Slider Revolution vs. Smart Slider

Before you start working with a new plugin, maybe you are curious about what the difference is between Slider Revolution and Smart Slider.

Slide Editing

Each plugin has a visual slide editor, so you can instantly see the result, and you can customize your slider. I think Smart Slider’s interface is more user-friendly, but each plugin has its own logic, where you can find the options.

Layers

Both plugins come with the standard layers – heading, text, button, and image. And you can use them freely. There isn’t a limit on how many layers you can use, you can create your own design with both plugins.

Available Building Options

While in Slider Revolution you can put layers on your slider to the position where you want, Smart Slider offers 2 options for positioning: a default and an absolute position. The Absolute position is similar to what Slider Revolution offers: you can drop your layers everywhere on the canvas.

In addition, the Default positioning works like a page builder: you can put your layers in rows and columns, and align them vertically or horizontally. To make space between the layers, you can use padding and margins. Why is it good? Because of that, you can create a responsive slider with minimal effort, and it will look great on every device. Also, you have the option to combine these 2 modes by which you can achieve every design as you imagined.

Animations

Slider Revolution has more options where you can animate your slider or your layers. You can put animation on your layers, on your background, you can use Ken Burns or parallax effect, so there are many options. However, in the free version of Smart Slider, you can use only background animations. Layer animations and a lot of other effects are available only in the Smart Slider Pro.

Speed

I have created a Smart Slider free demo with Slider Revolution to test the speed of each plugin. I published both sliders into a new empty page.

• In each slider, I used the same images, sizes, and fonts
• I tested them with other plugins deactivated
• Cleared the cache before the speed test
• I used Gutenberg to publish the sliders.

Let’s see the results.

	Smart Slider Free	Slider Revolution
Requests	20	21
Page size	709 kB	1 MB
Load time	199 ms	316 ms

As you can see, Smart Slider was faster than the Slider Revolution, and also the page size is less than the other plugin’s page. I didn’t use any optimization settings, which can speed up the results – so the speed test was made with the basic settings of each plugin. As we can see from the results, we can say that Smart Slider is faster, which isn’t bad for a free plugin, right?

Free Slider Revolution Alternatives with Smart Slider

Smart Slider can be a great free Slider Revolution alternative because you can create more kinds of sliders with this plugin. Let’s see some examples of what kind of sliders you can create with Smart Slider as with Slider Revolution.

Hero Image Block

Live PreviewIf you want to create a hero image block for your site, Smart Slider can be a great free Slider Revolution alternative. With Smart Slider, you can put Heading, text, image, and button on your slide, and you can position it where you want.

Hero image blocks can be used as the header of your page, and with Smart Slider, you can easily create it. Just select the layers you want to use, and then publish them on your site. There are more templates that you can start with, but you can build your own design, too.

Video Slider

Live PreviewRevolution Slider offers the opportunity to create video galleries. Smart Slider Free has the option to create video sliders, too. There are 2 video layers available: YouTube and Vimeo. There aren’t any other free slider plugins that I’m aware of that offer that kind of functionality.

A lot of people use YouTube or Vimeo videos on their websites because these media elements can call the visitors’ attention. These layers are simple, because YouTube and Vimeo host the videos, so you don’t need to download any video on your site. All you need is to copy the video’s link or ID, and you can create a free responsive video gallery.

Full-Width Slider Alternative

Live PreviewFree Slider Revolution slider alternative can be the full-width type slider of Smart Slider. A full-width slider fills the 100% width of your screen, and it looks good on any page. Using this kind of slider is a great way to highlight your product or content on your page, and it also looks good.

You have the option to design the controls like bullets or arrows, use a background color or image, and you can put layers on your slider. It’s up to you what kind of slider you want to create.

Post Slider

Live PreviewPost Sliders can be very useful parts of your website. They show all the recent or featured posts to catch the visitors’ attention, and they encourage your visitors to spend more time on your blog. Smart Slider offers variables that you can use, and these variables change dynamically depending on the content of your posts.

Can you Create the Same-Looking Slider in Slider Revolution and Smart Slider Free?

Maybe you have questions about a free slider plugin that can be a premium slider alternative. Let’s check a Slider Revolution example from their library, and see how we can create a similar layout with Smart Slider free.

I choose a hero image from the Slider Revolution’s templates. This block has a grey background image, a heading, 2 texts, and a CTA with a hover effect on the left side, and 3 images that overlap each other on the right.

This layout can easily be created with Smart Slider free. I have created a 1-row – 2-column structure. I’ve put two heading layers, a text layer, and a button into the first column. In the second I’ve put an image from a laptop. The mobiles are in the column but in absolute position, so this image is above the laptop image. Between the texts, I’ve set some padding which makes space between them.

With Smart Slider, you can easily create a responsive slider. In most cases, it is enough to make the font size smaller on different devices with the text scale. If you use a row, then it can be a great solution to wrap the columns below each other. Also, you can change the order of these columns, so you can put the images on the top.

You can use animation and effects in the Pro version of Smart Slider.

Reasons to Choose Smart Slider as a Free Slider Revolution Alternative

• • Free: Smart Slider is a free plugin with premium features. If you don’t want to pay for a plugin, it can be a great alternative.
  • Layers: Heading, text, buttons, images or videos. Create the slider that you’ve imagined.
  • Create the layout you want: You can create a complicated layout thanks to the rows, columns, and positioning options.
  • Customizable controls: You have the option to customize the arrows, bullets, and thumbnails. Position them, change their colors, or hide them on devices.
  • Ready to use templates: Smart Slider has a template library as Slider Revolution. Just choose one, change the content, and publish it.

Live Preview

• Responsive sliders: You can create a slider that looks good on any device.
• Free support: It’s also important to mention that Smart Slider offers free support to every user. Also, you don’t need to wait weeks for a response.

What More Can Smart Slider Pro Offer?

You may think that Smart Slider free doesn’t have a lot of features like Slider Revolution, however, the Pro version of Smart Slider has a lot. You can consider choosing the Pro version. Why? The Standard package costs $49 and you will get lifetime support and updates while Slider Revolution’s one-time payment package costs $79 only with 6-month support.

	Slider Revolution		Smart Slider Pro		Smart Slider Free
	Price	Support	Price	Support	Price	Support
1 domain	$95	6 months	$49	lifetime	free	lifetime
3 domains	$250	6 months	$99	lifetime	free	lifetime
5 domains	$415	6 months	$149	lifetime	free	lifetime
10 domains	$765	6 months	$249	lifetime	free	lifetime

Smart Slider and its 24 layer types give you much more creative freedom. If you do choose Smart Slider as your new slider tool, then layers for icons, progress bars, counters, and even mp4 videos can be used to add content-rich slideshows to your website.

Live PreviewThe pro version offers lots of effects that you can set, like Parallax, Ken Burns, Particle, and Shape Divider. All of them are customizable and can cheer up a single slider, too. You can add layer animations on the individual layers of your slides. They can come in, loop, go out, repeat, so you can create even more complex animations if you want.

Conclusion

Despite the fact that Smart Slider is a free plugin, it offers solid features that are on par with Slider Revolution. The Default and Absolute positions, drag-and-drop slider building, rich layers, and stunning templates, let you build impressive sliders that leave basic scrolling sliders in the dust.

Not convinced? Check out Smart Slider’s example sliders and see for yourself. It’s easy to put a slider together in just a few minutes. It’s totally free, what can you lose?

The post Are You Looking for a Free Slider Revolution Alternative? appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> https://smartslider3.com/blog/smart-slider-3-and-elementor/ Mon, 22 Jan 2024 06:00:32 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=3803 Download Smart Slider 3 Download Elementor Sliders are super versatile design tools. In fact, you can use them for almost any purpose on your site. Additionally, they fit into any page of a WordPress website. For example, you can create a hero slider or display your products on your homepage. Furthermore, it’s easy to combine […]

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]]> Download Smart Slider 3 Download Elementor

Sliders are super versatile design tools. In fact, you can use them for almost any purpose on your site. Additionally, they fit into any page of a WordPress website. For example, you can create a hero slider or display your products on your homepage. Furthermore, it’s easy to combine sliders with page builders. In fact, you can create a gorgeous slider in Elementor as well.

Why do you need an Elementor slider?

Sliders are one of the best tools at your disposal to make your site more attractive to your visitors. Here are some reasons to use a slider on your Elementor website.

• Sliders are interactive. Sliders can bring interactivity to your website. Instead of using standard arrows for navigation, you can use CTA buttons. As a result, visitors can explore your content at their own pace. Additionally, using CTA buttons as navigation can enhance the user experience.
• They make websites stand out. Sliders are full of cool effects that help your website stand out from the crowd.
• They highlight new content. Sliders are typically used to showcase the latest blog posts or new products. So when visitors look at them, they automatically assume they promote something new.
• Sliders save space. You don’t want to overwhelm your visitor with a website crowded with information. If you have lots of content and use proper white spaces, your pages will be long. However, if you use a slider, your content needs less vertical space, so it’s more comfortable to browse. Furthermore, you can leave appropriate white space around your content. As a result, the page won’t be too long and uncomfortable to scroll through.
• They help deliver the wow factor. You want your visitors to spend more time on your website, and to keep coming back. Sliders in 2020 are full of potential wow factors to help you achieve this goal. For one thing, they have cool effects, like Ken Burns or Parallax. Additionally, you can use them to create cool designs, like the broken grid layout.

How to add a slider in Elementor?

If you are wondering how to create sliders in Elementor, then the good news is that there are many ways to do it. For example, you can use the Pro version of Elementor, which has its own slider widget. In fact, it lets you create great-looking, responsive, but rather basic sliders for your site. There are only three layers you can add to your Elementor slider: a heading, text, and a button. Additionally, they can only be in fixed places, which doesn’t give much space for creativity.

In short, the Elementor slider is great but limited. So if you are looking for a slider, that helps you unleash your creativity, you need a slider plugin. In fact, there’s one plugin I can recommend you to look at: Smart Slider 3.

What is Smart Slider 3?

Smart Slider 3 is the fastest-growing slider plugin on the market. Its free version has more than 900k active installations, so it’s super popular. One of the reasons for its fame is that Smart Slider is super easy to use. Additionally, it has all the features you’d expect to find to create interactive sliders. Furthermore, it offers you unlimited possibilities to create visually stunning sliders and blocks.

Creating a slide with Smart Slider is super easy. You just need to drag a layer to the canvas and style it the way you want. It’s super simple and it’s just like working with Elementor’s widgets. Don’t believe me? Smart Slider has an excellent free version you can try on your own site.

Why should you use Smart Slider 3 with Elementor?

Smart Slider 3 is the best WordPress slider plugin. So it’s the perfect choice for creating Elementor sliders. In fact, there are many reasons you should use Smart Slider 3 and Elementor together.

• Smart Slider is easy to use. Creating content in Smart Slider is very much like working with Elementor. So, if you can use Elementor, you’ll be able to use Smart Slider 3 as well.
• It’s seamlessly integrated into Elementor. Smart Slider 3 has its own Elementor widget for easy publishing. Additionally, you can see the sliders you have made while you’re editing the page with Elementor.
• Your sliders are responsive. Using Smart Slider you can create sliders that look great on mobile devices.
• You can build anything you want. Unlike the Elementor slider widget, Smart Slider 3 doesn’t limit what you can build. In fact, you can add as many layers as you want. Additionally, you can freely change the order of the layers.
• It helps you deliver the wow factor. Smart Slider has spectacular effects which you can use to amaze your visitors. In fact, using Smart Slider you can enrich your slider with popular effects like the Ken Burns, Parallax, or Particle effect. Additionally, you can create interesting sliders if you add animated Shape dividers.
• It helps you save space. You can use sliders to save space on your website by grouping similar content inside. For example, if you sell products, you probably have a testimonial section on your site. But this section can be long if you don’t use a slider to display the testimonials. But if you create a testimonial slider instead, you can display them in a smaller space. Additionally, you can make the slider interactive and have visitors browse it at will.

How to add Smart Slider 3 in Elementor?

1. Install Smart Slider 3.
2. Create a new slider and add slides.
3. Configure each slide to your liking.
4. Edit your page with Elementor.
5. Drag and drop a Smart Slider 3 widget where you want the slider to show up.
6. Select your slider.
7. Save the page.

As you can see from the steps above, using Smart Slider 3 with Elementor couldn’t be simpler. After you created your slider, just add a new slider widget and select the slider you have made. It’s easy, fast and convenient.

Elementor slider examples for inspiration

Are you still not convinced that you need an Elementor slider on your website? Here are a bunch of slider templates that you can use in Elementor. All samples have been created with Smart Slider 3 and you can import them with one click. Let these gorgeous sliders inspire you to create something stunning for your website!

Homepage sliders

A stunning slider on your home page can help you grab the attention of your visitors. Typically, they use beautiful imagery and stunning effects for that. But one of the most important purposes of a homepage slider is to capture the attention of visitors. For example, to get them to learn more about your product or services using a CTA button.

Full-Width Slider

View Template

Make your website more appealing and mesmerize your visitors with the Monolith Boxed Slider. This trendy and energetic template guarantees to amaze your audience. Explore different layers, adjust animations, and experiment with the design to craft a classy and captivating Monolith Boxed Slider. Smart Slider’s responsive features ensure that it looks great on any device, providing an optimal viewing experience for all your visitors.

Blur Slider

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Discover a whole new realm of opportunities with the Blur slider. Its exceptional design and seamless animations push the limits of imagination, resulting in mesmerizing visuals that will stay with you. Dive into the Blur slider, where creativity and practicality come together to deliver a user-friendly experience.

Real Estate Slider

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The Real Estate slider is the perfect option for real estate websites or displaying your portfolio, as it effortlessly blends a modern and minimalistic appearance with stunning effects.

Undiscovered Universe Slider

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Take a cosmic adventure with the Undiscovered Universe slider template, specially crafted to take your website to new heights. Let your audience dive into mesmerizing visuals and captivating animations of otherworldly adventures that will keep them scrolling and captivated.

Hero Headers

A hero header is a trendy design element that typically contains a heading, an image, and a CTA button. Smart Slider helps you create stunning hero headers for your Elementor website.

Lawyer Slider

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Impress your visitors and add a touch of elegance to your business website with the Lawyer Slider. This full-width video slider will captivate your audience with its smooth animations and stunning video background.

Tattoo Studio

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Check out the Tattoo Studio template and experience the perfect blend of digital art and modern design. Whether you want to showcase your artwork or promote your services, this template offers a visually captivating and responsive platform that will surely impress your audience.

About Us Sliders

One of the most important pages of your website is the About Us page. You can tell visitors about your business, which helps to build trust. Additionally, the About Us page gives you a chance to introduce your business and your team as well.

Nala Showcase

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The Nala Showcase slider is a sleek slide kit that has evolved from the Slide Library kit, Nala. It’s specifically created to help you effortlessly create breathtaking slides that will leave a lasting impression.

Advertising Agency

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Check out the awesome Advertising Agency slider, which draws inspiration from a one-of-a-kind design. With its special gradients in the background, this slider adds a visually striking element to your website.

Monolith Full Slider

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The Monolith Full Slider is an amazing tool to showcase your content with a striking design and smooth animation. This slider, created with a Full-width layout, guarantees a responsive and captivating display on different screen sizes. With easy-to-use navigation, it provides a user-friendly experience right from the beginning.

Post Sliders

Creating a post slider can bring more attention to your blog posts. That’s why most serious bloggers have some kind of post showcase on their latest content.

Post Slider Showcase

View Template

First, let’s start with a more traditional-looking post slider. It shows up to 3 posts at a time. It uses the featured image of the post as the background of the slide. Additionally, it displays useful information about the post, such as its title, date, author, and excerpt. Furthermore, there’s a nice bullet navigation at the bottom of the slider.

Broken Grid Slider

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This slider is perfect for creating a post, product, or even a team slider. It features a large image, which could be a featured image of the post or a picture of your team member. There’s also a place to display information about the post.

Post Slider Carousel

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The Post Slider Carousel template is both dynamic and visually stunning. This template uses a Carousel slider to showcase your most recent or popular posts in a trendy card-like layout. Its full-width display, interactive links, and smooth horizontal animations make it the perfect choice for presenting your blog content or products with a touch of style.

