10 Best WordPress Slider Plugins Compared (Free & Paid)

Building a website is the easy part. Getting your website to stand out from the crowd, that’s a lot more difficult. It takes a great design, good content, beautiful graphics, and more.

One of the most effective elements you can have in your arsenal is a fantastic-looking slider. What’s a slider? It’s a web page element with a collection of images that move from left to right to reveal the next photo in the set. It’s an engaging tool that grabs attention and keeps visitors on your site longer.

There are thousands of free slider plugins in the WordPress repository which means that you need to spend time weeding out all the bad ones. Our seven best free WordPress slider plugins bring you the cream of the crop, combining both beautiful designs and simplicity of use.

Factors To Consider While Choosing A Slider Plugin

You can’t just pick a slider plugin and use it on your website. What if the plugin you chose had some serious issues like theme compatibility, performance etc?

That’s why it’s important to take a step back and know what makes a slider plugin good. So, here are some factors you should consider while choosing a slider plugin:

So, these are the 4 factors you should consider while choosing a slider plugin. The good thing is that our list of best slider plugins only includes plugins that meet the above criteria so you don’t have to worry about it.

Still, it’s a good practice to ensure that the plugin you choose would not cause any problems on your website.

Now, let’s jump right into the best WordPress slider plugins.

1. Smart Slider 3

Smart Slider has elegant and straightforward pop-off-the-page slider designs. It is intuitive and easy to follow, creating beautiful sliders full of stories in minutes.

It has various slide templates ready to be customized. You can select images, videos, layers, and post sliders to create fully responsive sliders. You can control the slider using touch swipe, scroll, and keyboard navigation.

Key Features

Pre-made templates
Import/export sliders
Create static overlay
Hides layers if needed
Background animations

Price

The basic version is free. And the pro version costs $49 for a single site.

2. Meta Slider

Meta Slider is one of the most popular sliders with an intuitive interface. It can add videos, images, and even the latest products from your online store to your slider. 

It has access to the Unsplash library to provide over a million high-quality images. Its FREE eleven ready-made templates are perfect to design professional-looking sliders, and you can tweak the HTML to create unique sliders of your own. 

You can even schedule sliders to be displayed on specific dates. It can design slideshows, galleries, and carousels- you name it!

Key Features

Built-in SEO
Thumbnail navigation 
Live edit and preview
Customizable to match your site
Shows latest posts/products dynamically

Price

It’s a freemium plugin. And the premium plan starts at $39.50 for a single site.

3. WP Carousel

WordPress Carousel Pro is a powerful and user-friendly WordPress Carousel plugin to create beautiful carousels with any type of content such as images, Posts, WooCommerce Products, video, content, etc. Besides, it is highly customizable with a number of customization options. So, in short, you can call it a complete solution of sliding any type of content you want. 

The plugin includes many options and features. Here are some of noticable features:

• Advanced Shortcode.
• Slide Any Content (Image, Post, Product, Content, Video, etc)
• Advanced Typography.
• Lightbox Functionality.
• Video Carousel Slider.
• WooCommerce Product Carousel.
• 15+ Carousel Control Options.
• Multi-Site Supported.
• Page Builders Ready.

You can get the personal license for just $39 which allows you to use the plugin on 1 site. If you wish to use it on 5 sites, you can get the multi-site license which costs $139 and for unlimited sites, you can get it for $299 only. All payments are one time payment with lifetime priority support and updates.

4. Slide Anything

Slide Anything creates gorgeous responsive and touch-enabled sliders. It can design carousels and sliders, where each slide comprises images, text, HTML, and even shortcodes.

It lets you set a timer for slide duration and transition, with additional options to loop all slides. You can adjust slide colors, backgrounds, borders, and device width. Its slider preview popup helps you view your design instantly, allowing you to make additional changes with ease. 

Key Features

Works on all browsers
Slides can be rearranged
Attractive transition effects
Adds clickable links to slides
Slides work using touch and drag

Price

It’s a completely free plugin.

5. Master Slider

With smooth transitions and touch navigation, Master Slider is a robust plugin. It supports all WordPress themes.

It has 8 ready-made sliders with over 6 slide transition options. Its admin panel is simple and easy to follow. You can set sliders to autoplay with a timer as well as add thumbnails.

