WordPress Slider Plugins Compared (2024)

WordPress, as a platform, is popular among the techies and the masses purely because of its dynamics and flexibility. Plain and simple, it’s user-friendly. What a theme may not offer is well-compensated via. widgets and plugins. For example, when it comes to the beautification of websites, WordPress Slider plugins are one of the smartest and easiest ways to use your WordPress website’s real estate to attract and engage your visitors.

This means that using the best WordPress Slider plugin can help you create a more appealing website, and help provide a good user experience. So if you are looking forward to adding a slider on your WordPress website there are plenty of plugins you can consider. However, not all of the slider plugins are the same. And with so many options available it can be difficult to pick the right one.

But, picking the right one could be tricky.  To help you choose the best WordPress slider plugin for your website we have shortlisted the top plugins for your website. Here at TemplateToaster website maker and offline website builder software, we have a list of the top WordPress Slider Plugins.

WordPress Slider Plugin

Apart from the design and page load speed, what you should pay attention to while picking a plugin for yourself is the ratio of its functionality and intuitiveness.

Although, using any slider plugin requires just three simple steps – download, install and activate – you can bypass even these steps by designing your theme on TemplateToaster WordPress theme builder and WordPress theme generator. Not only will you get the custom design and templates, you can adorn them with dazzling slideshows that will never weigh down your site.

Now, if you still want to try out plugins for a slideshow, then this list of handpicked WordPress slider plugins is where your search ends.

How Do We Choose The Best WordPress Slider Plugin?

Before listing these vest slider plugins for the WordPress website we have done complete research based on various factors., tested and compared these plugins.  Here are the major criteria we have looked into while picking the best WordPress slider plugins for this list:

• Responsive: You should choose a slider that automatically looks good on different screen sizes. The plugin should have the ability to work well on different devices like desktop, mobile etc.
• Speed: The slider may include heavy content and increase the page load speed. Therefore, it is important to choose a plugin that does not affect the website speed.
• Ease-of-Use: The sliders should be quick and easy to create even for beginners.
• Designs: The slider plugin should provide various design options with pre-designed templates or themes.
• Pricing: You can choose a free WordPress slider plugins, but many plugin also over paid versions. So look for something that gives you value for money.

List of the best WordPress Slider Plugins

1. Smart Slider 3
2. Meta Slider
3. Slider Revolution
4. Huge-IT Slider
5. Master Slider
6. Soliloquy Slider Lite
7. Ultimate Responsive Image Slider
8. Slider By 10
9. Royal Slider
10. Meteor Slides
11. Wonder Slide Lite
12. Image Slider
13. MaxGalleria
14. Giga Slider
15. Prime Slider

Comparison Chart of the Best WordPress Slider Plugins (2024)

Best Free WordPress Slider Plugins in Detail

1. Smart Slider 3

One of the fastest WordPress slider plugins, Smart Slider 3 is configurable and can be easily integrated to create sliders on a WordPress website. The plugin is fully-responsive, SEO-optimized, and works well with any WordPress theme. Yu can create beautiful sliders and narrate stories without any coding. You can find unique layouts with layers to make your website even more beautiful.

Features:

• Live slide editor to create slides easily and efficiently.
• Unique layouts with layers.
• Responsive mobile-friendly sliders.
• Beautiful slider templates to choose from.
• Page builder support.
• 9 supper smooth background animations.
• 15 template sliders.
• Font and style manager system.

2. Meta slider

Meta slider is a potent mix of Flex Slider, Responsive slides, Coin Slider and Nivo slider that is suitable for mastheads, galleries, as well as online stores. This WordPress slider plugin has features like thumbnail navigation and smart crop, it can give your slideshows the feel of a gallery.

Its Pro version has mind-blowing features like animated layer slides, customization options for developers using API, live theme editor, more than 50 CSS3 transitions, responsive video slides, and a built-in WYSIWYG editor which makes designing fun and intuitive. Full compatible with translation plugins such as WPML, PolyLang and qTranslate.

Features:

• Comes with responsive and lightweight slides.
• Easily crop images.
• Offers a powerful theme editor.
• Supports videos.
• Four slider options with unique transition effects.
• Includes preview option.
• Show sliders using the widgets.

3. Prime Slider

The Prime Slider addon powers up your landing page design with elegant and impressive sliders. Based on the Elementor Builder, this is a custom-coded slider plugin with an amazing number of 55+ unique slider modules and lots of skins. With this, you won’t need to spend more than a minute to design your landing page.