Post Carousel Divider

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This template showcases an animated carousel divider that effortlessly captivates your audience. By using the Carousel slider type, you can display multiple slides simultaneously, creating a visually stunning presentation. The smooth, wave-like motion of the animated shape divider adds a touch of wonder to your slider, making it a truly engaging part of your website.

Product Sliders

Webshops like to use product sliders to increase visitor engagement. Typically a product slider shows the most popular or latest products of the store. Both use cases have their own advantages. For example, showing the most popular products can save the time of visitors, as they don’t have to search for them. However, your latest products can get more attention if you feature them in your slider.

Product Carousel

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A product slider is the perfect choice to showcase your WooCommerce products. This carousel is a great choice because of its look, as it displays three slides. In fact, visitors are familiar with these traditional product slides. So they’ll enjoy seeing one on your website.

Organic Food

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Upgrade the charm of your website using the Organic Food slider template. It effortlessly combines popular animations like the Ken Burns Effect and mouse-based layer parallax, giving your site a trendy look. This captivating full-width slider is perfect for displaying organic products, delicious foods, or any visually appealing content.

Black Friday Slider

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This template is specifically designed to highlight your incredible deals and connect with your audience during this epic shopping event. With its Full Page layout, this slider effortlessly grabs attention by filling up the entire width and height of the browser. It’s guaranteed to make a lasting first impression on your users.

Full-Width Product Carousel

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In the Full Width Product Carousel slider products are showcased by introducing a fresh and creative look. This template utilizes the Carousel slider type to display products in a full-width format, seamlessly blending product information, discounts, and brand showcases. This slider guarantees a captivating and smooth shopping experience for your website visitors.

Video sliders

Video sliders help you tell your site’s story with audio and visual tools. Additionally, they’re great to help you sell your product or services. Also, you can use a video slider to show learning materials or even user testimonials. In Smart Slider, you can add YouTube, Vimeo, and MP4 videos to your slides.

Yoga Hero Block

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The Yoga Hero Block is a mesmerizing block-style slider that adds a stunning header to your webpage. This template flawlessly combines a video background with an Animated Heading and Counter layer to enhance visual appeal and captivate your audience. Take your website to new heights with this dynamic design tool that effortlessly grabs visitors’ attention and encourages interaction.

Vlogger Slider

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The Vlogger template is perfect for creating a landing page that grabs the attention of visitors with cool animations, captivating videos, and interactive lightboxes. With its well-structured design, this template provides a stylish and impactful way to showcase your business.

Testimonial sliders

Testimonials are powerful tools to increase the credibility of your business. Potential buyers won’t believe everything you say, but they’ll believe other people like them. So when you sell products online, it’s important to show testimonials. The word of other users helps to turn your hesitant visitors into customers. In other words, people who check out your testimonials will more likely spend money in your store.

Sliders are great to show testimonials because they help save space. Additionally, you can create interactive testimonial sliders that visitors will love to explore.

Testimonial Carousel

View Template

This modern-looking Testimonial Carousel displays up to 3 testimonials at a time. As a result, it takes less time and clicks to go through your testimonials. Furthermore, the single background color gives a modern look to the slider.

Testimonial Thumbnail

View Template

The background image of this slider is set for the slider. The slides themselves have no background, so the picture of the slider is visible. As a result, when visitors want to see a different testimonial, they’ll see the slide content move. But the background will stay there, without any movement. Because of this, the slider looks more interesting and eye-catching. In fact, with a slider like this, you can be sure you’ll stand out of the crowd

Final Thoughts

An Elementor slider can help you make your website more memorable. Sliders let you create interactive content, which visitors will browse with joy. In fact, Smart Slider 3 is the best slider plugin to help you create such amazing sliders for Elementor. Additionally, it offers many great samples you can start with.

What are you waiting for? Create interactive Elementor sliders and wow your visitors immediately!

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]]> https://smartslider3.com/blog/best-wordpress-ai-plugins/ Wed, 03 Jan 2024 08:00:09 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=56298 We all know that it’s important to keep up with the constantly changing world of web development if you want to have a successful online presence. Luckily, WordPress users have a chance to take advantage of the latest technologies by incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into their websites. AI has become a total game-changer in recent […]

The post 10 Best WordPress AI Plugins to Try in 2024 appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> We all know that it’s important to keep up with the constantly changing world of web development if you want to have a successful online presence. Luckily, WordPress users have a chance to take advantage of the latest technologies by incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into their websites.

AI has become a total game-changer in recent times, bringing fresh and creative solutions to make tasks easier, enhance user experiences, and boost website performance. In 2024, the integration of AI into WordPress is even more exciting than before. There are a bunch of incredible AI plugins ready to revolutionize the way we create and engage with websites. So let’s take a dive into the world of AI plugins for WordPress in 2024.

📚 Table of contents

🤖 1. AI Engine Plugin
📈 2. Rank Math SEO
🧞‍♂️ 3. GetGenie
🎨 4. Elemenentor AI
🌟 5. Divi AI
⚙️ 6. Uncanny Automator
💻 7. CodeWP AI
💬 8. Tidio Live Chat
📚 9. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)
🔗 10. Link Whisper
💡 Conclusion

1. AI Engine Plugin

Download

On our journey through the world of AI-powered WordPress plugins, we can’t miss the AI Engine Plugin. This plugin is causing quite a stir in the WordPress community as it brings the power of artificial intelligence right to your website.

What is the AI Engine Plugin?

Imagine having your own virtual assistant right in your WordPress dashboard. Thanks to the AI Engine Plugin, that’s exactly what you’ll have. This plugin provides a WordPress-focused AI experience that can help you improve and manage your website in countless ways.

To get started, simply get an open AI key and add it to the plugin’s settings. This will enable you to unlock the true power of the plugin.

Key Features and Functionalities

• Virtual Assistant: The AI Engine Plugin offers a virtual assistant that focuses on tasks specific to WordPress. It’s like having your own personal helper right on your dashboard, ready to answer any questions you may have.
• Prompts and Templates: It provides a wide range of prompts and templates to assist you in creating AI-optimized and generated content. This means that you can say goodbye to writer’s block.
• Image Generator: Its image-generating feature is definitely one of its most exciting features. With just a few text prompts you can create stunning images. Once you are happy with the generated image, you can personalize it by adding a catchy title, a captivating caption, a detailed description, and even some alt text. And the cherry on top is that you can instantly add it to your WordPress media gallery or simply download it for offline use.

Pricing:

• Free version available
• Paid plans start at $49/year for one website

Don’t worry we’re just scratching the surface with this plugin. Keep reading to discover even more amazing AI tools that will take your website to the next level.

2. Rank Math SEO

Download

In our search for the top AI plugins for WordPress in 2024, we stumbled upon the famous Rank Math SEO plugin. This plugin has been a favorite among SEO enthusiasts for quite some time, but now it’s made it to our list thanks to its impressive new AI capabilities. These features are designed to give you even more control over the on-page SEO of your website.

What is the Rank Math SEO Plugin?

Rank Math SEO is well-known for being a great SEO plugin. But what sets it apart from other WordPress AI plugins is its incorporation of cutting-edge AI features that are designed to make your on-page SEO even more efficient.

Key Features and Functionalities

• Content AI Integration: After you’ve got the Rank Math SEO up and running, it’s time to explore its powerful Content AI. With this awesome feature, you can easily boost your content‘s SEO elements, like headings, links, and overall optimize for SEO, by just asking its Content AI to generate it.
• SEO Keywords: Its Content AI is a great tool to add SEO keywords to your pages and optimize your content for search engines. You’ll get a detailed analysis of your page’s content. This analysis will help you identify areas for improvement and boost your page’s search engine ranking.
• Providing Insights: Rank Math SEO’s AI capabilities are not limited to analyzing your content alone. It can also help you analyze your competition by providing valuable insights like CPC and search volume data for your chosen keyword. With this information, you can make better decisions about your content strategy and stay ahead of the competition.
• Content Optimization Recommendations: It has a bunch of SEO suggestions as well, that can help you improve your content’s visibility on search engines. It recommends extra keywords, while also improving headings, word count, and more, all to boost the overall quality of your content.
• Link Suggestions: It makes sure that your content has reliable sources and boosts its credibility and relevance.

Pricing:

• Free version available
• Paid plans start at $59/year for unlimited websites

3. GetGenie

Download

GetGenie is an exceptional writing companion that we discovered during our exploration of WordPress AI plugins. It isn’t just any ordinary writing tool, it’s an AI assistant that’s been carefully created to take your content writing skills to the next level.

What is the GetGenie Plugin?

This AI assistant is designed to help content creators in producing high-quality, unique blog posts quickly. It’s got you covered whether you’re a beginner or an advanced writer.

Key Features and Functionalities

• Templates: GetGenie offers a wide range of templates to choose from, with more than 30 options available. These templates are designed to fit different content frameworks, providing you with guidance. By using these templates, you can ensure that your content follows these proven structures and have maximum impact.
• On-page SEO Scores: It gives you live on-page SEO scores, giving you immediate feedback on how well your content is optimized for search engines.
  Genie Mode: With it, you can effortlessly create content by using prompts and get detailed responses in return. It can be a game-changer for anyone looking to create content quickly and effectively.
• GenieChat: GetGenie takes it a step further with the introduction of “GenieChat”. It’s a chatting platform that allows you to have human-like conversations with 22 unique personalities. This not only adds a personal touch to your content creation but also opens up exciting opportunities for interaction.
• Competitor Data Analysis: GetGenie goes beyond content creation by providing competitor data analysis. Which means that it shows you valuable insight to stay ahead in your niche.
• Generate Ideas: Looking for some inspiration as a blogger? GetGenie is the perfect tool to generate ideas and ignite your creativity. It’s designed to help you uncover new and exciting topics to write about.
• Multilingual Content: Easily create content in various languages and broaden your audience.

Pricing:

• Free version available
• Paid plans start at $19/month for unlimited websites

4. Elemenentor AI

Download

Going further on this journey of exploring the top WordPress AI plugins, we’ve come across the game-changing Elelementor AI. This AI solution is seamlessly integrated into the popular Elementor page and website builder plugin.

What is the Elementor AI Plugin?

Elementor is one of the best page and website builders for WordPress. And now with the addition of Elementor AI, it’s taking a huge step into the future of website creation. Its main focus is on transforming website creation, optimization, and design processes.
Let’s explore the amazing features that make Elementor AI a must-have for Elementor users.

Key Features and Functionalities

• Custom Code Snippets: With Elementor AI, you can easily create custom HTML and CSS code snippets without any coding skills. This feature allows you to enhance and personalize your Elementor website effortlessly, even if you are not a coding expert.
• Content Creation and Optimization: Elementor AI is the perfect writing assistant for all your content creation and optimization needs. Whether you are creating new content or rewriting existing text within the Elementor page builder, you can easily shorten, extend, or check the grammar or spelling of it. With Elementor AI you can do all this within the familiar interface of the Elementor plugin.
• Multilingual: Elementor AI is a game-changer when it comes to language diversity. With its amazing multilingual capabilities, it effortlessly translates text into more than 20 languages in real time.
• Module-Specific Prompts: These prompts adapt to the specific Elementor module you are using. So if you are working with a heading module, the prompts will be different compared to when you are using a text block module. This personalized help from its AI helps you create impactful content for each module, which ultimately assists you in improving your website1s overall impact.

Pricing:

• Free trial available
• Paid plans start at $35.88/year for unlimited websites

5. Divi AI

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Divi AI completely changes the game when it comes to creating websites on WordPress. It’s not just a helpful tool, it completely reinvents how websites are imagined and brought into existence.

What is the Divi AI Plugin?

Divi AI takes your web design experience to the next level by seamlessly integrating with Divi, a popular WordPress theme and page builder while adding the power of artificial intelligence to the mix.

Key Features and Functionalities

• Content Writing Tool: It has launched an impressive content-writing tool, that allows users to create website content with ease. With just one click, you can generate text content for your website, whether you are starting from scratch or improving existing content. Divi AI offers prompts and suggestions to make our workflow smoother.
• Image Generation: Divi AI offers image generation features, letting users create stunning visuals for their websites with ease. With built-in style prompts, the generated images are guaranteed to match the desired aesthetic.
• Analyzes Website: It learns from your website, by analyzing the information available on your website and pages. This way it can produce highly accurate and relevant results.

Pricing:

• Free trial available
• Paid plans start at $24/month ($18/month if paid yearly)

6. Uncanny Automator

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Let’s explore the world of automation with the remarkable Uncanny Automator, as we continue our search for the top WordPress AI plugins. This plugin is like Zapier for WordPress, allowing you to automate a wide range of tasks by connecting your WordPress site, plugins, and apps. And now with the integration of artificial intelligence, it’s even more powerful than ever before.

What is the Uncanny Automator Plugin?

Uncanny Automator is a powerful automation tool that makes it easy for your WordPress site, plugins, and third-party services to communicate seamlessly. It ensures that all the different parts of your WordPress setup work together smoothly.

Key Features and Functionalities

• Extensive Plugin Integrations: It’s the ultimate connector for your WordPress ecosystem, with support for more than 100 plugins and third-party services. It acts as a universal translator, allowing smooth communication between various tools.
• No-Code Visual Builder: It’s one of its most outstanding features. With its user-friendly interface, creating recipes and automating tasks has never been easier. You can integrate AI into your WordPress workflow without any complex coding, thanks to the simple drag-and-drop feature.
• Dealy and Scheduling Automation: It brings in a touch of flexibility. With this feature, you can ensure that tasks are carried out at the perfect time, enabling you to enhance the efficiency of managing your website.
• Dynamic Content: You can make use of dynamic content from different sources such as user-generated data and other generated content. This guarantees that your website’s automation process can easily adapt to the changing needs of your website.
• OpenAI Integration: Uncanny Automator made a huge step in integrating with OpenAI, which allows you to bring its incredible capabilities to your WordPress site. With the help of recipes, you can effortlessly integrate AI into different parts of your website management.

Pricing:

• Free version available
• Paid plans start at $199/year

7. CodeWP AI

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We have arrived at a special place for WordPress developers. CodeWP AI is specifically designed for those who navigate the coding realm of WordPress.

What is the CodeWP AI Plugin?

This coding assistant is a powerful accessory that provides assistance with PHP and JS, making code creation easier and solving complex tasks that could otherwise take up hours of your time.

Key Features and Functionalities

• Dozens of AI Modes: It goes beyond generic assistance and caters to the specific needs of WordPress developers. With dozens of finely tuned AI modes, the plugin is designed to provide accurate and high-quality code snippets. Whether you are using specific plugins, page builders, or products, CodeWP AI has got you covered with its wide range of AI modes.
• Compatible with Page Builders: CodeWP AI is built to be compatible with all the major plugins and page builders.
• Tutorials: Looking for guidance? CodeWp AI has a wide range of expertly crafted tutorials made just for you.
• Example Snippets: It comes with a wide range of example snippets, which gives you tested and proven code snippets to easily integrate into your projects.
• General Functions: It provides you with various general functions that can be applied in different scenarios. Additionally, it offers specialized AI modes that are specifically designed for specific tasks. This means that whether you’re dealing with a common challenge or a specialized task, CodeWP AI’s got your back.
• Designed for WordPress Users: CodeWP AI is not your average coding assistant. It’s tailored to meet the needs of WordPress users, making it a smart and effective tool for those who use WordPress on a regular basis.

Pricing:

• Free version available
• Paid plans start at $96/year

8. Tidio Live Chat

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Tidio live chat is a game-changer in the world of WordPress communication solutions. It’s an all-in-one tool that revolutionizes customer service and boosts sales. It goes beyond being a simple chat plugin, it brings a new era to your website’s customer service.

What is the Tidio Live Chat Plugin?

It offers various communication channels and makes use of chatbots. Let’s explore its standout features that make it a force to be reckoned with.

Key Features and Functionalities

• Everything in One Place: It makes communication a breeze by bringing all channels together in one easy-to-use dashboard. Whether it’s live chat, email, or messaging apps, Tidio guarantees seamless management of all your needs.
• Templates: Its chatbot templates are the perfect way to boost user engagement. You can find a variety of options from cart-saving prompts to personalized interactions with returning customers. These templates are designed to take your customers’ experience to the next level.
• Drag-and-Drop Editor: Its chatbot editor lets you customize chatbots effortlessly. It has an intuitive interface where you can easily modify the existing templates or create chatbots from scratch.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP): Its chatbots are equipped with NLP technology that allows them to recognize commonly used words and answer basic customer questions. This feature ensures it’s delivering fast and accurate responses.

