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Slider plugin for WordPress home page. Simple and functional slider for WordPress

In this article I will talk about a slider on WordPress, which is easy to use, but is not deprived of functions and capabilities. Let's talk about the addition Meta Slider.

Here are the advantages that should be highlighted:

  • The plugin is easy to configure.
  • Interface in Russian.
  • It is possible to customize Title attributes and Alt for slide images.
  • You can assign links to each slide.
  • There are four ready-made designs.
  • There are several transition effects.
  • The slider turns out to be adaptive.

How to Make a Slider in WordPress Using Meta Slider

After activating the plugin, the console will display new item"Meta Slider". Go to it and click on the button with the plus icon to create a new slider.

By hovering your mouse over the tab with the name of the slider, you can change its name. And by clicking on the “Add Slide” button, you can add images to the slider.

Each added slide has settings from three tabs.

  • Basics. Here you can set a description for the picture and, if necessary, a link for it. You can make the link open in a new tab.
  • CEO. Here you can set the Title and Alt for the image, which will have a positive effect on the SEO optimization of the slider for WordPress.
  • Trim. Picture cropping options.

In the sidebar on the right, the WordPress slider has options for customization.

  • The Preview button allows you to take a look at the slider before publishing.
  • The “Save” button saves the changes made.
  • The four buttons below allow you to choose a design for the slider.
  • Width. Sets the width of the slider in pixels.
  • Height. Sets the height of the slider in pixels.
  • Effect. You can select a transition effect. IN free version the list is a bit limited.
  • Design. You can additionally choose a design for the slider. Limited in the free version.
  • Arrows. Enables or disables the arrows to toggle the slider.
  • Navigation. Enables or disables the dots below the slider.

A little lower there is another block of settings that can be expanded - these are “Advanced settings”.

It contains various options, including alignment, indentation, display speed, animation, and much more. I won't go into detail.


One of the main objectives of the Internet project is to maximize convenient navigation. One of the many and not the worst options to improve the usability of a WordPress site is to install a slider on its pages. The slider can be placed on the main page or any other page in any place, thereby implementing, in the form of a beautiful slide show, an announcement of all or only selected materials, a presentation of your own or partner products, and much more, depending on your imagination and assigned tasks.

Let's look at specific example, how to easily and quickly install a slider in the header of a WordPress site.

Preparing the template

Let's look at the implementation of this project For example WordPress template"Twenty Thirteen", which is already preinstalled by default on the system.

In our case, when installing a slider in the site header, first we need to hide this very header, instead of which we want to install our slide show. The function “ view element code » available in Google Chrome and in others popular browsers. To call the function, click right key mouse on the page header and in the opened context menu select " View element code ". While hovering computer mouse on the code, you can see the highlighting of the elements for which this code is responsible, and thus we find the necessary lines of code.

Having saved the changes and refreshed the site page, we see that the theme header has disappeared and we can begin installing the slider in its place.

Let's take advantage WordPress functionality Content Slide for installing a slider in the theme header. To install and activate Content Slide, use standard function WordPress search and installing plugins or download the latest version from its page at - wordpress.org/plugins/content-slide/ . ATTENTION! Currently, the plugin archive is not available for download, I sent a letter to the author, but he is still silent. It is present on my server, you can download the WordPress content-slide plugin from the link.

Before setting up the plugin, you need to place its call code in the place where you want to install the slider. The code is located in the “README” file, which in turn “sits” in the installed plugin folder.

Open the file text editor and copy the code itself from the installation manual.

To make your life easier, I provide this code below:

<

< ?php if(function_exists("wp_content_slider")) { wp_content_slider(); } >

?php if (function_exists ("wp_content_slider" ) ) ( wp_content_slider() ; ) & gt;

Let's install the slider code in the WordPress site header before the commented theme header code.

The flexibility of the settings allows you to change the image size, animation effects, slide display interval, font options, text color and transparency, slider frame and many other functions. Let's look at the purpose of each option in order.