Plus, Prime Slider offers pre-built drag-drop widgets so you do not need any coding knowledge to use them. It’s enough if you drop a Prime Slider widget on your page and call it a day. And you can go beyond by customising the slider with the many features provided within this beast of a plugin.

4. Slider Revolution

The Slider Revolution plugin is a beginner-friendly premium slideshow builder plugins WordPress. The plugin provides you to display text, images. and videos in the sliders. The plugin also lets you customize the slideshow based on your requirements. Without writing any line of code, you can create beautiful responsive sliders.

Features:

• Beautiful visual elements including sliders and corousels.
• Appealing hero sections that help your website stand out.
• 200+ templates.
• 20+ addons special effects.
• Rich and dynamic content.

5. HUGE-IT SLIDER

Extremely simple to use, edit and play, Huge-IT slider kickstarts your website in less than 5 minutes. Since, the plugin supports HTML both in titles and descriptions, you can set URLs to specific pages. Designed to serve different kinds of functionalities, this WordPress slider plugin can also be used as a widget from the widgets admin panel.

Pro version offers the flexibility to use videos and content in slides, new navigation buttons, more design and transition options. Smart Target feature which automatically opens all internal links within the page and outsourced links in a new tab keeping a check on bounce rate and time on site.

Features:

• Create unlimited images in countless number of sliders.
• Custom options for each slider.
• Fully-responsive slider plugin.
• Title and description can be added to the images in the slider.
• Add custom URL for each slide.
• Use post slides to add slides to your posts.
• YouTube Slides and Vimeo Slides.
• 16 navigation buttons styles.

6. Master slider

Master Slider is one of the most advanced HTML5 WordPress sliders. This WordPress slider plugin is characterised as robust, efficient, and intuitive slider compatible with all themes, browsers, and devices. Prime features include a user-friendly panel, smart crop, and multi-axis navigation.

Pro version offers full-width, full-screen and boxed layouts, deep linking, WYSIWYG editor and WordPress’ Native Text Editor. This best WordPress Slider Plugin has hardware accelerated CSS3 3D transforms and WooCommerce product slider.

Features:

• Touch swipe navigation.
• Drag and drop slider creation.
• HTML5 valid and clean markups.
• 6+ interactive transition slides.
• Smart loading assets.
• Loop and linear sliding.
• Fully customizable thumbnails and tabs.
• Supports multiple languages

7. Soliloquy

The Soliloquy Lite plugin is free and is a complete package that anyone would want for their website’s slider – touch-enabled swiping, metadata for each image as well as the slider, smart JS & CSS loading, WYSIWYG editor, and numerous add-ons ranging from themes to Lightbox to Instagram. However, support is provided only when a support license is purchased. The good thing is that this WordPress Slider plugin support comes right from the house of WP’s core development team! It is developed by WordPress’ lead developer, Mark Jaquith, with performance optimization and security at its heart.

Features:

• Drag-and-drop responsive builder.
• SEO-friendly slider plugin optimized for speed.
• Customizer with live preview of the slideshow.
• Compatible with WooCommerce.
• Import media from Instagram and Pinterest.
• Buy add-ons to add videos, HTML captions, touch and swipe navigation

8. Ultimate Responsive Image Slider

Ultimate Responsive Image Slider is the best suited for bloggers who appreciate a drag-and-drop interface with labels and descriptions for individual slides and feature of auto-height.

Unlocking Pro version gets you more than 500 Google font styles, Lightbox integration, unlimited colour scheme, side thumbnails, unlimited images, multi-lingual translation, and multiple image uploader. This drag and drop WordPress slider plugin is horizontal as well as vertical slider orientation.

Features:

• Fully responsive slider plugin.
• Multiple image uploader.
• Add unlimited image slides into single slider.
• Show multiple slides into single posts or page.
• Enable or disable slider title.
• Show or hide slider description.
• SEO-friendly sliders.
• Customize thumbnail position.

9. Slider by 10Web

Slider by 10 is a powerful and versatile WordPress slider plugin that makes it easier for you to show the content in the sliders. The plugin supports both images and videos. SO even if you have a lot of visual content on the website you can use this plugin to display the media.

Features:

• Unlimited slides and sliders.
• Offers multiple layers which can help create multifunctional sliders.
• Imager watermarking allows you to add text to the images.
• Supports carousel and parallax.
• Easy to customize so it can blend with your website.