Pricing:

• Free version available
• Paid plans start at $29/month

9. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)

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YARPP, also known as Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, is a must-have tool for WordPress website owners who want to boost their engagement and extend the reach of their content. With YARPP, you can increase page views and create a more captivating browsing experience for your visitors.

What is the YARPP?

This amazing WordPress plugin showcases visitors with related posts, pages, and custom post types. It uses advanced algorithms to connect them to content all over your website.

Key Features and Functionalities

• Advanced Algorithms: YARPP uses advanced algorithms that guarantee that users are presented with posts, pages, and custom post types that are relevant to your initial entries. This watching enhances the users’ experience by making it more personalized and captivating.
• Built-In Caching: It boosts performance by including its own catching system. This optimization guarantees that relevant posts are quickly delivered, resulting in a smooth browsing experience for your readers.
• Placement Options: With YARPP, you have the freedom to choose from a variety of placement options for displaying your related content.
• Templates: It makes it easy to showcase related content with its pre-built templates. These can effortlessly display your posts in a visually appealing way, adding a touch of style to your website.
• Language Compatibility: YARPP is built to be language-friendly, allowing it to work seamlessly with websites in different languages. This way everyone around the world can enjoy the advantages of these related posts.
• Customizable: YARPP provides customization options, which makes it easy for website owners to personalize the look and positions of their related posts. This allows them to match it to their site’s design and enhance the overall user experience.
• Free Access to Essential Features: It offers free access to all essential features, making it an affordable and effective solution for anyone looking to make use of related content without extra expenses.

Pricing:

• Free

10. Link Whisper

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Link Whisperer is truly a game-changer in the world of website optimization. It offers a simple and user-friendly solution to the problem of creating impactful internal links in your content.

What is the Internal Linking Plugin?

The proper positioning of internal links is not just to keep users engaged, but it also has a huge impact on improving SEO rankings. Link Whisper’s AI-driven plugin competently transforms this procedure by effortlessly going through your content and suggesting relevant links.

Key Features and Functionalities

• Link Suggestions: Link Whisper’s advanced AI features simplify internal linking by analyzing website content and providing relevant posts and link suggestions. This gets rid of the need for manual link creation, saving us valuable time and improving our internal linking strategy.
• Link Reporting: Besides suggestions, it lets you know about broken links and 404 errors, contributing to overall site health.
• Customize Recommendations: Users can customize link recommendations by selecting the keywords they find relevant. This gives full control over how internal links match with each content piece.
• User-Friendly Interface: Their platform is created with the goal of catering to website owners of all technical backgrounds, so everyone can benefit from their services.

Pricing:

• Free version available
• Paid plans start at $77/year for one site

Conclusion

As we come to the end of our exploration of AI plugins for WordPress it’s clear that the future of web development is here, and it’s smarter, more efficient, and more exciting than ever.

We’ve explored a wide range of plugins, each with its own special touch. From plugins that use AI to create content and generate images, to those that combat spam and provide helpful suggestions for internal links, these plugins are overlooked champions of the WordPress world.

If you’re an experienced developer exploring coding with CodeWP or just a casual user looking for a friendly chatbot companion with Tidio live Chat, there’s an AI plugin designed for everyone. These plugins go beyond mere functionality, they enhance your WordPress experience and make it truly remarkable.

These plugins are more than just extras, they are the secret ingredient that can elevate your website from average to exceptional.

The post 10 Best WordPress AI Plugins to Try in 2024 appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> https://smartslider3.com/blog/best-cache-plugin-smart-slider/ Tue, 22 Feb 2022 09:00:40 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=45508 Everyone wants their website to load as fast as possible. In fact, one of the best ways to help speed up your site is to use a good cache plugin. For this reason, there are many WordPress plugins available to create cache for your site. Which cache plugins are the most popular? Which one helps […]

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]]> Everyone wants their website to load as fast as possible. In fact, one of the best ways to help speed up your site is to use a good cache plugin. For this reason, there are many WordPress plugins available to create cache for your site. Which cache plugins are the most popular? Which one helps speed up your Smart Slider pages the most? Let’s find out together!

Why is page speed so important?

There are many reasons why people want their sites to be fast. The most important reason is the user experience: visitors don’t like waiting for a website to load. In fact, 47% of visitors expect a web page to load within 2 seconds. That’s not much time, but it requires website owners to optimize their site to ensure it loads as fast as possible.

Ultimately, slow loading websites have a higher bounce rate. The reason is that visitors don’t like slow sites and will not wait for them to load. So, a slow loading website can cost you losing sales. It doesn’t matter how good your website and how much time and effort you spend on SEO.

What does a cache plugin do?

Generally speaking, cache plugins save your site’s content in a given time and state. After that, they’ll keep displaying the content they’ve saved until you clear the cache. Clearing the cache regenerates the cache files. In other words, it saves yoursite again which makes the changes you’ve made on your site show up.

So, clearing the cache is always a good idea after you make changes on your site. It’s worth noting that some cache plugins clear their cache automatically after you save a post or page.

What are the most popular caching plugins for WordPress?

WordPress powers over 43% of websites. This means WordPress is super popular, both amongst developers and users. Because of its popularity, there are many plugins to give WordPress extra functions. Some plugins let you build your page visually, with no coding knowledge. Others help strengthen its security. Additionally, there are many plugins which help you optimize your website.

There are many popular cache plugins today, each having millions of users. The most popular ones include WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Fastest Cache WP, Super Cache. LiteSpeed Cache is also very popular, but that only runs on LiteSpeed servers. Unfortunately, my test server didn’t run on LiteSpeed, so I wasn’t able to test this plugin.

However, I tested all others listed above. In this article I’ll check which one helps you most to optimize your site where you use Smart Slider. Let’s dig in!

Speed testing of the page

To see which plugin helps the most to optimize my website with Smart Slider, I’ll test each of them. In order to perform fair tests, I’ll use the exact same server for each test. I’ll only enable two plugins: Smart Slider and the cache I’m currently testing. Additionally, I’ll use the TwentyTwenty theme. I’ll use a 10Mb/s connection and an incognito window. Also, I’ve reloaded the page 5 times to leverage browser caching.

Loading speed without any plugins

One of the most interesting aspects of a speed test is to see how a page performs on its own, with no plugins enabled. In other words, when there are no plugins to slow down the page. So, the only thing that affects the page load is the speed of the server, the theme and the content of the page. Here’s how my testing server performs on a page that has only text and a few images.

Connections speed	10Mb/s
Requests	11
Load time	263ms
Page size	766kb

Speed of Smart Slider

After testing the page load time on a simple page, I also wanted to test how much time it takes for the page with Smart Slider to load. I’ve used the Layer Slider template for testing. During this test, the only enabled plugin I had was Smart Slider. Here’s the speed result:

Connections speed	10Mb/s
Requests	38
Load time	412ms
Page size	1.4MB

Testing with WP Rocket

WP Rocket is a paid caching plugin, which powers more than 2 million websites. So, it’s widely popular and it made me super curious about how much speed I can gain by using it. While running the speed tests, I used WP Rocket version 3.10.7. I enabled WP Rocket’s cache option. Additionally, I also enabled the CSS and JS minification and combination options.

Connections speed	10Mb/s
Requests	30
Load time	234ms
Page size	1.3MB

That’s a pretty great result. With a slider on the page, WP Rocket managed to make the page load faster than the very first test I had run. That test measured a single page with text and images, without any activated plugins. Pretty impressive job!

Testing with WP Fastest Cache

WP Fastest cache is a freemium plugin. This means there’s a free version on WordPress.org you can grab for free to use. But, there’s also a premium version which offers some extra options. For the test, I used WP Fastest Cache free, version 0.9.8. Also, I’ve turned on Minify HTML and CSS, Combine CSS and JS, GZip, browser caching and disabled the emojis.

Connections speed	10Mb/s
Requests	33
Load time	251ms
Page size	1.4MB

Testing with WP Super Cache

WP Super cache is a free cache plugin, which is used by more than 2 million websites. I used it’s simple caching and enabled page compression as well. I ran the tests using version 1.7.6.

Connections speed	10Mb/s
Requests	38
Load time	304ms
Page size	1.4MB

Testing with W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is another free cache plugin you can download from WordPress.org. After installing it I enabled the cache. I also turned on its minifying options for better performance. The W3 Total Cache version I used for testing was 2.2.1.

Connections speed	10Mb/s
Requests	34
Load time	286ms
Page size	1.4MB

Summarized results

Each caching plugin performed pretty well and they made the site load faster. So, I can recommend any of them to you to help you make your site faster. Below there is the summary of how each plugin performed, so you can compare them more conveniently.

	WP Rocket	WP Fastest Cache	WP Super Cache	W3 Total Cache
Connections speed	10Mb/s	10Mb/s	10Mb/s	10Mb/s
Requests	30	33	38	34
Load time	234ms	251ms	304ms	286ms
Page size	1.3MB	1.4MB	1.4MB	1.4MB

Based on the tests, the plugin that helped speed up my site the most was WP Rocket. In fact, it had the fewest requests and smallest load time and page size. WP Fastest Cache deserves second place with its fast load time and small number of requests. But W3 Total Cache follows it very closely with just one more request and 35ms extra loading time.

As mentioned above, I wasn’t able to test the LiteSpeed cache since my testing server is not on LiteSpeed. Keep in mind that LiteSpeed Cache was created for LiteSpeed servers. As a result, it might perform better on those servers than the other plugins. So, it’s worth running your own tests, especially with the free plugins.

Conclusion

Every website is different. For this reason, it’s worth investing some time in finding the best cache plugin for the site at hand. As a result, you can find the plugin that will speed your site up the most. If you’re only looking for a free solution, try WP Fastest Cache or W3 Total Cache. However, if you’re interested in paid plugins, I can recommend WP Rocket for you.

The post What’s the best cache plugin to use with Smart Slider? appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> https://smartslider3.com/blog/best-wordpress-slider-plugins/ Tue, 10 Nov 2020 11:00:18 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=33759 Sliders, carousels, slideshows. There’s no other design element that’s as versatile as they are. And there’s no other element that divides web designers and developers as much as sliders do. Nonetheless, clients love and demand to have sliders. So if you’re in a position where you need to find the best WordPress slider, you’re lucky. […]

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]]> Sliders, carousels, slideshows. There’s no other design element that’s as versatile as they are. And there’s no other element that divides web designers and developers as much as sliders do. Nonetheless, clients love and demand to have sliders. So if you’re in a position where you need to find the best WordPress slider, you’re lucky. I’m here to help you with this hands-on guide.

📚 Table of contents

1. How to recognize the best WordPress slider plugin?
2. Slider Revolution
3. Smart Slider
4. LayerSlider
5. Master Slider
6. Meta Slider
7. Soliloquy
8. Speed test
9. Pricing
10. Final results

How to recognize the best WordPress slider plugin?

There are so many sliders out there, and of course, they all claim they’re the best sliders for WordPress. In fact, there are many great sliders but how do you find the best one? What makes a slider plugin the best WordPress slider? Well, finding the all-in-one slider solution for WordPress isn’t as hard as it seems. Simply find a plugin that matches the following criteria:

1. Interface

Even if you don’t think it’s a big deal, it actually matters how your slider plugin looks on your WordPress admin. If the UI is ugly, it’s likely hard to navigate, and creating a slider will be fiddly. So, the best WordPress slider plugin needs to have an interface that looks great and is a joy to use.

2. Ease of use

Slider plugins tend to have many options to allow you to create whatever you want. Too many options can be confusing, especially if they’re not laid out logically. The best WordPress slideshow needs to be simple to use. Having to add a new slider or slide shouldn’t stress you out.

3. Available layers

In sliders, you can create content with layers. They allow you to add text, images, buttons and other cool stuff to your slideshow. The best slider plugin needs to have layers. Additionally, it needs to have enough layers to create a modern slider.

4. Styling

It’s not enough to be able to add many layers to your slideshows. You need to be able to style them, to make the slider fit into your website nicely. So I’ll check the available styling options each slider plugins offers.

5. Slider navigation

A slider contains a bunch of slides. Your visitors need to be able to go through them in an intuitive way. For example, using arrows, bullets or thumbnails. These controls need to fit into the color scheme of your website, and also remain visible over the images. In other words, the best slider plugin for WordPress must offer customizable navigation options.

6. Post slider

Being able to create a slider from their posts is a must-have for any serious blogger. Post sliders help to showcase the amazing content they have on their site. Of course, not all websites have blog pages, but running one can have SEO benefits.

7. Effects

The best WordPress slider needs to help you deliver that wow factor. In other words, it needs to have all the fancy effects you can use to amaze your visitors. You have only 50 milliseconds to create a good impression. And your slider needs to help you with that. You need effects like Ken Burns or Parallax, which look great on any website. Also, a trendy transition effect to switch slides can make the slider more appealing.

8. SEO friendly

There’s a common misconception that sliders are bad for SEO. This might be true for some sliders, especially if they’re outdated. But it’s not so true for modern sliders. Additionally, if a slider wants to be the best WordPress slider plugin then it must be SEO friendly as well.

9. Responsive

In 2020 around 50% of all website traffic is coming from mobile phones. That’s an insane amount of small screen usage, but it’s perfectly understandable. Phones are always around in people’s pockets or bags, ready for browsing. For this reason, your website needs to look great on mobile. Similarly, you need a responsive slider, that’s a joy to look at on a small screen.

What are the best WordPress slider plugins?

The better a plugin is, the more people use it. So, it makes sense to think that the best WordPress sliders are those, which are used by most people. During my research, I found 6 super popular plugins, used by tens of thousands of people all over the globe. How do I find the best slider plugin for WordPress? I’ll compare the most popular plugins I’ve found. I’ll use the criteria listed above for my comparison and see how each plugin performs. These are the six best WordPress slider plugins I choose to compare:

• Slider Revolution
• Smart Slider
• LayerSlider
• Master Slider
• Soliloquy
• Meta Slider

As I want this article to be the most comprehensive one, I’ll be as objective as possible when I test the sliders.

Slider Revolution

If you’ve ever searched for a slider to use on your site, I’m sure you’ve come across Slider Revolution. It’s a super popular slider plugin for WordPress. It’s bundled in many premium WordPress themes which might be the reason for its fame.

People generally choose themes based on the features the theme offers. Often this feature comes from a plugin bundled into the theme. Premium themes usually bundle slider plugins, because they’re great eye candies. Thus, they make the theme more appealing to potential buyers.

But bundled plugins have a huge disadvantage: they come without a license key. As you know, you need to activate premium plugins to be able to update them. But you also need an activated copy for the premium services. These services typically include the support and the template import. So, if you use a bundled plugin, you get a premium plugin for free, but without any support. Unfortunately, this isn’t a very good bargain.

Interface ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The first thing I noticed about the Revolution Slider’s interface is that it’s incredibly dark. By default, I found it hard to read, as there are gray texts on the black background. Turning on High Contrast mode helps a lot with the legibility.

Slider Revolution uses the same interface for the slider configuration and slide editing. In other words, there’s no separate page where you can configure your slider. The large area on the left is where you can set up the slide. The sidebar on the right side is where the settings are. For example, this is where you can name the slider, or style the layers you added. It’s an interesting approach, and it takes a lot of clicking around to get used to it.

Ease of use ⭐⭐⭐⭐

What caused the most difficulties for me is the lack of tooltips. In fact, Slider Revolution uses icon buttons in many places for example, at the top of the sidebar, or above the timeline. Unfortunately, it’s hard to guess what these icons do, sometimes even after clicking on them. It would be nice to have a tooltip that tells the name of the option on hover. This could help to give a clue about what’s going to happen if the icon is clicked. I did find the help mode, but it didn’t work on these icons.

Rev Slider has a drag and drop interface to create the layout of the slide. As a result, it’s easy to learn and use. However, the positioning leaves a lot to be desired. Imagine this: you want to create a heading, a text and a button layer, and they should start from the same position. By default, layers only stick to each other when they touch. If they’re at least 1px away, they no longer stick. As a result, there’s a good chance they’ll be misaligned. To be able to do pixel-perfect positioning, you need to enable the grid or layer-based adjustments.

