10 Best WordPress Lightbox Plugins Compared (2023)

Are you looking for WordPress Lightbox Plugins? If so, then reading this guide can be really helpful for you. In this guide, I have compiled a list of some of the top-notch plugins that you can use for your WordPress website. Sometimes it gets difficult to pick up the perfect option for your site. That’s exactly where you will find this guide helpful. So, let’s dig deeper and see what are the best options available. Let’s dive in!

When you create a website, of course, adding media is essential. However, a Lightbox is an elegant approach to your web design with better media engagement. Basically, it features an image or video on the screen whereas the whole web page dims out. The web page remains visible only around the edges. It helps a visitor to be well-focused on the image or video. Ultimately, it helps drive traffic to your website. This is really impactful in displaying images/videos, opt-in forms, newsletters, slides, etc. If you are running a photography site, then a lightbox feature is a must for you. And, WordPress lightbox plugin is a great tool to convert your call to action. The WordPress lightbox plugin easily makes your media content look more beautiful.

Creating a plain WordPress website is simple. Since WordPress is the most popular and widely used content management system. Everyone from a beginner to a seasoned professional find this platform amazingly useful. Moreover, the availability of WordPress plugins can help you extend the functionality of your website to whatever level you want. And This is exactly how you can use Lightbox plugins for your WordPress website. So, without any further ado, let’s go through the list of some of the cherry-picked WordPress Lightbox plugins. And see which plugin can be useful for your website.

WordPress Lightbox Plugin

WordPress plugin directory provides more than 750 WordPress Lightbox plugins. All these plugins allow you to add a lightbox feature to your website in no time. But choosing one out of hundreds of available plugins can be a cumbersome task. So, Here at TempateToaster offline website builder software, I tried to make it easy for you by enlisting some of the best WordPress lightbox plugins. Let’s go through them and see which plugin is useful for your website.

Best WordPress Lightbox Plugins Compared (2023)

Best WordPress Lightbox Plugins (Review)

1. Easy Fancybox (Free)

Easy Fancybox plugin is quite similar to WP-Featherlight jQuery lightbox plugin. It uses a Fancybox lightbox and WP 3+ multi-site compatibility. However, it easily opens up all links to JPG, GIF, and PNG images in the Fancybox. Furthermore, it also supports the hidden inline content. It has a 4-star rating.

Features

• Easy-Fancybox is compatible with WordPress media plugins.
• Easy Fancybox links to YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, and flash movies.
• It easily links inside Gravity Forms in Ajax mode.
• It supports all common image types like WebP, image maps, SVG, etc.

2. Simple Lightbox (Free)

Simple Lightbox is a quick, lightweight, easily customizable plugin. It is preferable to many complex WordPress lightbox plugins. It has a long list of customizing options. Such as resizing of the lightbox, lightbox effects, and keyboard navigation for images, etc. You can apply lightbox to almost everything: pages, posts, widgets, menus, etc. It also displays the metadata with media files. However, the rating for any plugin matters a lot. And this plugin is well-rated with 4-star on WordPress.

Features

• It offers mobile-optimized themes.
• It automatically activates the links without any coding.
• Simple Lightbox also provides many customizable lightbox animations.
• It facilitates group image links.

3. Responsive Lightbox (Free)

Responsive lightbox is mainly designed for all screen-size of mobiles. Furthermore, it enables you to see better photos in a new window. Also, it allows you to add a lightbox to WordPress image galleries, image/video links, comments content, etc. This plugin has a huge user base with a 4-star rating.

Features

• It selects from 7 responsive lightbox scripts. Including (SwipeBox, prettyPhoto, FancyBox, Nivo Lightbox, Image Lightbox, Featherlight, and TosRUs).
• It has an option to display single-post images as a gallery.
• Responsive Lightbox can modify native WordPress gallery links’ image size.
• It supports the WooCommerce product gallery.
• You can use the image’s title, description, caption, alternative text in the lightbox.
• It gives multi-site support.

4. Ari Fancy Lightbox (Paid)

Ari Fancy lightbox is a mobile-ready plugin. It can be used with different content types. Such as native WordPress images, NextGEN, FooGallery, Justified Image Grid, and Jetpack galleries. Also includes photos, videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Vine, Metacafe services, PDF documents, Google Maps links, etc. It’s really easy to use & automatically attaches to all the links on your website. It also provides a UI interface to change lightbox styles. The rating for this WordPress plugin all good i.e. 5/5. It can load get smart titles from EXIF data or use filenames for images.

Features

• Ari Fancy lightbox gives easy one-click integration with WooCommerce.
• It allows you to disable right-click for images to avoid copying URLs.
• Ari Fancy lightbox supports slideshow mode and loop navigation.
• It provides a thumbnail toolbar for fast navigation between lightbox items.
• It uses Fancybox3 and highly customizable.

