5 Most Popular WordPress Slider Plugins

Sliders are very popular means of showcasing the important stuffs. Having a slider is a modern trend these days. As the web becomes more visual, sliders are becoming the most effective tool to grab user’s attention. Sliders mainly exist for stunning animation effects and image galleries. They are truly valuable for highlighting important contents, images and videos inside of a limited space. This article presents 5 most popular WordPress slider plugins available in WordPress.

Factors to consider while choosing the slider:

Speed: Most WordPress sliders are slow. A slider can increase your page load time, if it is not properly coded. You should have a good WordPress hosting service in order to minimize your server’s respond time.
Ease of use: Slider you choose should be easy to operate and customize. The problem with most WordPress slider plugins is their complexity of use. In the name of adding extra feature most of the sliders have become complex and beginners find hard time using them.
Features: After all, the main purpose of slider is to enhance the beauty and look of websites by providing cool features and eye catching animations. So, make sure the slider has a good front end design and has advanced features to attract visitors.
Responsive: It is useless to use a non-responsive slider. You have to make sure that your WordPress slider is responsive and supports touch navigation for mobiles and tablets. Well lots of sliders lack responsiveness which is a major drawback.
Pricing: Most beautiful and popular sliders are free. Many premium sliders also have free versions with limited features. If you are thinking of getting one of the premium sliders, make sure the price is worth it. You don’t want to be paying for the things you can get for free. However, premium sliders may give you better functionalities and added features.

5 Most Popular WordPress Slider Plugins

There are hundreds of slideshow plugins. Choosing the best slideshow plugin that suits your need can be confusing. Here are few most popular and highly-rated slideshow plugins.

1. Soliloquy

Soliloquy Lite is the free light version and Soliloquy Pro is its premium version. Soliloquy Lite is dependable and very easy-to-use. Installing it and creating a slider in it is extremely simple. Soliloquy loads faster than any other slider since that the code is optimized for speed. It supports shortcode and template tags. This plugin makes adding of slides super easy with a button on post editor, and can be used as a widget to add your slides to different sections of your website.

Features:

The ability to specify alt and title tags for your images which makes it completely SEO optimized.
It is completely responsive and supports touch enabled swiping.
Supports drag-and-drop feature for image uploading, sorting and saving for each WordPress slider.
Shortcode, template tags and Media Up loader button to easily insert your WordPress slider
It can support the use of a custom post type to create an unlimited number of sliders.

Download Soliloquy

2. Meta Slider

This is one of the most popular slider with more than 600,000+ active installs and high rating of 4.8 out of 5. It is very easy and fast to create slides. It comes with 4 different slider types Flex Slider 2, Nivo Slider, Responsive Slides and Coin Slider. The free version doesn’t have post sliding feature. You can also upgrade the slider to premium version of Meta slider Pro for more features.

Features:

Full width slider
Drag and drop sliding order
Creates SEO optimized slides.
Simple and easy
Intelligent image cropping

Download Meta Slider

3. Meteor Slides

Meteor Slides comes with more than 20 different transitional styles in a single plugin. The plugin has a simple interface that is incredibly simple to use. You can add slides to posts and pages using shortcode or using PHP code. The plugin can also be directly added in a widget using the Meteor Slides Widget. It scales to fit any device and supports touch navigation for mobiles and tablets.

Also Read: Beginners Guide on Learning WP_Query

Features:

Organize your slides into multiple slideshows
Integration is easy using template tag, shortcode or widget.
Responsive
Support multiple slideshow and is multisite compatible
Allows you to do slideshow customizations with slideshow setting page, slideshow Meta data slideshow transition style, slideshow navigation.

Download Meteor Slides

4. Huge-IT Slider

It is relatively popular plugin with more than 100,000+ active installs that adds custom sliders to your website. The plugin is really useful if you have a website specializing in photography or any event since it allows us to add unlimited images. You can also embed videos from most popular resources such as YouTube and Vimeo and use it as slider. However the older versions of this plugin can be vulnerable to SQL injection. So, we advise you to use only the latest versions of it.

Features:

Single page can support unlimited amount of slider.
Drag and drop images to arrange their order.
Consistent good look in every device.
Title and description can be added to the images.
Auto generated shortcode for adding slides.

Download Huge-IT Slider

5. Cyclone Slider 2

This slider also lies in the list of popular sliders with more than 80,000 active installations. It supports 5 different slide types: image, YouTube, Vimeo, custom HTML, and testimonial slides. Another good thing about Cyclone Slider 2 is that it uses a template system that allows developers to easily customize the look and behavior of the slider. The slider is easy to use with simplified 4 steps which are:

Add slides
Set slideshow properties
Choose a template
Publish!

You can choose between a shortcode or a PHP function (for themes) to display.

Features of Cyclone Slider 2:

Ability to add different slide transition effects for different slide.
Unlimited sliders with random slide order.
Unique settings for each slider
The plugin can be used as a widget and your slider can be easily placed in any desired widget areas.
For each slide images title and alt can be specified.

Download Cyclone Slider 2

There are many more slider plugins available in WordPress community. We encourage you to experiment yourself with various plugins available and choose the right one that fits your needs.

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Kantiman Bajracharya

Kantiman Bajracharya is a freelance web developer. He is a computer geek who has a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering. He has earned lots of satisfied customers while working for numerous successful projects. He is also a WordPress theme creator and web article writer. On free time he likes reading philosophy books, traveling and playing chess.