Luckily, Revolution Slider offers many great slider templates. You can import them with a single click and customize them to your liking. As a result, you can have a great looking slider for your WordPress website fast. Additionally, you won’t need to spend time positioning your layers.

Available layers ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

You can find the basic layers and some more in Slider Revolution. There’s a text layer where you can put a heading or paragraph text. You can add buttons, images, videos, audios and icons to your slides. If you want to darken the background image to increase the legibility of the layers, use the Shape layer.

The available layers are enough to create any kind of layout you can imagine. As a result, it’s safe to say that Slider Revolution is a multipurpose slider plugin. So, you can use it to create high-quality sliders for your WordPress site.

Styling ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

You can configure any layer to your liking with Rev Slider. At text layers, you can set the font size, family, color, weight and even the letter spacing. But there’s also an option to set the background color, padding and margin on each layer.

The first confusion I bumped into was when I wanted to create a button for my slider. I needed to change the normal and hover background, but they are in different places. The Style, which has an artist palette icon, has all styling options. For example, that’s where I found the normal background color option. However, the hover color is under the Hover settings, which has a mouse cursor icon. There’s some logic behind this, as the hover color activates on a mouse interaction. In any case, it’s an interesting choice to put these options so far away from each other.

Slider navigation ⭐⭐⭐⭐

There’s no default navigation enabled when you create a new slider module. In other words, if you want arrows, bullets or thumbnails on your slider, you need to enable them yourself.

You can choose from many predefined navigation styles. Hovering on their name shows them on the slide editor which makes it easier to choose the one you like the most. You can also change the colors to ensure the navigation stays visible over the slide content. I thought that setting a normal background and turning off hover would make the same color show for both. Instead, Slider Revolution sets some kind of default color as the hover background. So if you want the same color for hover and normal state, you need to set it at both.

Post Slider ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Being able to create sliders from the posts is something most bloggers want to do. Post sliders can highlight the latest post, and bring them more readers. They can also showcase the most popular posts from your blog. As Slider Revolution is one of the best WordPress slider plugins, it can create post sliders.

What’s great about the post slider is that it allows creating separate layouts for the post. Additionally, it’s simple: you just need to create more slides. For example, if you create two slides, your odd and even posts can have different layouts. In other words, it’s possible to create a different layout for every other post in your slider. Since the type of the slider is dynamic, you can’t put non-dynamic slides to your slider. This could be used, for instance, to create an intro or an outro to the dynamic slides.

When you edit the slide, you can’t see the actual post data in your slides. As a result, it can be difficult to create a proper layout. That’s because the length of the content at the editor and the frontend can differ. Although it’s easy to build the slide, you won’t know how much space the content needs. As a result, the editing gets complicated, because layers can overlap. This can cause legibility problems. Additionally, overlapping content looks unprofessional.

Effects ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Slider Revolution is full of amazing effects to create truly gorgeous sliders. Unfortunately, many cool effects are available after you download their addon. Some of these popular effects are the before & after, particle, or typewriter effects. Obviously, addons have their own advantages and disadvantages. First, not including everything in the plugin makes the UI less bloated. As a result, it’s easier to navigate and more user friendly. Additionally, people will only have the effects which they actually use.

However, there are some disadvantages to the add-on approach. First, it’s the fact that the site will have more plugins that need to be maintained. Whenever you update Slider Revolution, you need to ensure you update its add-ons. Otherwise, there can be compatibility problems. For example, some effects won’t appear on the sliders.

It’s also important to mention that add-ons are only available after activation. Since Slider Revolution is often bundled with themes, this can help to generate revenue. That’s because themes can’t include license keys, so their customers won’t be able to use the add-ons. But there are many great and popular effects amongst the add-ons, so there’s a good chance people will update.

SEO friendly ⭐⭐⭐⭐

When you add text to the slides, Slider Revolution wraps it inside rs-layer tags. However, that’s not really good for SEO. Additionally, a Slider Revolution user claims they noticed an improvement in their keyword positions. I searched for content wrapped in the rs-layer tag. Then Google displayed a message about not finding any matches for my search. Even if the link to the page was just below this block, it seems to prove this user’s point. Google does not like the rs-layer tag.

So, if you want your site to rank better, be sure to change the wrapper tag. Change h1 to h6 tags for your headings, and p tags for other texts. When you add images, their alt text is pulled from the WordPress Media Library. If you update it at WordPress, it’s updated at the slider as well. This way you won’t have to work twice.

Responsive options ⭐⭐⭐

Slider Revolution has the same responsive behavior as most sliders have. They scale down everything while keeping the aspect ratio of the slider. As a result, the layers can get too small and illegible on mobile devices. Luckily, you can improve the result and create a much more mobile-friendly slider by hand. However, first, you need to turn on the mobile editing to be able to make changes. This suggests you can create sliders that don’t need mobile-specific changes. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to create a slider like that.

After you enable the mobile editing, you can move layers around. It’s also possible to adjust font sizes to ensure legibility. Additionally, you can hide layers on mobile, or on other devices. This is useful, for example, if you don’t have enough space for the layer. But you can also hide the layer if it’s not important for mobile users.

Smart Slider

Smart Slider is another popular WordPress slider plugin. Its free version is the fastest-growing slider plugin in the WordPress.org repository. So, Smart Slider is a popular slider plugin, and people love it for a good reason. It’s easy to use, has many features, and a huge amount of dynamic slide generators.

Interface ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Smart Slider has a clean and colorful interface. First, you arrive on the Dashboard where you can find the sliders you created. Also, this is the place where you can create a new project. Clicking on any slider thumbnail takes you to the slider settings page. This page displays the slides in the slider on the top, and the settings below. You can edit the slide by clicking on their thumbnail. The slide editor takes up the entire screen, which is great because it gives enough space to edit the slide in a comfortable manner.

Smart Slider has an incredible amount of options. Just the Slider settings page has 9 tabs full of them. While so many options can be confusing at first, they’re placed very logically. For example, on the Controls tab you can find all options you can use to switch slides.

The three levels (dashboard, slider settings page and slide editor) are easy to distinguish. The UI differs enough to give you a clear idea of where you are right now. But the elements look so similar that you can always tell you’re still using Smart Slider. Also, there’s breadcrumb navigation on the top left corner.

Ease Of Use ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Creating a slide with layers is the easiest and fastest amongst the sliders I’ve tried for this article. That’s because Smart Slider has two positionings: Default and Absolute. Absolute positioning is what you can find in every other slider. You drag and drop the layers anywhere, and they scale up or down with the ratio of the slider. As a result, they can overlap on smaller screens. In any case, they make responsive editing seem like a nightmare.

On the other hand, you can’t freely drag and drop Default layers. Instead, you need to position them from their container, which can seem restrictive at first. But you can learn it quickly, and create sliders with really great results.

The layer styling options are available in a floating window, which you can drag anywhere. As a result, there’s no need to scroll up or down to see the changes you made. Also, since the layer window doesn’t have a fixed space, it doesn’t take up useful editing space.

Additionally, Smart Slider has many amazing slider templates. You can download them with a single click from the dashboard. Then change anything you want, including replacing texts, images or colors. The slider templates give you a great head start and also help to learn the plugin. If you don’t need a whole slider, just a slide, take a look at the slide templates in the Slide Library.

Available Layers ⭐⭐⭐⭐

There are 24 layers in Smart Slider. That’s an incredible amount of elements to work with. Obviously, there’s a heading, text and a button layer, which is already enough to create a hero header. But there are video layers to enrich your slider with YouTube, Vimeo and MP4 videos.

Having so many layers can cause choice overload. You might build your content with a layer, then find out there’s a better layer for your needs. As a result, you’ll need to style your layer again, causing time loss. For example, there’s a simple heading layer which has text animation. This animates the full text you entered, but if you want to animate certain words only, you’ll need the animated heading layer instead.

Styling ⭐⭐⭐⭐

You can find rich styling options in Smart Slider, so you can configure your layers to your liking. At the font family, you can choose from a huge list of Google Fonts, or you can write the name of the custom font you want to use. You can also adjust the font-weight, the line height, set background color, add a border and border-radius. But there are too many options you can play with, which can be confusing.

Additionally, you can save the styles you created and apply them to layers of the same type layer. For example, if you styled a cool CTA button, you can save this slide and use it at other buttons. Although styling a layer is easy, this option can save a lot of time.

Slider Navigation ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The typical slider navigation options are available in Smart Slider. This includes the arrows, bullets and thumbnails as well. The best thing about these controls is that they’re not theme-based. As a result, you can freely configure their look and position. However, the button that brings up the styling options bends into the UI so seamlessly that it’s easy to miss.

There are preset styles of course, what you can select, but you can customize these as well. For example, you can choose the arrow preset that has an orange background, and change the color to blue. Additionally, you can upload your own arrow image as well.

Post Slider ⭐⭐⭐⭐

You can create sliders from your post, and custom post types as well. What’s more, you can mix these dynamic slides with the non-dynamic slides. So it’s not the slider that’s connected to the post, like at Rev Slider, but the single post slide. If you want to create a different styling for the second, or third slide, you can create more dynamic slides. However, you need to adjust their settings to make them show just the second or third slide.

Another thing that makes the post slide really great is that you can actually see the result in the editor. So you’ll know how much space the layers need when you create your layout. However, it doesn’t really matter, because you will work with Default layers anyway. These layers will make space for themselves, and won’t overlap.

Effects ⭐⭐⭐⭐

As mentioned above, Smart Slider has many options. Naturally, the available features include cool effects as well. First, let’s see the effects you can add to background images. The most popular one is the Ken Burns effect which you can set for every slide or individual slides. But you can also select background animations and the parallax effect, too. Additionally, the parallax effect is available for the layers as well. Now that I have mentioned layers, it’s possible to animate them with cool layer animations.

Also, you can find many slider level effects in Smart Slider. For example, you can use the Particle effect to give some subtle movement to the slider. But you can use the animated Shape divider for a modern look. Unlike at Revolution Slider, these effects are immediately available. So you don’t have to download and maintain add-ons.

Seo Friendly ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Smart Slider is another slider you can use for SEO purposes. You can specify alt and title text at every slide background and image layer. At the heading layer, you can choose from h1 to h6 tags to help to structure your content. If you need simple paragraphs for the content, use the text layer. Additionally, search engines can easily read the content you write into Smart Slider.

When you add images from the WordPress Media Library, Smart Slider sets the alt tag you wrote there. Later you can adjust the content of the alt tag at the layer window if you need to.

Responsive Options ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The best thing about Smart Slider is the Default positioning. As mentioned above, for first-time users it can seem limited and harder to use. But when it comes to the responsive result, it couldn’t be any better. The layout I have created with Default layers didn’t actually need any responsive changes. In fact, the slide looked fantastic without having to do anything. As opposed to Absolute positioned layers that other sliders have. Additionally, these layers take longer to position.

Should you need to make responsive adjustments, here’s what Smart Slider can help you with. First, you can use the Text Scale option to adjust the font sizes. If your texts are too small, you can increase them with this option. But if your texts are too big, you can use the Text scale to decrease the font size. It’s also useful if you want to make your heading text fit into one line. Additionally, you can hide layers on any device. As a result, you can hide unnecessary layers on mobile. But you can also replace complex desktop layers with simpler ones on mobile.

LayerSlider

Layer slider is yet another slider that’s typically bundled in premium themes. You can find it in themes like Avada, Enfold or Bridge. As mentioned above, bundled plugins have many disadvantages. First, you can’t get premium support. Then you can’t download templates or update the plugin via WordPress. In LayerSlider’s case, some features are also locked behind the activation wall. For example, the popup usage feature needs a license key.

Interface ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The interface of LayerSlider is very minimalistic, mostly just gray and white. The only place where you can find colors is the activation area. When LayerSlider is not activated, there’s a blue Activate button, and a red label. The latter turns green after the activation. Because of this, the interface feels a bit empty.

Ease of use ⭐⭐⭐

Editing a slide in LayerSlider involves lots of scrolling. You need to scroll up to see the layers, then scroll down to see the configuration options. It’s an unfortunate placement, and it makes the editing process tiring. To avoid this problem, make sure you toggle the Popup editor. It creates a floating box from the settings, so you can style your layers much more comfortably.

It’s good that layers snap to one another, but they need to be really close. Otherwise, it’s easier to use the arrow keys or the positioning options at the Styles to set their position.

When I worked with LayerSlider, I wanted to create a specific design. The first part of the design was breaking a text into three lines. I tried to do this by limiting the width of the layer using its dragging points. However, as it turned out, these dragging points don’t limit the size of the layer in the way I thought. In fact, they only increase or decrease the font size. As a result, the text I entered stayed in one line. I found this approach very interesting, and rather confusing. Additionally, leaving line breaks at the layer’s content field had no effect either. I found only one way to limit down the width of the layer. I had to manually write the size at the Styling options.

Available layers ⭐⭐⭐⭐

There are 8 layers in LayerSlider. That doesn’t sound a lot, but it’s enough to create good content. The most basic layers, like the image, text and button are available. Additionally, you can add video or audio, or write your own HTML codes.

Styling ⭐⭐⭐

LayerSlider offers a bunch of configuration options for the layers. You can set the font size, family or color for the layers. Although there are not many fonts in the dropdown, it’s possible to write the name of the custom font you want to use. This dropdown is present at some other options, like the font size, too. The problem with them is that they make the editor seem restrictive because it seems you can’t actually set anything but the suggestions.

Another good option is the rotate, which lets you create interesting layouts by rotating the layers. But there are some options which don’t seem to work well. For example, the min font size option has no effect in the slide editor. It seems to work fine in the preview, but completely messes up the layer in the frontend.

Slider navigation ⭐⭐⭐

You can add bullets and arrows to the slides. However, their look depends on the selected slider skin under Appearance. Even if there are many skins to choose from, you can’t configure the navigation further. In other words, if the arrows have a white background in the skin you choose, you’re stuck with that color.

Post Slider ⭐⭐⭐

Creating a post slider is totally possible with LayerSlider. But there’s a catch: you will need to create as many slides as many posts you want to show by hand. Although you can create one slide, and duplicate it, so you won’t need to work a lot, if you need to change something on the slides, like a color or font size, you’ll need to edit each slide.

You can also mix post slides and normal slides within a single slider. It’s a really useful feature.

Effects ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

You can find popular effects like the Ken Burns effect in Layer Slider. Additionally, there are layer animations to enrich sliders. There’s also a timeline, although it’s easy to miss. Additionally, it’s possible to copy and paste the effects you set. You can also enable the parallax effect on the layers. Additionally, you can enrich your slides with many great looking slide transitions.

SEO ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

At the text layers, you can choose between h1 to h6 and p tags to display content. As a result, LayerSlider can help you write a structured text for SEO purposes. This is good news because it means you can use the content of the slider to earn a higher rank in search engines. Additionally, LayerSlider pulls the alt tag for the images from the Media Library. Thus, you won’t need to edit the alt tag twice.

Responsive options ⭐⭐

LayerSlider scales up and down the slider to match the set aspect ratio. As a result, the text sizes might end up being too small. Luckily, the developers have thought of that and made a minimum mobile font size option. But there’s a catch: the result doesn’t show in the editor. Additionally, the minimum mobile font size doesn’t show in the preview either. So you can only test how the slide looks with the set font size on the frontend. This means doing lots of back and forth editing.

Also, LayerSlider has an option to hide the slider you made on a mobile device. Alternatively, you can hide the slider above or below the given screen width, in pixels. In other words, if you want to have a decent looking slider on mobile, you’ll need to create and maintain two sliders. Unless you create simple image galleries or add just a few lines of text, you’ll need separate sliders.

Apart from the above options, LayerSlider has no other responsive tools. These options are not enough in 2020 when so many people browse from their phones. Modern websites need responsive content, which means LayerSlider isn’t suitable for these sites.

Master Slider

Master Slider is another popular slider you can use on your WordPress site. It allows you to create image slideshows with layers. Additionally, it’s simple to use, and touch-friendly as well. Also, it offers a bunch of cool slider templates to start with.

Interface ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The interface of Master Slider is very simple. The Dashboard, where the sliders are, looks like WordPress’ own post page. As a result, even new Master Slider users will be able to navigate easily.

However, the slider’s settings page doesn’t look so close to WordPress. First, the options are available via horizontal tabs. These tabs make the slider configuration, slide editor and slider control pages available.