5. Foobox Image Lightbox (Free)

Foobox Image lightbox is a stylish plugin with a modern interface. It was the first WordPress lightbox plugin to consider responsive layout seriously. It offers a lightbox with social icons to share your images easily. Moreover, it is fully compatible with many popular WordPress gallery plugins. Like Envira Gallery, NextGEN Gallery, Jetpack, etc. It has a good repo with a 4-star rating and a huge user base.

Features

• It automatically resizes images, videos, and HTML files to match your screen size.
• Foobox Image lightbox plugin provides inbuilt social sharing for each file.
• Foobox Image Lightbox supports YouTube and Vimeo video formats for lightbox.
• WooCommerce product images can be displayed in a lightbox.
• It needs no configuration at all.

6. WP Lightbox 2 (Free)

WP Lightbox 2 is another one of the best WordPress lightbox plugins. It adds a responsive lightbox effect to all your images and gallery photos for the blog. It has many options to set Animation duration, resize large images, change image info position, etc. Moreover, it is easy to install and comes with 5 different themes. It gives an excellent user experience with a 4-star rating. It may have compatibility issues.

Features

• WP Lightbox2 works on all modern browsers.
• You can use lightbox for comments too.
• It can group images to display as a slideshow.
• It is fully responsive & works well with all WordPress versions.

7. WP jQuery Lightbox (Free)

WP jQuery Lightbox is built around Lightbox-2 functionality. It also provides the live browser orientation adjustment. It gives a download link for each file. WP jQuery Lightbox requires WordPress 2.9.2 or higher. It is compatible with versions up to 3.1.4. It is well adjusted for mobile devices. WP jQuery Lightbox has a wide user following, with a 4-star rating. It is no longer maintained and may have compatibility issues.

• This WordPress plugin provides full localization support.
• It also offers an admin panel for configuration.
• WP jQuery Lightbox includes an autoboxing feature for your image links.
• It supports WordPress galleries with media library titles and captions.

8. WP Video Lightbox (Free)

WP Video Lightbox plugin makes use of lightbox overlay display to embed videos. You can easily use it for images, flash, YouTube, Vimeo, iFrame, etc. It offers you a configurable pretty photo library. You can also set the different animation speeds depending on your needs. It can be as fast, slow, normal as you want. It has a 4-star WordPress rating. You can watch videos easily on iPhone & iPad with it.

• You can easily resize a photo plus expand a resized photo.
• It allows you to set a default height & width for the lightbox window.
• You can set an autoplay mode for videos/slideshows.
• It retrieves the thumbnail for your video automatically.

9. jquery-Colorbox – Free WordPress Lightbox Plugin

jQuery Colorbox comes with 11 separate customizable themes. It is compatible with WordPress image galleries and the NextGen Gallery plugin. It has image grouping, gallery grouping, group slideshow capabilities. Furthermore, jQuery Colorbox provides configurable CSS classes and the ability to display externally linked content. It is compatible with versions up to 3.2.1. This plugin has a 4-star rating.

• It supports ajax, inline, and iframed content.
• It is a lightweight plugin with 10KB of JavaScript.
• jQuery Colorbox has the ability to extend with callbacks & event-hooks without altering the source files.
• It preloads upcoming images in a photo group.
• It has multi-lingual support.

10. WP Featherlight ( Free)

WP Featherlight is one of the best WordPress lightbox plugins. It is a simple jQuery lightbox plugin that opens all the images and videos in a minimalist lightbox. You just link to Media File option every time you upload a new image or gallery. You can also lightbox videos, iframes, Ajax content along images. It can work on all modern browsers and on mobile platforms. It has solved the user’s problem of heavy-handed styling. WP Featherlight is a popular WordPress lightbox plugin with a 5-star rating.

• WP-Featherlight is extremely lightweight & flexible.
• You need not configure it. It automatically adds a lightbox to your media elements.
• This plugin gives the option to disable the plugin locally for each page/post.
• It comes in a single beautiful lightbox style.

So, these were some of the best and popularly used WordPress lightbox plugins that you can use for your WordPress website. However, your choice may vary depending on your business needs. But I am quite sure that all the WordPress plugins available in the above list are highly useful and can help you bring more creative and innovative results to your website.

Knowing the fact that all these WordPress plugins are freely available in the WordPress plugins repository. However, there are many other paid WordPress plugins available out there. You may use that too. The choice is all yours!

So, Which WordPress Lightbox Plugins You Should Use?

So, this brings us to the end of this comprehensive guide that includes the best WordPress lightbox plugins. I sure by now you must have got a clear idea about how WordPress Lightbox plugins improve the user experience drastically by displaying enlarged versions of media. They help to reduce the bounce rate plus visitors can navigate through more images/ videos. So to have a memorable and better presentation of media, you can make use of any of the free WordPress lightbox plugins. You can use any plugin depending on the customization options or installed WordPress version, all are going to benefit you.

If you also want a website that can complement the lightbox feature, try your hands on our website maker software or WordPress theme Builder. You can easily make a stunning website having the latest functionality. No coding at all, only a user-friendly drag & drop interface, and your site will be ready just in few minutes. So, get ready for a great experience. Stay Safe!