Key Features

Multi-site support
Import/export tool
Sets a loop on sliders
Works on all browsers
Widgets and shortcodes
Smart auto crop and height adjustment

Price

The plugin has a free version in the WordPress repo. And the pro edition costs $34.

6. Ultimate Blocks

Ultimate Blocks comes with a wonderfully designed slider block that creates intuitive slides. It is quick and lightweight and loads your sliders in no time.

The plugin comes with simplistic yet detailed options for customization. You can add images, videos, fonts, and other elements.

Key Features

Smooth interface
SEO optimized slides
High performance and speed
Multi-layered transition effects
Best plugin for Gutenberg sites

Price

It’s a completely free plugin.

7. Soliloquy Lite

Soliloquy creates powerful drag-and-drop sliders in minutes. It is incredibly fast to use, focusing on designing user-friendly content.

It comes with pre-designed templates to aid you in creating attractive images and video sliders. It is highly optimized to deliver the best speed, claiming to be the fastest WordPress plugin of its kind. 

Key Features

Lightbox for gallery
Drag and drop builder
Adds thumbnail to slides
HTML and CSS customisation
Product slideshow (WooCommerce)

Price

The basic version is free. The pro plan starts at $17 for a single site.

8. Slider by 10Web

Slider by 10Web maximizes the content in each slide by adding layers of text, image, video, hotspot, and social media buttons. It is SEO-friendly and responsive to all devices.

It has a variety of customization options, letting you have complete control over the design and navigation of each slide. You can add an unlimited number of slides with this plugin, alongside watermark and social sharing options. You can play around with media (add videos from YouTube and Vimeo), icons, fonts, and more.

Key Features

Swipe control
Animation options
Export/import slides
Used on pages, posts, widgets, and more
Filmstrip, carousel, and parallax effects (premium)

Price

It’s a free plugin.

9. Slider Revolution

Slider Revolution is known as the best WordPress slider plugin ever made. That’s because of the vast features it has to offer.

The latest version of Slider Revolution brings more features than ever. What I love about this plugin is its asset library. This library contains assets such as images, objects, backgrounds, and icons that you can use on your slider.

Slider Revolution also includes a whiteboard feature that allows you to create whiteboard animations for your sliders. The plugin also has a rich set of over 140 templates that you can import and use on your website.

Here are the different types of sliders you can create using Slider Revolution:

• Regular Slider.
• Carousels.
• Hero Blocks.
• Social Media Feeds.
• Media Galleries.
• Front Pages.

Their powerful visual editor lets you do things you can’t even imagine. You can create shapes, add animations, effects, customize CSS, and what not. 

The plugin is fully responsive and is lightening fast which means you won’t have to compromise the user experience of your website.

Let’s take a look at some of the features of Slider Revolution:

• Responsive.
• Drag-and-Drop Editor.
• Lazy Loading.
• Links And Actions On Slides.
• Parallax Effects.
• Animation Builder.

The list of features is too big to mention here. You might be thinking this plugin costs hundreds of dollars.

You’re absolutely wrong!

It costs only $29. Shocking, right?

At this price, Slider Revolution is probably one of the best WordPress slider plugins out there.

10. RoyalSlider

Royal Slider is a jQuery image gallery and content slider WordPress plugin. The plugin is responsive and has touch support for mobile devices. 

You can create different types of sliders such as image slider, slideshow, HTML content slider, gallery, banner rotator, video gallery, presentation, and carousel sliders using this plugin.

It doesn’t come with fancy transitions as the plugin focuses more on performance. Here’s a breakdown of the features available in Royal Slider plugin:

• Touch Navigation Support.
• Lazy Loading.
• CSS3 Transitions.
• Youtube And Vimeo Videos In Slides.
• SEO Optimized.

The plugin costs only $14 which makes it quite affordable for the features it has to offer.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many things you can do with WordPress, but it all depends on you. It depends on your imagination and the resources you have at your disposal. Using the plugins we mentioned, you can create a homepage that will not only look amazing but will also be an awesome way to showcase your business and what it has to offer. 

We hope that you find these WordPress slider plugins useful and help you further customize your website(s). Also, thank you again for reading!