin on CodeCanyon, and is frequently packaged with WordPress themes on ThemeForest.
You can create slides using a modern visual editor, which allows you to insert images and videos and create multiple layers of content. Fonts, animations, backgrounds, icons, colors, and more can all be edited easily.
Animations are one of the stand-out features of the plugin. These can really bring your slides to life, and there are a lot of presets to make the task simple.
But if you really need something small, light, FREE, you will opt for the other slider plugins listed above.
Slider Revolution Feature List
- Social media feed support to import slider content from Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Vimeo.
- Dynamic post content to include a list of your latest posts in a slider.
- Lots of navigation options including thumbnail navigation.
- Tons of animation options, including an option to create your own custom animations.
- Scheduled sliders to let you publish slides based on predefined dates (like that neat Soliloquy feature.
Despite the name, Slider Revolution also markets itself as “not just a slider”. And it’s true – it does go beyond just slider functionality and includes features to, say, help you build a one-page website. And because of that it is quite bulky and slow.
🏅 Which WordPress Slider Plugin Should You Use?
Ok, so which one of these sliders should you actually use?
Well, let’s break it down into a few different scenarios.
First off, let’s keep things FREE. If you’re specifically looking for a free slider plugin, then I think your two best options are Transition Slider or Smart Slider 3. Transition Slider will give you all the FREE features, unlike other sliders that put a lot into the PRO version and you have to pay. There is, of course, a visual editor included to add elements to the slider.
If you really want to have a slider that is shouted on all sides, feel free to opt for LayerSlider or Slider Revolution. They are full of options, templates, but being the most popular does not mean that they are the only and the best.
Over time, they became an increasing product, and thus pushed their boundaries and are now not only a slider builder but also a page builder.
So if you just want a great, lightweight, FREE, full-featured slider that will work quickly Transition Slider or some other alternatives are a good choice. Because they don’t integrate many other things that you may never use if you just need to put together an amazing slider.
But if you need a slider editor that is also a page builder Slider Revolution or LayerSlider are good options if you are willing to pay.
Now over to all of you — have you used any of these WordPress slider plugins? Which one is your favourite and why?