Ease of use ⭐⭐⭐

Master Slider offers the familiar drag and drop editing. What makes drag’n’drop editing good is that it’s intuitive and easy to learn. Layers can snap to each other, but only when they’re close. For example, if you want your layers to have the same distance from the left, it’s easier to set it manually. Just write the number in the Left field. Or you can use the arrows keys for positioning. First, snap the layer to another one that’s already positioned. Then use the up/down keys to move the layer.

But there’s one thing that makes using Master Slider even more uncomfortable. The slide you’re editing, and where the layers are, is above the area where you add and configure them. When you add a new layer, it appears in the top left corner. However, the top left corner isn’t usually visible even when you don’t have any other layers yet. Constantly having to scroll up and down is time-consuming and uncomfortable. Additionally, they don’t have the undo-redo option. So if you accidentally edited the wrong layer, you need to revert your changes yourself.

Available Layers ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Master Slider has 5 layers available. These are text, image, button, video and hotspot. At the text layer, you can find an editor that looks like WordPress’ Classic editor. Chances are you’re already familiar with it. But if you’ve only used Gutenberg, you can still learn this editor easily. Additionally, it allows you to decide if you want your text to be a paragraph or an h1 to h6 heading.

Styling ⭐⭐⭐

As mentioned above, styling the layers in Master Slider is super uncomfortable. It involves a lot of scrolling up and down due to the unfortunate position of the slide, layer list and style options. Once you’re at the style editor, you’ll be happy to find the most common styling options. For example, you can change the font family, size, color and weight. You can also save your style as presets and re-use them later.

Master Slider handles the background of the text layer rather interestingly. I’ve added a two-line text (6 words total) and decided to give them a nice background color. Interestingly, the editor only set the background of the first word. Additionally, it broke up the text, putting every word in a new line. But the frontend looked fine, which made me question if I can trust the editor at all.

Slider navigation ⭐⭐⭐

When you create a new slider, the only default option to switch slides is swiping on the slides. To be able to have arrows or bullets, you need to enable them. First, you need to go to the slider controls tab of the slider.

There are seven different controls available, including the arrows and bullets. However, none of the controls have styling options. In other words, there’s no option to change the default colors. The only way to have different colored arrows is to change the skin at the Slider settings tab. Luckily, the set skin displays on the preview, so I could check how the slider looks before publishing.

Post Slider ⭐⭐⭐

When you create a new slider you can choose to create a post based slider. Then you can configure how you want your slides to look. Since the whole slider is pos-based, you can’t mix dynamic and non-dynamic slides. Additionally, it’s also not possible to create two kinds of post slides in the same slider. So, you can’t create different layouts for different posts.

At the Post Settings, you can select, which categories should MasterSlider filter posts from. You can also exclude or include posts based on their ID. Both are very handy options to have.

Effects ⭐⭐⭐

MasterSlider has a handful of cool effects to choose from. First, there’s the layer parallax which looks cool and makes the site look impressive. Then, there’s another nice effect, the pattern overlay. This effect can increase the legibility of the text by placing a black or white pattern above the image. As a result, the image will look darker or lighter. Additionally, it makes the picture more interesting.

Unfortunately, popular effects like the Ken Burns are not available in Master Slider. This effect is something people often look for in a slider plugin. So, they need to look further than Master Slider.

SEO friendly ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Master Slider claims to be the most SEO friendly slider. Indeed, it has a valid HTML structure. When you create text layers, you can set h1 to h6 tags, or leave them as paragraphs. Additionally, the alt tags of the images are pulled from the media library.

Responsive options ⭐⭐

The slide editor has desktop, tablet and mobile editing options. It seems to be possible to edit most options on mobile devices, and that’s great. However, the beautiful mobile layout I created in the editor looked nothing like what I made on my site. As it turned out, the editor, for some reason, keeps the set height, but the frontend does not. In fact, I had to enable custom slider size and set the size I want on my own. Unfortunately, that’s not what people expect after seeing the result in the editor.

Meta Slider

Meta Slider is the most popular free slider plugin in the WordPress.org repository. At the time of writing, it has 800,000+ active installations. So, a lot of people like the free version. But there’s one other thing that makes the Free version so popular: the Pro version doesn’t work without it. Does this huge user base make Meta Slider the best WordPress slider plugin? Let’s find out!

Interface ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Meta Slider has a simple interface divided into two sections. First, there’s the top bar, where you can search your sliders, or add a new one. Additionally, this is where you can add slides to your current slider, or preview it. Second, below the top bar there’s another horizontal area. This is where you can find the sliders you already made. Then, the biggest part of the page is the Slide configuration area. Next to it, there’s a sidebar where you can configure some aspects of the slider.

When you go to MetaSlider, you’ll end up on the Slider configuration page of the first slider in the slider list. So, the plugin assumes you’ll want to work on the slider that’s in the first place in the list. It’s convenient if you drop the slider that needs the most frequent changes there. Otherwise, it’s not really useful, they could have left the configuration part of the page empty.

Ease of use ⭐⭐⭐

Meta Slider has a very few options, which makes it simple to use. On the other hand, there are a couple of things that make the plugin seem a lot more complicated. For example, if you want to add layers, you need to add a special “Layer Slide”. If you realize this after you added all images where you want to have layers, you’ll be disappointed. There’s no option to convert to a “layer slide”, so you’ll have to start again. While you can add many image slides together, it’s only possible to add layer slides one by one. This makes the whole process of adding a new slide confusing.

Available layers ⭐

Most slider plugins offer a bunch of different layers to add content with. However, Meta Slider offers a single layer. It’s a text-based layer, but you can put an image into it. As a result, you can enrich your slides with more interesting content.

Styling ⭐⭐

Meta Slider has the basic styling options to allow you to style your content. But there’s a catch: most options are super limited. For example, the Font color has 40 predefined colors to choose from. Then, at the font family, you can choose from 8 common (and boring) font families. The font size options are also limited.

Meta Slider provides an option to access the HTML code of the layers you added. You can make adjustments there, like changing colors or adjusting the font family or size. So, if you know, and are willing to, touch a couple of lines of HTML code, you can create better-looking layers. That’s not something you’d expect from the world’s #1 slider plugin.

Slider navigation ⭐⭐⭐

Meta Slider integrates four slideshow types you can choose. These are Flex Slider 2, Nivo Slider, Responsive Slides and Coin Slider. These slideshow types affect how the available arrows, bullets and thumbnails display. Although it would be great if the navigation would have customization options.

Post slider ⭐⭐⭐

When you create a new slider, you can choose to create a Post slider. This will create a special slider where you can filter posts into. Additionally, you can filter posts from custom post types into the slider. This all sounds really cool until you want to start configuring the slides.

Unfortunately, Meta Slider provides no visual way to edit the content of the post slides. In other words, you can only edit and customize what you want to see on the slides via HTML coding.

Effects ⭐

The only effects Meta Slider offers are the layer and background animations. There’s no parallax or Ken Burns Effect. Although, you can add the latter via custom coding. Even if layer animations look good, they aren’t enough for modern websites.

SEO friendly ⭐⭐

Meta Slider claims you can use it to “create powerful, SEO-optimized slideshows”. However, at the layers, you can’t set h1 to h6 tags unless you edit their HTML source. Usually, people use plugins to avoid having to code things. Well, using Meta Slider you can’t avoid having to code your way around to create the slider you want to have.

Apart from these problems, search engines can read the content Meta Slider creates. You can also write alt and title tags for the background images. The images inside the layer, however, read the alt tag from the Media Library once when you select them at the slide. The alt tags can’t be changed later unless you pick the image again or touch the code.

Responsive options ⭐

The Slide editor of Meta Slider doesn’t have the option to edit or even view the slider on mobile. Additionally, the Preview has no device selector either. In other words, there’s no way to edit or even see the result the slider will produce on mobile. It does have a basic responsive behavior, though. The slides scale down, keeping the set aspect ratio, and the layers scale, too. But this way the texts can shrink too much and become illegible. As a result, this is not the best WordPress slider plugin for content slides.

Soliloquy

Soliloquy is a popular slider plugin for WordPress. The premium version is based on add-ons, similar to Slider Revolution. However, unlike Rev Slider, you only get all add-ons by purchasing one of the two highest packages.

Interface ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The interface of Soliloquy slider couldn’t look closer to WordPress’s own interface. First, the slider list looks exactly like the Posts page of WordPress. Then there’s the slide configuration page which is very similar to the post editor. So when you configure your slider, you feel like you’re not creating a slider, but configuring a post. I’m not saying looking like WordPress is a bad thing, but it does limit what you can expect your slider to do.

Ease of use ⭐⭐⭐

Even when all add-ons are installed, Soliloquy doesn’t have many features. As a result, there’s no bloat in this slider, which makes it super easy to use. However, there’s no preview. So you can’t see what the options do and how they look in the slider without publishing the slider first. It would be a lot less of a problem if you didn’t have to keep scrolling up and down to save the slider. So it would have been nice from the developers if they had figured out something to avoid this.

When you set the title and caption of a slide, there are navigation buttons to quickly go through all slides. The problem is that the captions you added or changed are saved individually. For example, if you have two slides that need captions, you need to save both of them or you’ll lose the caption. When you switch away with the arrows, there’s no indicator that your changes are not saved yet. Additionally, there’s no notification when you close the editor either.

Available layers

There are no layers in the Soliloquy slider. You can add “edit” the slides and give a title and a caption to each image, but that doesn’t count as a layer. In fact, this is the first slider I’ve tested for this article, where I wasn’t surprised to see that there are no layers. A layer editor wouldn’t really fit into the look of the WordPress post editor.

Styling ⭐⭐

The styling is another part where the Soliloquy slider doesn’t shine. There are two themes you can choose from that define how your slider looks like. You’ll get three more with the Themes add-on, but that’s all. If you want a simple slider to display images or videos, I have no doubt Soliloquy slider will serve you well. But it will let you down as soon as you want to create a content slider, or just need some styling options.

Slider navigation ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The most popular navigation options are available in Soliloquy WordPress slider. There are arrows, bullets and thumbnails you can turn on. However, the look and position of the arrows and bullets depends on one of the two themes the plugin offers. If you have the Themes add-on, there are three more skins. They do look somewhat good, but they’re very basic. Additionally, they give the impression of an outdated slider.

Post Slider ⭐⭐⭐

To be able to create post slides, you’ll need the Featured Content Addon. This add-on is available in the two highest packages. So you won’t be able to create post slides by purchasing any Soliloquy Pro package.

Effects ⭐⭐

The only effects Soliloquy slider has are the slide transitions. Unfortunately, there are only four effects you can choose from, which isn’t a lot. The slides can fade, scroll vertically, horizontally or continuously horizontally.

Although it’s possible to adjust the caption transition delay, there isn’t any other option to set. For example, it’s not possible to set if the captions should slide or fade in. As a result, they’ll always fade in, regardless of the slide transition setting.

SEO Friendly ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Soliloquy slider has a clean and valid HTML structure. That’s always nice from the SEO perspective. When you add the slide, Soliloquy pulls the alt tag from the WordPress Media Library. Of course, you can edit it at the slide editor. Additionally. search engines can see the content the plugin creates well. The only SEO related feature I missed was the ability to set h1 to h6 tags.

Responsive options ⭐⭐

I created a slider with captions to see how that looks on mobile. While the images resized correctly, I was astonished to see the captions were gone. By default, Soliloquy slider hides the captions on smaller screens. Luckily, there’s an option to show the textual content on mobile, so I turned them back. Then I looked at the slider again and immediately understood why they chose to hide the text. As my image had a couple of lines of text, it covered the image completely. Additionally, the text even overlapped the content above the slider. All in all, the slider looked terrible on mobile with the captions enabled.

To sum it up, Soliloquy slider does a great job of resizing the images for small screens. At the same time, it does a terrible job of displaying their captions.

Comparing the speed of the best WordPress slider plugins

There are many criteria the best WordPress slider plugin must fulfill. It needs to have all the amazing features to create a stunning slider. Additionally, it needs to load fast, because the websites need to care about their speed. So they need to choose the fastest loading plugins. In other words, when you choose a slider, you need to consider its impact on your page’s loading time. A resource-heavy slider will have a huge negative impact on your site’s speed. As I want to find the best slider for WordPress, I have to compare the speed of each plugin.

Testing environment

I wanted to run the speed test on sliders that have the same content. Since not all sliders have the same features, it was a bit difficult to create the same looking slider in all. Finally, I decided to create a slider like the Image slider, template, without Google Fonts. I run the test using the Hello Elementor theme. I tested each slider with no other plugins being active at the same time.

All images and texts were the same in each slider. Each slider uses its default settings. I haven’t enabled any optimization options, like lazy loading. Additionally, I cleared the cache before each speed test.

First, I ran the speed test on the WordPress Sample page, to give you an idea about Hello Elementor theme’s speed. The internet speed used for the tests was 10Mb/s.

Speed test results without lazy loading

I’ve run two separate tests. In the first test I checked each plugin without using any kind of optimization, such as lazy loading. This makes the speed test fairer for those plugins, which don’t have built-in lazy loading.

The fastest loading slider was Soliloquy. It also produced the smallest page size. The second fastest and most lightweight slider was Meta Slider. The third palace is Smart Slider’s, which is slightly slower than Meta Slider.

Speed test results with lazy loading

Some plugins can lazy load the images. In other words, they can delay the loading of the images, which are not essential to see the slider. So, I decided to run a test where each plugin can showcase their full speed. Here are the results:

Although Soliloquy doesn’t have a lazy loading feature, it still finished in the first place. After turning on Lazy Loading Smart Slider loaded faster than Meta Slider. So it was the second fastest slider, barely slower than Soliloquy.

Pricing

In this article, I’m focusing on premium slider plugins, which means I have to mention their pricing. Most slider plugins have many packages to choose from. To make the comparison fair, I’ll compare the price, support and update period of their one site package. So, here’s how much each slider costs if you want to use them on a single WordPress site:

If we compare the prices alone, Soliloquy is the cheapest option, as it costs $19. But for this money, you get updates and support for one year only. Unless you never update anything on your site, you’ll need to renew the plugin for a second year. So, for two years Soliloquy costs you $38.

So which WordPress slider plugin is worth its price most? Obviously, it needs to use a one-time payment model. There are only four plugins that offer lifetime updates with a single purchase. Although Slider Revolution, Layer Slider and Master slider offer only 6-month support.

There’s simply no guarantee that you won’t need support after 6 months. Imagine the plugin has a major update 8 months after your purchase. Some options were moved around, but you can’t ask where they are now, because your support period is over. So, you need to purchase the plugin again to have another 6 months to ask questions.

There’s only one plugin that offers lifetime updates and support: Smart Slider. So the WordPress slider plugin that is worth the price the most is Smart Slider.

Which one is the best WordPress slider plugin?

Here’s how the scores stack up (in order) for each WordPress slider plugin I’ve tested for this article:

Based on these scores, the best slider plugin is Smart Slider. Although there’s a learning curve, the plugin is super easy to use. Thanks to Default positioning, the slider looks amazing on mobile. Actually, it looks much better on small screens than any other slider in this article. Additionally, you can use if for SEO purposes, and it has all the fancy effects you’d need for your site. The pricing couldn’t be more friendly: for $49 you’ll get updates and support forever. Additionally, it was one of the fastest plugins.

The second best slider is Slider Revolution. It has many great features and lots of effects. You can (and will need to) make responsive edits to make your slider look good on mobile devices. You’ll also need to make adjustments to ensure the content you create is SEO friendly.

Final Thoughts

Choosing a slider plugin for your WordPress website is never easy. There are just too many options, and not all plugins are equally great. Additionally, they might not be a good fit for your website.

So, which is the best WordPress slider? Which is the plugin you should use on your website? I can heartily recommend Smart Slider. It’s a wonderful plugin which your site can benefit from. It has great responsive behavior, and there’s a chance you won’t need to make any changes. It’s SEO friendly, it’s fast and has nice effects and a friendly pricing. What more could you ask for?