10. Royal Slider

Royal Slider is a WordPress slider plugin provides a responsive image gallery along with HTML content slider plugin with touch swipe navigation. The plugin offers a mobile-friendly with  custom slideshows with CSS3 banner rotators with images, videos or HTML content in slides. Royal Slider focuses on performance, accessibility, and also provides best user experience.

Features:

• Touch swipe navigation.
• CSS3 transition for devices.
• YouTube and Vimeo videos.
• Smart lazy loading.
• Image and HTML content for every slide.
• Full-screen features with native HTML5 full screen support.

11. Meteor Slides

Meteor Slides is a no-fuss responsive and device-friendly slider with fluid themes, touch & swipe support which is powered by jQuery Cycle. A basic pack contains more than 20 transition styles and supports multiple languages. This best WordPress slider plugin is Lightweight and multisite compatibility.

Features:

• Meteor slides with 20+ transition styles.
• Add slideshow to your website using template.
• Mobile-friendly slides.
• Multiple slideshow options.
• Manage the slide height and width easily.
• Customize individual slideshows.
• Slideshow navigation options.
• Multiple language support.

12. Wonder Slide Lite

The Wonder Slide Lite plugin provides the easiest way to create image slider, video slider, and post slider for WordPress. The plugin also supports YouTube, Vimeo, mp4/webm videos, and WordPress posts. The plugin is fully-responsive and mobile-friendly and is also compatible with iPhone, iPad, and Android. Also it comes with3D transitioneffects and built-in gallery.

Features:

• Fully responsive and mobile-friendly.
• Supports images, mp4/WebM video, YouTube, Vimeo, and WordPress posts.
• Full slider width.
• Beautiful 3D transition effects.
• Built-in Lightbox gallery.
• Multiple slider on single page.
• Show slider in WordPress widget.

13. Image Slider

Image Slider is compatible with all devices and search engines and comes loaded with more than 390 transition effects, unlimited colours, layouts, and ability to link images to external URLs. On top of it, you can customize with CSS and JS and use it for posts, pages, widgets, and sidebars. There is no additional heaviness on the page in this Lite version. This WordPress slider plugin has social share buttons on the slider.

Features:

• Responsive sliders.
• Add sliders on posts, pages and widgets.
• Unlimited image sliders.
• On/Off auto slider.
• 25+ slider effects.
• Open slider in a Lightbox.
• Slideshow using adaptiveHeight

14. MAXGalleria

MaxGalleria is a great pick for everyone – designer, developer, and bloggers. A streamlined design and management put the user to ease. It picks images from the WordPress gallery and from external URLs which can then be used in the six preset layouts or customized as per requirement. There are multiple add-ons that further increase the plugin’s flexibility while keeping it light and interface clean. This best WordPress Slider Plugin has six responsive Lightbox scripts – SwipeBox, PrettyPhoto, FancyBox, Image Lightbox, Tos “R” Us, Nivo Lightbox.

Features:

• Responsive WordPress gallery for all devices.
• Responsive lightbox.
• NextGen gallery importer.
• Addons to improve your gallery experience.
• Layout addons.
• Media library folders.
• Select multiple images from media manager.
• Import galleries from NextGEN.

15. GIGA Slider – Flexible WordPress Slider Plugin

Giga Slider offers the flexibility to be used both as a page slider and a small widget slider. With freedom of unlimited sliders and a plethora of transition effects and skin types to choose from, you have the perfect, responsive, SEO-friendly slider for your website to run on any modern browser.

Pro version adds on to these amazing features with the ability to point slides to a specific URL, full design management and prompt support. This flexible WordPress slider plugin has minified CSS, JS and jQuery files with a lazy load that keep the page light and load speed minimum.

Features:

• Fully responsive and multiple layout support.
• 32 skin type to set.
• Enable or disable pagination.
• Set pagination types to images or buttons.
• Set height or width to pagination thumbnail.
• 25+ transition effects.
• Auto start slideshow on hover feature.
• Supports shortcode.

Which WordPress Slider Plugins You Use ?

That brings us to the end of this discussion of the best WordPress slider plugins. We hope we covered a good amount of ground here. So, try these plugins and let us know in the comments below what worked for you. With the aforementioned slider plugins, you can choose based on your requirements and budget. We have shortlisted and ranked these plugins based on active installations, features, ratings and reviews. So you can choose the one that fits your website needs easily.