Adding visuals to a WordPress website can help to showcase your brand and add dimension to your pages. One way to achieve this is to add an image slider.
With so many image slider plugins available in the WordPress Plugins directory, we will be taking the top 10 free image slider plugins and comparing them. An overview and analysis of each plugin will give you a better idea of which image slider plugin to use for your WordPress website.
1. Slider by Soliloquy
Soliloquy is a drag and drop slider plugin that’s both easy and powerful. It has over 80,000 active installations and 685 five-star ratings! It’s a free plugin that prioritizes user experience, allowing users to create a beautiful responsive image and video sliders in minutes.
It has many pre-made templates with the ability to use CSS code to customize them any way you like. They’re great for creating slideshows for blog posts, products, photo galleries, testimonials, and more! The options are endless.
Another great benefit is that it also boasts of being the most SEO friendly plugin with proper HTML markup, fast speed, and Google friendly display. This is very important for websites that want to be optimized for the web.
2. Ultimate Responsive Image Slider Plugin
This image slider plugin is another way to implement a photo gallery on your WordPress site. With over 40,000 active installations and a 4.5-star rating, it’s a great option for WordPress blog users that contain a lot of visual content.
The Ultimate Responsive Image Slider allows you to add infinite image sliders in a single slider using multiple image uploader. It also has various settings like customizable height and width, autoplay, navigation buttons, and many more. It even gives you the freedom to add the image slider gallery within a page or post with a generated shortcode.
3. Slider by Nivo
The Nivo Slider is a popular jquery image slider plugin with over 40,000 active installations and a 4.5-star rating. It’s a fast, intuitive, and easy-to-use plugin that’s great for everyone.
With this plugin, you can create sliders from galleries, categories, and sticky posts. You can build carousels, use custom themes, and customize the slider to your liking. It’s not the most feature-rich plugin on the market, but it’s great if you just need a simple responsive content slider.
4. Slider by 10Web
Slider by 10Web is a functional and easy-to-use plugin for creating elegant sliders. It has over 70,000 active installations and 195 five-star ratings.
It’s a drag and drop plugin that allows you to customize and create sliders with multi-manageable layers. You can add multiple text, images, video, media, social and hotspot layers, pick the transition effect you like, and effortlessly embed YouTube or Vimeo. This is a great option for organizing and displaying multimedia content.
5. Video Slider – Slider Carousel
If you’re looking for a way to showcase your videos through a slider without any programming skills, the Video Slider plugin is a great option. It has over 6,000 active installations and a five-star rating.
This plugin can create fully responsive video sliders that support YouTube, Vimeo, Vevo, and MP4 files. You can customize it by adding overlay color, changing the slideshow speed, adding animation, and many more.
6. Slider Carousel – Responsive Image Slider
Slider Carousel allows you to easily create sliders by adding unlimited photos, as well as posts, pages, in template files. It has over 10,000 active installations and a 4.5-star rating.
It’s fully responsive and comes with multiple layouts to help you create eye-catching slideshows. The only downside about this image slider plugin is that you would need to pay for the premium features to add video, change color, and modify slideshow effects.
7. Master Slider – Responsive Touch Slider
Master Sliders is an SEO friendly, responsive image and video slider plugin that allows you to create slideshows within minutes. It has over 100,000 active installations and 164 five-star ratings.
With its easy-to-use interface, you can use any of the 8 starter templates and over 6 interactive slide transitions to create an image slider for your website. The free version is a bit limited, but the premium comes with a ton of pro features to accelerate your image sliders.
8. Slide Anything
Slide Anything – Responsive Content / HTML Slider and Carousel
Slide Anything allows you to create a carousel or slider with any kind of content you like–images, text, HTML, and even shortcodes. It has over 70,000 active installations and 74 five-star ratings.
This image slider plugin uses the Owl Carousel 2 jQuery plugin to create beautifully, touch-enabled, responsive carousels and sliders. It’s very versatile, making it another great option for those that want to showcase multimedia content.
9. MetaSlider
MetaSlider is WordPress’ most popular image slider plugin, with over 900,000 active installations and 452 five-star ratings. It allows you to create powerful, SEO-optimized slideshows within minutes.
With this image slider plugin, simply drag and drop your images to instantly enhance your blog or website. The simple, user-friendly interface has unrestricted full-width support for image slides. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support video slides with the free version.
10. Smart Slider 3
Smart Slider 3 is a powerful and intuitive WordPress plugin to create fully responsive, SEO optimized sliders to work with any theme. It has over 400,000 active installations and 585 five-star ratings.
It’s a very favored image slider plugin that allows you to use unique layouts with layers to build beautiful, dynamic sliders. It has a ton of customization options, making it a great plugin for those that want something different.