The post Best WordPress Slider Plugins Compared appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> https://smartslider3.com/blog/best-free-wordpress-page-builder-plugins/ Wed, 30 Sep 2020 06:00:11 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=5219 Your website needs to stand out of the crowd, not only with its great and unique content but with its design as well. If your site can’t catch the visitors’ attention, they’ll leave immediately. For this reason, you need to create outstanding pages. The easiest way to do that is to find the best free […]

The post Best Free WordPress Page Builder Plugins Compared 2021 appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> Your website needs to stand out of the crowd, not only with its great and unique content but with its design as well. If your site can’t catch the visitors’ attention, they’ll leave immediately. For this reason, you need to create outstanding pages. The easiest way to do that is to find the best free WordPress page builder plugin for your website.

Comparing the best free WordPress page builder plugins

In this article, I’ll compare the most popular free WordPress page builders. Of course, there are many great free builders out there, but I’ll only take a deeper look at four of them. The page builders I chose to compare are Gutenberg, Elementor, Beaver Builder and Brizy. I’ve picked them because they’re popular amongst WordPress users. So I’m curious to figure out which one is the best free page builder for WordPress from these four. I’m going to analyze them based on the following criteria:

1. Interface

When you choose a page builder for your site, you always need to consider how easy it is to use the plugin. After all, you trust it to help you build beautiful pages for your WordPress site. So the plugin you choose can’t have a clumsy interface. The options need to be laid out logically, they can’t be all over the place. In other words, you need to be able to find your way around quickly. So the best free WordPress page builder needs to have an interface that’s a joy to work with.

2. Available Elements

Unless you have the right tools at your disposal, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to create a stunning website. Page builders need to give more than only the basic heading, text, image and button elements. If these basic elements are not available, it isn’t a good fit for a modern website.

3. Styling options

If a plugin wants to be the best WordPress page builder, it needs to offer more than the ability to add content. It needs to provide options to style or design this content to create something unique.

4. Templates

Being able to create what you imagined is great. But having premade layouts to choose from is always welcomed. That’s because these layouts save time and effort. Additionally, they can teach you about what you can create with each plugin, and how to do it.

5. Pricing

Most plugins have a paid version with extra features. Although, in this article, I focus on finding the best free WordPress page builder. But I have to mention the premium plugins. I’ll compare what more you get, and how much you need to pay for it.

6. Speed

The keys to a successful site are: good content, nice design and fast loading. This is why I want to compare the speed of each page builder. I’m curious to see which of them loads the page that has the same layout, content and images the fastest.

📚 Table of contents

1. Gutenberg
2. Elementor
3. Beaver Builder
4. Brizy
5. Speed
6. Pricing

Gutenberg – free page builder plugin built into WordPress

Download

Gutenberg is WordPress’ built-in, block-based page and post editor. It arrived with WordPress 5, back in December 2018. Gutenberg editor has come a long way since its initial release. As a result, today and in the future, it can compete with the best free WordPress page builders.

Interface of Gutenberg ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Gutenberg looks simple and minimalistic, maybe a bit basic. This makes it fast to learn and easy to use. While it’s a visual, drag and drop editor, it operates on the backend. As a result, you might not see everything the same way as they’ll appear on the frontend during editing. Although, themes can style Gutenberg’s backend editor. As a result, the backend and frontend can look as similar as possible.

Gutenberg has an inline editor, which feels natural to use. Additionally, you can paste long text with basic formatting into the visual builder. Gutenberg is capable of automatically creating the paragraphs, headings and lists. You don’t need to create any element before. Very handy.

Available elements ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Gutenberg calls its elements blocks. Adding a new block is super easy, and there are more ways to do it. First, there’s one at the top left part of the fixed toolbar. Additionally, you can find one plus icon right below every block you added.

Styling options ⭐⭐

Gutenberg offers minimal styling options for the elements. You can adjust the font size, color, and background color. But apart from these, there aren’t many options you can tweak. Nonetheless, they’re useful and nice to have, but it would be great if more were available. For example, I would have loved to be able to adjust the font family of the content I added. Unfortunately, Gutenberg offers no way to do that, it can only inherit it from the theme.

Templates ⭐⭐

Gutenberg offers a few selections of block templates under the Pattern tab. These are simple, but great looking layouts that can give you a head start. The designs are simple and there’s not much you can choose from. Nonetheless, they help you save time when you build your page.

Final thoughts about Gutenberg

Gutenberg is a simple, but easy to use tool WordPress offers to create nice looking pages. It works best with a theme, that does the heavy lifting when it comes to styling the page. Paired with such a theme, Gutenberg can beat any competition. However, if you pair it with a minimal theme, you’ll probably have a hard time creating the designs you want.

Elementor – the most popular free page builder plugin

Download

Elementor is the most popular page builder in WordPress.org’s repository. In fact, it’s one of the most popular WordPress plugins. Right now, the repository has only 7 plugins which have more than 5 million installations. And Elementor is one of these super popular plugins. Having so many users, Elementor managed to keep an impressive 5-star rating out of 5,465 reviews.

Interface of Elementor ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Elementor offers a visual frontend editor to create pages. Many users prefer frontend editing, because they can see how the page is going to look like while they edit it. So, frontend editing saves time, because it removes two editing steps. You don’t need to save and refresh every time you want to take a look at the page you’re working on. Additionally, you can edit textual layers inline which is a great addition.

The editor is divided into two main sections. First, there is the Elementor panel on the left side, where you can find the configuration options. For example, this is where you can name your page. Then there’s the wider section, which is the actual editing screen. This is the place you can drag widgets to from the left panel and see what you’ve created.

The Elementor panel has a handy search field to quickly find widgets. This helps speeding up the workflow, as you won’t need to locate the widget you want. Although, you might need to be a little familiar with the elements to use it effectively.

Available Elements ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Page builders need to provide at least the most basic elements to fit into a modern website. Since Elementor is one of the best free WordPress page builder plugins, it offers them. You can create headings, add text, images, and buttons. Additionally, you have other handy widgets at your disposal. For example, the image carousel, counter, progress bar or tabs at your disposal. So Elementor doesn’t only offer the most basic widgets, it gives so much more.

There’s a huge list of widgets you can choose from to create your amazing looking Elementor page. These elements will help you create beautiful pages for your website in the long run. Additionally, if you would need more widgets, there are many plugins that offer them. Moreover, there are plenty of these plugins which are available free of charge.

Styling options ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Have you installed Elementor on your site for the very first time? I recommend setting up the typographies first. You can find them at Elementor Editor’s Settings Panel > Hamburger Menu > Site Settings. After that you can select these at any widget you add, speeding up your workflow.

There are many options you can use to style every element to your heart’s content. Although there are many settings, they are easy to understand. Even if you aren’t sure what an option does, you can try it with confidence and undo the change if you wouldn’t like them. While there are many styling options, there were a few things which I missed being able to set. For example, the line height can only be a pixel or em value. I’d have loved to simply set it to 1.5, but I couldn’t. The custom CSS giving option would have been a workaround for this. But that option is available in Elementor Pro only.

Templates ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Elementor offers a huge template library, but first, you need to create a free account at them. After that, you’ll have access to a bunch of great looking designs. You can import full pages which then you can customize to your heart’s content. Or you can import separate blocks and assemble the page piece by piece.

There’s an incredible amount of beautiful designs you can choose from. It can be time-consuming to look at all available templates. Luckily, there’s a search option so you can try to find blocks or pages by related keywords. Additionally, at the right side of the Block templates, there’s a category selector. If you’re looking for contact or pricing sections, you can choose it there and see what’s available.

But there is one thing I don’t like about the templates popup. It’s the fact that pro templates are seamlessly mixed with the free ones. You can’t filter for the Pro or Free ones only. As a result, you can spend too much time trying to find a template you both like and can import.

You can also save your own designs as templates which you can easily import later. It’s handy when you have the same looking elements across your site, like a subscription or contact block.

Final thoughts about Elementor

Elementor is an exceptional page builder. It’s easy to learn to use, although it might take some time to master. In any case, Elementor allows you to build modern and great looking websites. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a beginner or a professional

Beaver Builder – one of the best free WordPress page builder plugins

Download

Beaver Builder is another popular free WordPress page builder plugin. It powers over 300.000 websites, and has an impressive 5-star rating on WordPress.org out of 342 reviews. So, a lot of people use and like this plugin. Let’s see what the hype is all about!

The interface of Beaver Builder ⭐⭐⭐⭐

You can use Beaver Builder to build pages for your site in two ways. The first way is using the floating Content panel which you can drag anywhere. The second way is sticking the Content panel to the left or right sides of the browser. As a result, you can add and configure the elements on the left side, and see the result on the right.

Beaver Builder offers inline editing, which is very convenient to use. It’s easy to figure out how to add new elements, and configuring them is just as effortless. However, adding a new element makes a loading icon appear in the area where you drop it. Although it only lasts for a few seconds, I found it irritating. Additionally, I felt it was interrupting the editing process. Also, the drag’n’dropping of the modules sometimes produced interesting movements.

Available Elements ⭐⭐

Beaver Builder offers the bare minimum of elements, or modules as they call them. There’s only 5 available: audio, HTML, photo, text editor and video. Additionally, you can create rows to place content into. The WordPress widgets are also available to choose at Beaver Builder. This gives slightly more tools to work with. Still, this free WordPress page builder plugin has very few elements to offer.

You can use the Text editor to create headings, so you can structure your content properly. What’s more frustrating is that there’s no button module, at least in the Lite version. That’s a bummer because CTA plays an important role in a website’s conversion. Of course, if you have coding knowledge, you can create buttons using the HTML or Text Editor modules. But let’s face it: if you wanted to write code to have a button, you wouldn’t have used a page builder.

Styling options ⭐⭐⭐

Beaver Builder seems to expect the styling to be done from the theme’s end. By default, it inherits the layout the theme sets nicely. If you want to create a custom layout, you can use Beaver Builder’s options to do so. However, there’s no global, or page level styling. At the rows or columns you can only set text colors, but not font specific options, like size or family.

Templates

Many WordPress plugins offer quick access to some templates, which users can use to get a head start. It’s useful for those who are new to the plugin, or don’t have much design knowledge, or are in short of time. In Beaver Builder, templates are available only after purchasing a paid plan. So users of the Free plugin won’t be able to import any templates.

Final thoughts on Beaver Builder

Beaver Builder is a nice and easy to use free WordPress page builder plugin. However, it seems it’s aimed for developers, rather than the average WordPress users. In the free version, it’s not possible to create a Hero header, because there’s no option to create a button. Unless you code the button yourself, and I don’t think that’s acceptable from a visual builder in 2020.

Brizy – innovative free page builder plugin

Download

Brizy is a relatively new plugin, released in April 2018. The page builder plugin market is full of big fish like Elementor or Beaver Builder. On the paid front, there are plugins like Divi or Visual Composer. So new plugins need to offer something more, something new to be able to attract users. And that’s not an easy task.

Yet, Brizy has managed to earn more than 60.000 people’s trust in just two years. Additionally, it promises to offer a new and intuitive way of visual page building. This makes me curious to see if this free WordPress page builder can keep its promise.

Interface of Brizy ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Like the other page builders, Brizy also has a visual frontend editor. It has a narrow panel on the left side of the browser window. This is where you can add new elements, adjust the order of the added blocks, or set the styling. The large right-hand side is for placing the content. As a result, the interface offers plenty of space to see the content you’re creating.

Brizy has inline text editing by default, which is very convenient to use. In fact, Brizy’s solution feels as natural as Gutenberg’s. And that’s a big achievement. I’ve tested Elementor, which also has inline editing, but it doesn’t feel as seamless.

Available Elements ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Brizy offers a handful of elements to create content with. You can create headings or paragraphs with the text module, or add a button to your page. You can also add images, icons, or videos. There are cool extras, like the counter or Google map elements. To sum it up, Brizy has all elements you’ll need to create a content rich website.

Styling options ⭐⭐⭐

Before you start creating your pages with Brizy, make sure you set up colors and text styles first. This will make the editing experience faster. In the text settings, you can find the most essential options. You can set the font size, family, weight, line height and letter spacing. Other options, such as the text-align, are available at the text element.

Templates ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The page creation in Brizy starts with adding a new block. First, you need to choose whether you want to start from a template or create an empty block. In case you chose to add with an empty block, you can build your content from scratch. But even if you start with a template, you’ll be able to tweak anything you want.

There’s a total of 502 blocks you can choose from, and you can use them to build your page piece by piece. There are also 41 full-page layouts ready for importing. The only downside is that pro and free templates are totally mixed. As a result, it can take time to find what you can import in the free page builder.

Final thoughts on Brizy

Brizy is easy to use whether you have any developer knowledge or not. Additionally, its inline editing feels like a breeze and is very easy to get used to. Of course, there’s plenty of room for improvement. For example, I’d love to have more styling options. Nonetheless, I feel Brizy has created something unique.

Speed of the best free WordPress page builders compared

There are three key factors for creating a successful site. These are: a good copy, an eye-catching design, and a fast loading time. Most plugins you add to your site have an impact on your website’s speed. So you need to choose what you install carefully.

When you choose a page builder for your site you need to consider how much impact it has on your page’s loading time. A resource heavy plugin will have a negative impact on your site’s speed. And you haven’t even added your content yet.

To help you find the best free WordPress page builder plugin, I’ll compare their loading speed. In other words, I’ll check how fast the page you create with these plugins loads. Additionally, I’ll test how much weight they add to the page speed, and how many requests they make.

Testing environment

I wanted to run the speed test on a page that had the same content. So I built the layout of the Healthcare template in each page builder. I run the test using the Hello Elementor theme. When I run the tests, no other were active at the same time but the one I was testing. All images and fonts were the same in each builder. Additionally, I’ve cleared the cache before each speed test.

First I ran the speed test on the WordPress Sample page, to give you an idea about Hello Elementor theme’s speed. The internet speed used for the tests was 10Mb/s.

Speed test results

	Hello Theme	Gutenberg	Elementor	Beaver Builder	Brizy
Loading time	198ms	361ms	2.05s	1.26ms	1.42s
Page size	90.0kb	230kb	964kb	418kb	1.5 MB
Requests	6	17	35	21	26

Gutenberg is an obvious winner here. It loads faster than any of its competitors, weighs less and makes fewer requests. Of course, it’s much more limited than any of the other plugins in this article in terms of styling. So, based on its speed alone, Gutenberg is the best free WordPress page builder plugin.

But we should look deeper than the page speed. Take the styling options and available elements into account as well. In this case, Gutenberg won’t keep its first place. With these in mind, the best free WordPress page builder plugin is either Elementor or Brizy. Elementor loads slower, but it weighs less. Brizy, on the other hand, is faster, but heavier. So, if you need a good page builder for your site, I recommend giving Elementor or Brizy a try.

Which one is the best free WordPress page builder plugin?

If you still haven’t decided which plugin to pick, here’s how the scores stack up (in order):

	Gutenberg	Elementor	Beaver Builder	Brizy
Interface	⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Available Elements	⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐⭐
Styling options	⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐
Templates	⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐⭐		⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Speed	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐⭐	⭐⭐⭐
Total	15/25	21/25	13/25	20/25

Based on these scores, the best Free WordPress page builder is Elementor. But it’s closely followed by Brizy. If you start a new project, I recommend checking these out first. But it’s also worth considering whether Gutenberg would be enough.

Pricing

As mentioned before, I wanted to take a look at the paid version of the best free WordPress page builder plugins. You might want to go pro later, even if you’re satisfied with the plugin now. Or you might upgrade because you want to support the developers of the plugin.

As Gutenberg is part of WordPress core, it has no premium plan you could upgrade to. But if you should need more blocks or templates, you can find a bunch of free or premium plugins to help you with that.

However, there’s a premium version of Elementor, Brizy and Beaver Builder. You can choose from the following pricing options:

	Elementor			Beaver Builder			Brizy
Price/year	$49	$99	$199	$99	$199	$399	$49	$99
Domain license	1 site	3 sites	25 sites	∞	∞	∞	3 sites	∞

What more do you get if you buy the premium plugin?

• Elementor: You get 50 more widgets to build. Also, 300+ more templates, and 10+ full website kits. The Theme, WooCommerce and Popup Builder is also available in one of the paid plans.
• Beaver Builder: Each Beaver Builder package is different. In the cheapest plan you get Premium Modules & Templates, and pro support. Additionally, in the middle package, you get the Beaver Themer and multisite compatibility. What’s more, the highest package offers White Labeling.
• Brizy: The Pro version of Brizy gives you access to 250+ Premium Designs. You can also access Brizy Cloud, where you can get amazing new templates from.