Basic Content Slide Settings

1 Image width - width of images (in pixels)height - height
Border width - frame thickness (if you install null value, there will be no frame at all)Border Color - frame color
Font family - description text font
Text font size - text font sizeText color - text font color
Heading font size - title font sizeHeading color - title font color
Background color - background color

Content Slide Animation Effects and Settings

7 Squares per width - proportions of animation effects in widthSquares per height - proportions of animation effects in height
Delay between images in ms - image change delay time in mil.sec.Delay beetwen squares in ms - navigation bar delay time in mil.sec.
Opacityof title and navigation – opacity of header and navigation elements
Speed ​​of title appereance in ms – title change speed
Effect - Effect:
  • random- random;
  • swirl- vortex;
  • rain- rain;
  • straight- flipping;
  • fade- fading.
Mouse Over Pause (Stop Animation on mouseover) - stop the animation by hovering the mouse?
Navigation Previous/Next (Previous/Next buttons on image) - navigation buttons (previous/next)
Navigation Buttons (Square buttons at bottom) - navigation buttons for quick transition through slides
Navigation Buttons Color (Square buttons at bottom) - color of navigation buttons

There is also the ability to select images for the slider and set them required amount, order of display and more.

16 Display Heading and Text? - display title and description?No. of chars - number of characters in the description
Open Images/Links In New Window? - open the slider link in a new window when clicked?
Order Images Randomly - show images in random order
Use custom images? - use your own images?Yes, Custom Images - yes, own images
Number of custom Images – number of own images
CustomImage 1 - first own image
  • Image 1 SRC- image address;
  • Image 1 Link- slide link;
  • Image 1Heading- title;
  • Image 1 Text- description.
No, Using Posts from a Category - no, use post thumbnails from selected categories
Select a Category - select a category
No. Of posts/images - number of posts/images

Well, that's it, you're done with the Content Slide settings, don't forget to save the changes.

And upon completion of the work done, my main page looks like this:

Of course, you can’t see the animation effect in the picture, but you can be sure that the effect is amazing.

Possibilities Content plugin Slide, thanks to its rich functionality, allows you to create slide shows of almost any size and in any part of the site page (to install the slider on a separate page or in the sidebar of the site using a text widget, you will additionally need a plugin).

Installing a slider on a WordPress website will allow you to clearly demonstrate the content of an online resource, keeping visitors on the project pages for as long as possible, or attracting their attention to your own or partner products, increasing sales. Good luck!

Updated: June 18, 2017 by: Roman Vakhovsky

Sliders on WordPress will make your website more convenient and attractive. But, in order not to sacrifice loading speed, you should only add good ones to the site optimized sliders. Also make sure that your slider will display correctly on mobile devices Oh.

A bunch of WordPress themes contain built-in sliders, but if you still don’t have it, I recommend it this list. Here we have collected best WordPress plugins that will add a beautiful and fast slider to your website.

Meta Slider

Meta Slider is widely used to display pictures. To customize the slider, simply drag to work area required images. The built-in ones will help you quickly set up a beautiful slideshow; the plugin also provides various visual effects.

Cost: Free

Slider Revolution

If you use premium WordPress themes, then you've probably already heard about Slider Revolution. This is one of the most popular sliders with a beautiful design and amazing performance. The plugin will allow create a slider any sizes. Contains many animations and an administration panel for simplified setup.

Cost: $19

Mega Slider

Mega Slider is modern adaptive slider , which can display text, pictures or videos. The plugin provides an easy-to-use builder to create a slider with a unique design, without having to understand any code.

Cost: $18

Hero Slider

This is a well-optimized paid slider that can be fully customized to suit your needs. The plugin is fully responsive and contains a designer for editing the design. You can customize arrows, buttons, and also put a video on the background of the slider.

Cost: $18

Soliloquy

Soliloquy is another one high-quality slider for WordPress. Setting up the plugin is so easy that even inexperienced users they will deal with him immediately.

Cost: from $19

Accordion Slider

Accordion Sliders is fully responsive, impressive stylish design. The slider is very convenient for displaying images. The plugin is well SEO optimized, works quickly and loads using lazy loading technology.

Cost: $21

Smart Slider 2

Smart Slider 2 is free slider with an easy to use designer. The plugin contains convenient panel administration to manage slider parameters, also allows you to place the slider in any part of your site and adjust its size.

Cost: Free (PRO version available)

Slider Pro

Slider Pro is a fully featured premium plugin with full set options for adding and customizing a slider on a WordPress site.

Cost: $29

All Around

All Around is a high-quality and flexible plugin for adding a slider with both videos and pictures. The slider can be placed vertically and colors and fonts can be fully customized. You can customize all the details of the slider, so All Around is suitable for any site.

Cost: $18

Master Slider

Master Slider is one of the most popular sliders on WordPress. Has completely adaptive design , is well optimized and contains over 25 for easy setup. The slider can display any type of content; you can also add a video to the background.

Cost: $20

Cloud Slider

Cloud Slider in full responsive WordPress slider from 18 different topics, which can be easily customized for your website. With this plugin you can create any type of slider.

Cost: $18

Smooth Slider

Smooth Slider is one of the best plugins for displaying custom content. This plugin can create sliders with posts, pages or media content. It has a fully responsive design and contains smooth animations transitions. The plugin is installed along with a multifunctional administration panel for customization.

Cost: Free

for your WordPress site? Tired of testing hundreds of plugins trying to find the best one? Great, then you are standing on on the right track. In this article, we will compare the four most popular plugins that allow you to connect sliders in WordPress, noting their speed, ease of use, and other features. The purpose of our testing will be to find best plugin to implement a slider in WordPress.

Many readers of our site quickly grow from the beginner level and move on to theme customization. One of the most popular questions questions asked by our readers: what is the best slider for WordPress? In this article we will try to answer this question by comparing popular sliders in terms of performance and quality.

The WordPress Slider Problem

The vast majority of WordPress sliders are too slow. If it's not coded too well, a slider can significantly increase the load time of your pages. Adding this is not the most best WordPress hosting, you can come to a situation where your server will work like a snail.

Another root of evil with WordPress sliders is ease of use. Most sliders are overloaded with options and come with massive documentation for beginners.

You should also make sure that the slider is responsive. Unfortunately, most sliders are not like that.

Is it really possible to test hundreds of sliders and check all these points? No, and you don't need to do this. We conducted the testing for you, and below you will find out which slider is the best in all respects. Continue reading.

Contenders for the title of the best slider for WordPress

For this article, we have selected four popular plugins recommended by many users that implement sliders in WordPress. Through our research, we found that these plugins are the most used. We decided to run some simple tests to understand how each of them works. The criteria by which we selected plugins: speed, ease of use, availability of features and compatibility.

Speed

Page loading time and operating speed are important factor when choosing a suitable slider for a WordPress site. As noted earlier, a slow website not only disrupts the user experience, but also reduces your performance in search engines. It is for this reason that the speed of the slider is the number one priority in our tests.

As you can see, Soliloquy is the fastest slider of all in our tests. The reason why this is so is that the plugin features optimized code.

The plugin also uses one small attractive trick. It loads your main slide, after which the rest of the slides load asynchronously. This approach is fast not only in tests, but also in real application on the site - your visitors will notice the speed of opening the slides.

If you want to get a site that is different high performance, then the Soliloquy slider – perfect choice for you.

Ease of use

Creating sliders is not as simple a process as we think. The main task this section– find a plugin that even a beginner can handle. That is, users should create sliders quickly and easily.

Soliloquy

We tested numerous sliders for WordPress, but we didn't find it that simple plugins, like Soliloquy. Installing the plugin and creating slides in it are surprisingly simple steps.

Why is it so easy to use? The answer is obvious: it follows basic coding tips and fits perfectly into the native WordPress admin interface. The slider is simple, but at the same time intuitive user interface, which allows you to create slides using the standard WordPress media uploader.

The plugin includes simple shortcodes, template tags, a button in the post editor, and a widget that allows you to add your slides to different sections of the website.

SlideDeck

SlideDeck is the second easiest plugin we've found to use. Creating a new slideshow in SlideDeck is amazingly easy, and you can easily add numerous slides. You can also create slideshows by adding content from dynamic resources: Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube.

The plugin has many settings to control the behavior of your slideshow. There is a possibility of live preview. SlideDeck's admin interface is a bit confusing and looks out of place in a WordPress environment. However, it is important to note that from a design point of view, the interface is quite nice.

We think that beginners will be able to create slideshows quickly and easily using SlideDeck.

By default, SlideDeck slides are not responsive, but there is an easy solution: you either need to make them responsive when editing or add ress=1 to your shortcode and the problem will be solved.

Nivo Slider

Creating a slider using Nivo Slider- a simple process. You can select images from media downloader, download various images. You can also change the order of the slides. Through an interface similar to the uploader, you can add captions, links, Alt text to your slides. The plugin has shortcodes and template tags that allow you to add a slider to posts, pages, and templates.

Nivo Slider does not support video or other types of media. The plugin only allows you to create slideshows from images. It comes with a wonderful set of themes that you can use, as well as numerous transition effects. Setting up the plugin, creating slideshows, and adding slides to posts/pages is very easy and quick. However, if parameters and options are important to you, then Nivo is noticeably behind SlideDeck 2 and Soliloquy.

Meteor Slides

When creating a slideshow in Meteor Slides, you need to upload each individual slide individually. This is a huge time waster and many newbies may find it a very confusing step. After installing the plugin, go to the Slides - Add New section. Give the individual slide a title, then click on the Set featured image item to load the next slide.