Final Thoughts

Choosing a WordPress page builder plugin for free is never easy. There are just too many options, any not all plugins are equally great. Additionally, they might not be a good fit for your website.

So, what’s the best free WordPress page builder? Either of these four plugins can be the best for your project. If you have a theme with nice styling, Gutenberg would probably be enough for your site. As a result, your site would load faster than with any other plugins I’ve tested for this article.

But if you don’t have such a good theme, or you prefer to create everything by yourself, you still have good options. You can choose Elementor or Brizy as the free page builder for your site. Both plugins offer a great number of features to create an amazing website.

The post Best Free WordPress Page Builder Plugins Compared 2021 appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> https://smartslider3.com/blog/elementor-slider/ Mon, 07 Sep 2020 15:08:39 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=31943 People love sliders, and they demand to have them on their site. As an Elementor user, I’m sure you’ve wanted to have one, too. Or you had a client who wanted to have a gorgeous slider on their site. However, finding the right Elementor slider solution isn’t an easy task. In this article, we’re going […]

The post The Ultimate Guide to Elementor Sliders and Carousels appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> People love sliders, and they demand to have them on their site. As an Elementor user, I’m sure you’ve wanted to have one, too. Or you had a client who wanted to have a gorgeous slider on their site. However, finding the right Elementor slider solution isn’t an easy task. In this article, we’re going to explore what kind of carousels are available in Elementor. Additionally, I’ll introduce you to another slider solution, which you can use to create modern Elementor sliders for your website.

What are the best sliders for Elementor?

1. Smart Slider
2. Revolution Slider
3. Elementor Slider widget
4. Layer Slider

In this article we’ll cover Elementor Slider widget and Smart Slider. If you want to learn more about the other sliders, be sure to check out article about the best WordPress sliders.

Sliders in Elementor

If you’re using the Pro version of Elementor, there are a couple of widgets that allow you to create sliders. For Free users, however, only one carousel widget is available. In any case, all of these widgets are fully integrated into Elementor. As a result, you can configure them the same way you set up any other Elementor widget. This ensures a seamless and familiar experience during slider creation.

So, you need a slideshow and you use Elementor. You can choose from the following built-in solutions to add an Elementor slider to your site:

Carousel widget: Free Elementor slider solution

In the Free version of Elementor, you can find a Carousel widget, which you can use to create sliders with. It’s a simple solution that allows you to add basic image galleries. The carousels you build are responsive and look great on mobile.

Using the Carousel widget you can select images directly from the Media Library. Do you want to leave your visitors guessing why you have added the images? If not, you can display the image title, description, or caption below the pictures. You can configure the text you want to be displayed at the WordPress Media Library.

At the widget, you can select the image size and also the number of slides you want to see next to one another. It’s also possible to set how many images you want to scroll together. For example, let’s say you have a carousel with 6 slides, and 3 slides display at the same time. You can set the “Slides to Scroll” value to 3. As a result, all visible images will change together, as opposed to going through them one by one.

Additionally, you can make your slides switch automatically by the given interval. This way you can create simple, autoplaying slideshows for your site. It’s pretty great, right?

Slides widget: Elementor Pro slider solution

In the Pro version of Elementor, you can find an actual slider widget. It’s much more suitable for creating sliders for your site. Additionally, it allows you to put content on the slides you make. You can add a heading, a description and a CTA button on each slide.

Each slide can have a background image or a color. If you choose to have a background image, you can set a colored overlay for it. Additionally, there’s an option to adjust the blend mode of the background. Moreover, the popular Ken Burns Effect is available as well.

You can add a title, a description and a button with a link to each slide. These are the most essential elements you’ll need to create a slideshow for your website. In conclusion, the Elementor slider widget is suitable for creating a basic content slider.

Other notable carousels in Elementor Pro

Elementor Pro has other widgets that can create a slider-like result. With the Testimonial Carousel you can display your client’s words in a nice slideshow. You can enter the content of the testimony, give the name and title of the person and upload an image. You can choose from two skins and five layouts to make the testimonial stand out.

With Elementor’s Media Carousel you can create a media gallery. This widget can create a thumbnail slider. Also, you can set it to show the enlarged image in a lightbox. It’s called Media Carousel because it also accepts YouTube and Vimeo URLs in the lightbox. In this case, the image is just a simple thumbnail that launches the lightbox.

Using the Reviews widget you can display your reviews in a tweet-like manner. You can upload a picture, set the name, title and rating and also choose an icon for the review. Also, you can set the actual review text. In short, you have all the tools you need to create a review slider.

A summary of Elementor’s slider widgets

There are many great widgets in Elementor that help you add carousels to your site. These sliders are easy to use and responsive, just like Elementor is. However, there’s one notable difference between them and Elementor: they feel a lot less customizable. You can create anything you want with Elementor. Unfortunately, the same isn’t true about these carousel and slider widgets.

How to create more customizable Elementor sliders?

Every website is different. With Elementor you can create simple sliders. That might be enough for a couple of sites you create. But on other sites, you might need to create more content-heavy slideshows. You might need to add another CTA, more paragraphs, images next to the text (not behind it), or even icons.

So you need to look for a slider, which works well with Elementor. Additionally, it needs to be responsive and easy to use, and have the features you need. Have a look at Smart Slider, the best Elementor slider solution for your website.

What is Smart Slider?

Smart Slider is a super popular WordPress plugin. It allows you to enrich your site with beautiful, modern and responsive slideshows. There’s a free version available, where you can create sliders or blocks. In the Pro version (starting at $49) there are more slider types: Showcase and Carousel. Additionally, each package offers lifetime updates and support for your activated domains.

Smart Slider has its own Elementor widget which makes the publishing super easy. Additionally, it is compatible with Elementor 3.

Comparing Smart Slider and Elementor’s carousels

Elementor’s slider is a simple but feature-rich slider plugin. In the table below I have compared its features with the Free and Pro version of Smart Slider.

	Elementor Slider	Elementor Image Carousel	Smart Slider Free	Smart Slider Pro
Layers	3	❌	6	23
Custom layer order	❌	❌	✅	✅
Adjustable Content width on each slide	❌	❌	✅	✅
Custom layer positions on each slide	❌	❌	✅	✅
Slide Captions	❌	✅	✅	✅
Typography options	✅	✅	✅	✅
Background image	✅	✅	✅	✅
Ken Burns Effect	✅	❌	❌	✅
Background overlay	✅	❌	✅	✅
Blend mode	✅	❌	❌	❌
Autoplay	✅	✅	✅	✅
Navigation arrows, bullets	✅	✅	✅	✅
Thumbnail navigation	❌	❌	✅	✅
Transition options	2	❌	10	55
Content animation	6	❌	5	5
Layer Animation	❌	❌	❌	✅
Video slides	❌	❌	✅	✅
Lightbox	❌	✅	❌	✅
Showing more slides at the same time	❌	✅	❌	✅

Can you create the same looking slider in Elementor and Smart Slider?

The table above highlights the features you can expect from Elementor Slider and Smart Slider. Apart from telling you a couple of things you can do with these sliders, I also want to show you an example. In other words, I’ll try to create the same slider in Elementor and Smart Slider. As a result, you’ll have a better idea on the sliders you can create with each software.

But here’s a twist: I’ve chosen an existing Smart Slider Pro template to recreate. It’s one of the most popular full-width templates of Smart Slider. It looks really cool and fits any site. What’s more important: it uses only 3 layers in the same order as the Elementor Slider needs them.

Highlights of the Fullwidth Slider template

Before I start recreating this slider in Elementor of Smart Slider free, let’s see some of its details. First, the layout, which is quite simple: it contains a heading, a text and a button layer. These layers are placed into a 1200px wide container and aligned to the left inside it. As a result, on larger screens, there’s more space on the left side of the content than on smaller screens.

The heading uses the Highlighted heading layer of Smart Slider Pro. This layer can highlight the most important part of your text with the shape of your choice. Additionally, you can see a nice movement when the highlight happens. But there’s much more on this slide, so let’s move on!

On the button layer, there’s a cool hover effect. The color changes and the button grows a little. The growth happens because of the bigger padding on hover. Furthermore, the small image icons react to the mouse movement by trying to follow it. This happens because of the layer parallax effect.

Also, the slide navigation arrows are placed to the bottom-right corner of the slider. This is the slider I’ll try to replicate in Elementor’s slider solution and in Smart Slider Free. It’s time to get started!

Building in Elementor slider

It wasn’t challenging, nor time-consuming to create this cool full-width slider in Elementor. I did, however, have to cheat a little: to be able to make the texts bold, I needed to use some HTML codes. I also needed to write HTML to make the bold text white in the description. Nonetheless, Elementor’s slider is easy to understand and fast to work with. Below you can see the pretty great-looking result:

However, for some reason, I wasn’t able to get the content to align to the middle, inside a 1200px wide container. I did the set 1200px content width, but that seemed to make no difference as my content wasn’t wider than 1200px. As a result, the final look of the slider looks a bit uncomfortable on the left side of the screen. Additionally, it’s far away from the guy in the picture.

I also couldn’t get the arrows to be on the same side. Elementor’s slider only allows placing the arrows on the inner or outer sides of the slider.

✅ Can do:

• Add all three needed layers
• Set the styling (font color, size and family)
• Set the layer positions
• Make the slider 700px high

❌ Can’t do:

• Adding line breaks without HTML
• Styling part of the text without HTML
• Placing the content to the middle into a 1200px wide container
• Placing both arrows to the bottom-right corner

Building in Smart Slider Free

Smart Slider makes it easy to build responsive sliders fast. I just needed to drag the layers to their place and change the Inner align on their parent to finish the layout. For the “Make products that matter” text I used two heading layers. This way I was able to adjust the font weight and family in Smart Slider’s visual editor. At the text layer, I added an empty link, which I selected at the layer window. As a result, I could change the color by changing the color of the link.

I was able to style the arrows and position them to the bottom right corner without problems. Then I created a Static overlay, that’s above all slides in the slider, and placed the small images there. I used Absolute positioning to add these images and position them on the canvas.

As you can see the result is really close to the goal. Basically, the only difference between the slider made in the Free and Pro version is the Pro effects.

✅ Can do

• Create a 1200px wide container and align the content inside it
• Place the arrows to the bottom-right corner
• Make the slider 700px high
• Create an overlay to place the small images to
• Create the hover effect of the button

❌ Can’t do

• Create the parallax effect for the small images
• Create the animated shape around the “that matter” text

What more can you get with Smart Slider Pro?

With the Pro version of Smart Slider, you can create much richer slideshows. For example, if you click on the “But how?” button, a couple of new layers will appear. These are the layer animations, that you can trigger with an event. In this case, the event was clicking on the CTA button.

Clicking on any boxes takes the visitor to another slide within this slider. Using such navigation makes your slider look unique and ensures a memorable user experience.

Why should you choose Smart Slider as your Elementor Slider?

Elementor is a powerful page builder which you can use to create a beautiful site. On the slider front, however, it only allows you to create something basic. So if you need more functionality, you’ll need a slider plugin. Unfortunately, the market is full of slider plugins to choose from, which makes it hard to pick one.

I recommend giving Smart Slider a try. It has an excellent Free version you can try at no cost. Additionally, you can create amazing sliders even with the Free version. If the slider example above weren’t convincing enough, below is a list of reasons to choose Smart Slider.

Why should you choose Smart Slider Free?

• It’s free. Free things are always nice to have. Smart Slider offers a powerful slider builder tool, without having to spend a penny.
• Easy to use. Smart Slider is just as easy to use as Elementor’s Carousel and Slider widgets. But it’s much, much more powerful.
• 6 unique layers. There are 6 layers available, each suitable for a certain type of content. You can add as many headings, paragraphs, buttons, images, YouTube or Vimeo videos as you want to each slide.
• Default positioning. Add rows and columns to display your content, the same way you use Elementor.
• Absolute positioning. Need to add some decorative elements? Use Absolute positioning which gives you the freedom of placing the layers anywhere.
• Freedom to build what you want. With Smart Slider, you can build anything you imagine.
• Style as you want. Make the layers look the way you want to! As a result, the slideshow can bend into your site perfectly. Or you can create a slider that truly stands out.
• Customizable controls. Add arrows, bullets or thumbnails to your slides. Then customize them to your heart’s content.
• It’s responsive. With Smart Slider, you can create sliders that look gorgeous on any device. You can use responsive tools, like the Text scale to fine-tune the result on small screens.
• Post Sliders. Create sliders from your most recent blog posts using the dynamic slide generator. The best part is that the generator automatically updates when you add new posts.
• Beautiful templates to start. Need to create something good looking fast? Import one of the 11 ready to use sample sliders and customize them to your liking.

Why should you choose Smart Slider Pro?

The Free version of Smart Slider is an already amazing and highly customizable plugin. But if you want more power, have a look at Smart Slider Pro! It has all features the free version, and much more. Some reasons to go Pro:

• Much more layers. There are a total of 23 layers in the Pro version to create content with.
• Self-hosted videos. You can use MP4 videos in your slides to avoid having to use a 3rd party service for it. Additionally, an MP4 video can look great as the background of the slide.
• Cool effects. You can find the coolest and most popular effects in Smart Slider. For example parallax, particle, Ken Burns effect and Shape Divider.
• Layer animation. Breathe some life into your layers by animating them separately. Build any layer animation you like or select from our preset animations.
• Reveal animation. Reveal animation is a special type of layer animation, that gives a modern touch to your slides.
• Layer events. Events let you start layer animations when visitors interact with the slider. For example, you can make a layer show up when the visitor clicks on another layer.
• Lightbox. Display your images in a lightbox, which allows the visitors to enjoy them in a larger size.
• More beautiful templates to start. Get a headstart and choose from more than 180 sliders.
• Friendly pricing. All Smart Slider packages come with lifetime updates and support. You don’t need to renew your subscription yearly to be able to get help or access the latest features.

Conclusion

Elementor already has some great built-in slider solutions. They let you create nice-looking, responsive sliders to your site. But in some ways, they lack functionality and creative freedom. So, if you need more functionality and features, you need a slider plugin.

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Give Smart Slider a try. It works well with Elementor, which makes it an excellent choice to create sliders for your site. Even the free version can fulfill your website’s slider needs. You can add unlimited layers and create any layout you want. But if you need more features and some cool effects, you can go for Smart Slider Pro. I’m sure you won’t regret it!

The post The Ultimate Guide to Elementor Sliders and Carousels appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> https://smartslider3.com/blog/divi-slider/ Fri, 04 Sep 2020 08:28:38 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=31831 Divi by Elegant Themes is one of the most popular WordPress theme and page builder available today. This page builder is a drag and drop editor in which you can create a whole website. There are a lot of available modules that you can choose from, and which makes it easier to create a website. […]

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]]> Divi by Elegant Themes is one of the most popular WordPress theme and page builder available today. This page builder is a drag and drop editor in which you can create a whole website. There are a lot of available modules that you can choose from, and which makes it easier to create a website. In this article, I will introduce the available slider modules in Divi. Also, I will show you a slider plugin alternative which can make your website more unique.

Divi Slider modules

Using a slider or a block on your website isn’t a new thing nowadays. Page builders like Divi already have options to create a slider module for your page, which is the easiest and fastest solution to create a slider. Divi offers 3 kinds of slider modules: a simple slider, a video slider and a post slider module.

Let’s take a look at these modules!

Slider module

Divi slider module can be a great solution if you want to place a basic slider on your page. Every setting is inside the Divi builder, and you can instantly check if the design fits or not.

This slider is a great slider module that you can use to showcase images or videos, display some text, and also you can put a CTA on it. For this reason, it can be a quick way to create a hero slider. You also have customization options, like setting the typography, colors or the style of your bullets. The slider has an option to set a slider background image, where you can adjust the size of the image. Additionally, you can put an overlay on it. And you can even add a parallax effect which can make your site more professional.

👍 GOOD

• Easy to use
• Parallax background
• Video background
• Hide slider on devices

👎 BAD

• You can’t change the order of your slide content
• Limited structure

Video slider

Divi offers another slider module to create a video slider on your page. With this module, you can organize your videos. You can use any source, for instance, you can put any YouTube or Vimeo link, or you can upload your own mp4 video. So it is up to you which one you want to use. There are customization options similar to the other slider module. In addition, you can customize the thumbnail images and the play button as well.