If you want your slide to link to a page, then enter the URL. Finally, you will need to select the appropriate slideshow from the Slideshows meta box.

You cannot change the order of slides in a slideshow. You cannot add video slides and you cannot set text above the slide. All this greatly reduces the functionality of Meteor Slide. However, it remains useful if you just want to add a slideshow.

Possibilities

If you just want to create a simple slideshow of images, then Nivo Slider and Meteor Slides are suitable options for you.

However, Soliloquy and SlideDeck 2 allow you to do so much more with your slideshows. In terms of features, SlideDeck and Soliloquy are almost next to each other. They both have great features and offer a wide range of controls over the presentation of your slides.

Due to its simplicity, Soliloquy is perfect for beginners who can quickly and easily understand its capabilities and options. Slides in Soliloquy are responsive by default, so users won't need to add Extra options to shortcodes to make the slider responsive.

Slide Deck and Soliloquy support Various types content. You can add images, notes, text, and media to your slides. Both plugins allow you to edit individual slides, add advanced information such as captions, overlay text, call to action button.

Price

Another decisive factor that helps users decide on the choice of a slider is its price. IN in this case the price is for a license for one site. Meteor Slider – free plugin, so it is not listed in the table.

As a result of comparing plugins, we can come to the conclusion that the best WP plugin for creating sliders is Soliloquy.

The winner is determined!

Soliloquy is the fastest plugin for creating sliders in WordPress. It adheres to all coding standards, has excellent documentation, is easy to extend for developers, is easy to use, and is also the cheapest.

SlideDeck is second in terms of functionality. In addition, it is slightly slower than Soliloquy.

Sliders, today I want to present several plugins on which these sources can be loaded. Plus, a short description of each plugin, so as not to download a “pig in a poke”. Nobody likes checking once again what the plugin can do and its performance, right? I’ll say right away that all sliders are in plugin format for WordPress, so there shouldn’t be any problems with installation and configuration.

Coin Slider

One of the best, in my opinion, in terms of customization and simultaneous simplicity, but loses to Nivo, which is lower. Allows you to set the image size from the admin panel without delving into the jungle of code. Added by changing the template. There are no previews, which is sad.

Nivo Slider


Truly the king of sliders. To be honest, I don’t really recommend using the WordPress plugin because it hasn’t been updated for a long time, unlike the script. A latest version for WordPress - paid. Well, or as an option - adapt new script To old shell plugin, but this requires more serious knowledge. 16 options for changing the image, support for themes, previews, excellent and valid layout, rich settings. I have not yet come across a script that would do Nivo.

Content Slider from SlideDeck


Another very fancy slider, but now it’s a content slider. Very rich settings, integration into the post editor, several themes included. It is possible to insert different sliders into each post. Eat Pro version, which can do a bunch of other cool things, but the price of $99 per slider really, really confuses me.

Meteor Slides


This candidate is simpler, but he also has his own trick. Firstly, it can be embedded using a shortcode, which is convenient. Secondly, it can create several slideshows that can be used in different places. Thirdly, it can be embedded into a sidebar as a widget. And then rotate the pictures. Pretty cool in my opinion. And yes, Russian support is included

Slideshow Gallery


This slider can also work with the editor WordPress posts, can also be embedded with a shortcode and has image previews. Localization support using po/mo files. Plus, for large images, a lightbox is supported, that is, the image can be enlarged by clicking.

TN3 Gallery


A good plugin, with image previews, good layout and other goodies. But he has an excellent trait - he supports that on this moment Quite a rare thing. But there is also a minus, even two, to download you need to register and there is no version for WordPress. Only a script option, but the slider's capabilities are worth a little effort to install.

WordPress Content Slide


What can I say about this plugin? It is small, completely customizable in appearance, and has good settings from the admin panel. And it works.

ISlidex


A very good slider with support for several themes. The authors promise SEO layout, automatic cropping and caching of images, cross-browser compatibility up to IE7 and support for WordPress 3.x. It can also be embedded in a widget, which significantly increases its value.


24.01.2013 — I’ll add one more plugin that I had to deal with. It left the most pleasant impressions, despite the fact that it is paid.

He will be able to show you anything you want. More than 10 output templates included, own API, support for mobile devices and a bunch of other goodies. Believe me - today it is best slider. And it's worth everything 12$ , of course, all subsequent versions are free. Yes, as the developer claims, this plugin is the only one that fully supports IE10, which is installed in Win8.