👍 GOOD

• You can use any type of video
• Easy way to create a video gallery

👎 BAD

• No autoplay option
• Every time the video starts from the beginning

Post slider

Creating a dynamically changing post slider is great to showcase our latest or featured posts. Divi offers a post slider module where you can display your latest post, define how many articles you want to showcase and in which order. You can set the featured image as the slide background, display the post title and meta, and put a read more button which links to the post itself.

👍 GOOD

• Dynamically changing content
• You can choose from categories
• Customizable post count and order

👎 BAD

• Limited design and structure

How to create better Divi sliders?

The slider modules in Divi are great but I think they are a bit limited. If you want to create a more customizable slider, it’s worth finding a slider plugin that is compatible with Divi. Smart Slider is one of the best slider plugins in WordPress. Even the free version has great features that you can start with. Smart Slider helps you create custom designs, and you can customize every layer. This plugin has a Divi module, so you can publish it as usual.

Hopefully, you want to know how the Smart Slider 3 plugin can upgrade the Divi slider functionality. One of the most important improvements is that you can create slideshows with more than 4 layers in custom order and placement.

Smart Slider has a layer list where you can choose from more types of layers. The rows and columns help you to structure them. You have the option to align your layers vertically and horizontally, set a maximum width, change any colors or typography, so you can create a unique design. If it isn’t enough, you can use absolute positioning on your layers to design the slider. By combining the different layers and positions, you can create some truly unique websites with Smart Slider 3 and Divi.

How to use Smart Slider 3?

Smart Slider is a slider plugin that is available for free in the WordPress repository. Just simply download, and activate it. Then you can start creating your slider. There are many pre-built templates that you can start with, but you have the option to start from scratch.

If you are ready with your slider, publish it with the Smart Slider Divi module.

Comparing Divi slider module and Smart Slider

Let me compare the basic Divi slider and the free and pro versions of Smart Slider. I really think that the Divi slider module is a great module of Divi, because it has a lot of customization options, and it is inside in Divi. Everything is in one place, and you don’t need to know a new interface. But the functionality is limited because you can’t create the layout you want.

If you want a more specific layout where you can place your layers where you want, and you can create a more unique content, consider using Smart Slider 3. The free version offers a lot of features like the Divi module, and with the Pro, you don’t have limits.

Let’s see some relevant differences!

	Divi slider module	Smart Slider 3 Free	Smart Slider 3 Pro
Layers	5	6	23
Typography options	✅	✅	✅
Drag & Drop interface	❌	✅	✅
Background image	✅	✅	✅
Background video	mp4, WEBM	❌	mp4
Parallax effect	✅	❌	✅
Layer animations	❌	❌	✅
Transitions	✅	✅	✅
Controls	2	5	7
Dynamic variables	✅	✅	✅
Static overlay	❌	✅	✅
Autoplay	❌	✅	✅

Interface

The main difference is the interface. There’s no doubt that Divi makes it easy to add sliders to your WordPress website. Simply enter text in the set fields and then upload some images and your slider is ready to go. However, when it comes to functionality and letting you create impressive sliders, the Divi slider does have some limitations. Nonetheless in Smart Slider, you can use a drag and drop slide editor, and you can place your layers where you want.

Animations and effects

With background animation modes you can easily bring your design to life. Divi has a basic animation option, which you can cheer up your slider, but in Smart Slider 3 Pro you can choose from 3 kinds of animations: main animation, background animation and unique layer animations.

Customizable controls

Each slider module has options to customize the controls, but in Smart Slider, you have more ways to make them unique. You can put the controls into other positions, change the colors, spacing, or hide them on different devices. Besides in Smart Slider 3 you have options to display thumbnails which you can create an image gallery styled thumbnail slider.

Slider autoplay

Smart Slider offers slider autoplay which is a popular feature at most slider plugins. This way the slider switches slides after a while. This can call the visitors’ attention but if you don’t like autoplaying sliders, then you can simply disable this setting.

Why should you choose Smart Slider 3 as your Divi Slider?

If you like simple and basic things, maybe you don’t want to install another plugin and learn how it works to create a slider. Divi also has slider modules, so why should you use a different plugin to create a slider? Let’s see some features which can help you decide to choose Smart Slider or not.

Reasons to choose Smart Slider 3 Free

• It’s free. The free version of Smart Slider is available on the WordPress repository, you don’t need to pay for it.
• The freedom of creating a slider. You can create a complicated layout thanks to the rows, columns, and the positioning options.
• Customizable controls. Use your arrows, bullets, thumbnails, text bar the way as you imagined. Position them, change their colors, or disable if you don’t want to display them.
• Ready to use templates. In Smart Slider 3 you can start with pre-built templates, which are fully customizable. Just change the content or the images and you have a ready slider.



• Responsive sliders. With minimal effort, you can create a slider that looks good on any device.

Reasons to choose Smart Slider 3 Pro

Hopefully, you now have a better idea of how Smart Slider 3 can upgrade your ability to add slideshow presentations to your Divi website. But if you’re still not sure let’s see some features of Smart Slider 3 Pro!

• Slider types. In the Pro version, you can find every type of slider which can fit on any page: full-page and full-width sliders, carousels, showcase sliders, and blocks.
• Lots of layers. Smart Slider 3 and its 23 layer types give you much more creative freedom. If you do choose Smart Slider 3 as your new slider tool, then layers for icons, progress bars, counters, and even mp4 videos can be used to add content-rich slideshows to your website.
• Much more templates. Smart Slider 3 definitely isn’t short on fully customizable templates either. Choosing an option from the collection of complete pre-built sliders and a library of individual slides can help you save time and overcome any design-related shortcomings you might have.
• Popular available effects. The pro version offers lots of effects that you can set, like Parallax, Ken Burns, Particle, Shape Divider. All of them are customizable and can cheer up a single slider, too.
• Layer animations. You can add layer animations on the individual layers of your slides. They can come in, loop, go out, repeat, so you can create even complex animations if you want.
• Lightbox. The pro version offers the lightbox feature, so you can enlarge your images or videos or even an iframe in a popup. It’s a popular feature which can also save place on your webpage.
• Dynamic sources. Smart Slider 3 goes beyond just allowing you to use posts for the content of your dynamic sliders. Displaying WooCommerce products, custom post types, and content from popular WordPress events plugins is all supported.
• One time payment and lifetime support. Finally, I should mention that if you buy the Pro version, you need to pay only once, and you will get lifetime updates and support!

Final Thoughts

There are a lot of great reasons to use Smart Slider 3 to add sliders to your Divi website. You can build more creative, good-looking and unique slideshows with Smart Slider 3 compared to the Divi slider modules. If you need a simple slider, then you can use the basic Divi module, but if you need more, then use Smart Slider. With Divi and Smart Slider 3 together you can make a powerful page with a unique slider. If you want to give it a try, don’t hesitate, install the free version of Smart Slider 3 first, and give it a try. And if you like it and need more features, then you can upgrade.

The post The Ultimate Guide to Create a Divi Slider appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> https://smartslider3.com/blog/smart-slider-3-free-vs-pro/ Mon, 18 May 2020 14:00:11 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=19124 Sliders, slideshows, carousels — no matter what you call them, they are an incredibly versatile design tool that enables you to showcase images, video, and other dynamic content beautifully and more effectively, while maximizing the space on your website. Whether you need a simple way to display a slideshow of photos, or you want to […]

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]]> Sliders, slideshows, carousels — no matter what you call them, they are an incredibly versatile design tool that enables you to showcase images, video, and other dynamic content beautifully and more effectively, while maximizing the space on your website.

Whether you need a simple way to display a slideshow of photos, or you want to a bold video header complete with animation effects and buttons, sliders provide an eye-catching way to promote your products or services and let visitors know what your site is all about.

Currently, the highest rated slider plugin for WordPress is Smart Slider. With a 4.9 out of 5-star rating at WordPress.org, it has more than 800,000 active installs and is also the fastest growing plugin, according to WPTrends.net. Smart Slider also comes as a Pro version. So you might be wondering if the free version is so highly rated, is it worth upgrading to Pro?

In this post, we’ll take a look at the free and Pro versions of Smart Slider in detail so you can decide which is the best option for you.

Introducing Smart Slider

Smart Slider is a powerful and easy to use slider plugin that’s feature-rich and fun to use. Whether you’re a beginner starting out with creating sliders for the first time or a developer who has been using sliders for years, Smart Slider offers features that appeal to a broad audience of users.

Here are just some of Smart Slider’s top features:

• It’s easy to use. The Default and Absolute visual positioning modes are unlike anything you’ll see in other slider plugins.
• It’s packed with features. There are 5 layer types with the free version (21 when you upgrade to Pro), 100+ pre-designed slide, a huge template collection, dynamic generators, animations and effects, and much more.
• It’s fast. You can optimize and preload images to improve your website’s loading speed. There’s also script optimization, which includes efficient code, asynchronous loading, and minification.
• It’s SEO-friendly. You can add alt text to any image in your slides.
• It’s developer-friendly. The expert mode unlocks a bunch of advanced options, giving you even more control over your sliders.

Why Use Smart Slider Free?

The free version of Smart Slider is one of the most feature-packed plugins I’ve ever come across in the WordPress repository. It’s amazing for the price you pay, which is absolutely nothing! It has exploded in popularity over the past year, with 20,000 new active installs in just the past month.

So what makes Smart Slider so special? For one thing, it offers just the right number of features so you can create beautiful sliders with complex designs, all without feeling forced to upgrade for something as simple as layers (layers are included, unlike some other free slider plugins).

So let’s take a look at the features that come with the free version of Smart Slider.

Default and Absolute layers

There are two different visual layer positions in Smart Slider: Default and Absolute.

Using Default layers you can build much like a page builder. You can quickly build your slides using columns and rows for uniformity, and a clean design that’s fully responsive.

Absolute layers give you the freedom to work with layers unobstructed, much like you would with popular image editing tools such as Photoshop. With Smart Slider, you can drag and drop your layers and position them anywhere on your slides, even on top of each other for dynamic effects.

Layers

Create unique designs with six different layers: image, heading, text, button, Vimeo, and YouTube. What’s great about Smart Slider is that you can place your layers anywhere on your slides, so you can have text on top of images and position your layers how you like.

Image optimization

Smart Slider free can optimize your images by resizing them to the size of the slider. This reduces your page loading time, so you can serve content to your visitors faster.

Slide Library

The Slide Library provides several pre-made slides in light and dark skins to help kickstart your work. You can import slides directly into the Slide editor and start customizing them with your own content.

Page Builder Support

Smart Slider works flawlessly with Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, Page Builder by Site Origin, and WP Bakery Page Builder, and Gutenberg.

Responsive and Touch-Friendly

Ensuring that your site design is responsive is crucial now that Google has moved to mobile-first indexing. With Smart Slider, your sliders will automatically adjust for different devices.

This means your sliders can be enjoyed on any device, be it mobile, tablet, or desktop. You can choose to enable features like swipe, or simply turn off sliders for particular devices.

Dynamic Slides

You aren’t limited to adding just static images, video, and text to your slides. With Smart Slider, you can populate your slides with dynamic content, such as WordPress posts.

For example, you could pull in your latest blog posts and display them on your homepage to promote your recent article.

Customizable Controls

There’s a range of different navigational controls you can add to your sliders, including arrows, bullets, and thumbnails. You can also add text bars, shadows, and autoplay your sliders.

Slide Background Animations

Smart Slider comes with nine super smooth background animations, which you can customize to change the duration and speed.

Why Use Smart Slider Pro?

The free version of Smart Slider is so popular and feature-rich that you might be wondering, “Should I buy the Pro version?”

While the free version lets you create beautiful sliders with ease, the Pro version offers a huge stack of additional features to help you build sliders with more complex designs, including more layers, more slider types, and more animations and effects.

Plus, with the Pro version, you get access to the latest updates and support. This means you’ll always have the most secure version of Smart Slider, and if you ever need any help, it’s just a ticket away. It’s worth pointing out that the free version of Smart Slider has a 4.9 out of 5-star rating — and the Pro version has even faster access to support.

So let’s take a look at the additional features available in Smart Slider Pro.

More Slides

The Slide Library comes with 100+ pre-designed sliders for everything from hero sliders and product carousels to magazine layouts, app showcases and testimonial sliders. No matter what kind of design your site has, there a slide you can import and customize to suit your needs.

More Layers

Enhance your sliders with the full collection of 21 layer types, which you can use to create. For instance, you can add MP4 videos to your slides instead of just Youtube or Vimeo. You can create animated or highlighted heading layers to deliver your message in the most effective way.

More Slider Types

There are three additional slider types: Carousel, Block and Showcase. You can also create Full Page sliders, which fill the browser viewport.

More Dynamic Generators

With the Pro version you can populate your slides with content from even more sources — 32 sources, in fact — including WordPress posts, WooCommerce products, YouTube, Dribbble, Pinterest, and NextGEN Gallery.

You can even pull in events from popular plugins like All-in-One Event Calendar, Events Manager, and The Events Calendar.

More Background Animations

Whether you want to fade, zoom, rotate or explode your slides, with the Pro version you get access to the full collection of 70+ background animations. These animations let you control the transitions between each of your slides.

Layer Animation Builder

Smart Slider Pro features a powerful layer animation system that enables you to create motion and transitions between your layers.

Live Timeline

Every layer animation appears on an interactive visual timeline, where the details can be changed easily.

Tons of Extra Expert Settings

When you upgrade to Pro, you unlock the full range of functionality available in the plugin, including:

• Lazy loading – Improve your website’s loading speed by loading less images on page load.
• Lightbox option – Enable images and videos to display in a lightbox for a better user experience, and save space on your webpage.
• Layer animation – Introduce or hide your layers in an exciting way with a cool layer animation.
• Actions and events –Trigger layer animations using custom events in response to actions like mouse clicks or mouse enter events.
• SEO-friendly – The HTML structure ensures the best results for search engines.
• Device Specific Options – Set custom slider size or slide background image to provide the best experience for all users.
• New navigational controls – Tweak new arrows, bullets and thumbnails with new customization options.
• Text animation – Text animation gives you the opportunity to animate the text itself by words or characters.

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How Much is Smart Slider Pro?

There are three different pro pricing options:

	1 site	3 sites	5 sites	10 sites
💰 Price	$49	$99	$149	$249
🌐 Domain license	1 website	3 websites	5 websites	10 websites

When you purchase a license, it’s a one-off payment and you get lifetime updates and support, as well as access to all Pro features.

Smart Slider Pro also offers a handy 14-day money back guarantee if you decide it’s not for you and you want to return to using the free version.

Conclusion

So which version of Smart Slider is the right one for you — Free or Pro?

If you want to create a simple image slideshow, a full width slider that features dynamically generated content from your blog posts, a video slider, or thumbnail slider, then Smart Slider Free is the right option for you.

If you want to create sliders with more complex designs, including layer and background animations and effects, app showcases, fullpage blocks, or dynamically pull in video, social media, ecommerce products, and other content, then Smart Slider Pro will best fit your needs.

If you have any questions about the free and Pro versions, let us know in the comments below!

The post Smart Slider Free vs Pro: Which One Should You Pick? appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> https://smartslider3.com/blog/top-10-features-of-smart-slider-3-pro/ Sun, 10 May 2020 11:37:19 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=18873 Smart Slider 3 is quickly becoming the go-to slider plugin for WordPress. With more than 500,000 active installs — including 20,000 new installs in just the past four weeks — there’s nothing stopping this plugin’s phenomenal growth. In fact, Smart Slider 3 is outpacing every other slider plugin at WordPress.org. So why is Smart Slider […]

The post Top 10 Features of Smart Slider 3 Pro appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> Smart Slider 3 is quickly becoming the go-to slider plugin for WordPress. With more than 500,000 active installs — including 20,000 new installs in just the past four weeks — there’s nothing stopping this plugin’s phenomenal growth. In fact, Smart Slider 3 is outpacing every other slider plugin at WordPress.org.

So why is Smart Slider 3 so damn popular right now? If you’ve tried this user-friendly plugin, you know it’s super easy to get started creating a good-looking slider with minimal effort, no matter your skill level. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Smart Slider 3 makes designing sliders fun!

And that’s just the free version of the plugin — when you upgrade to Smart Slider 3 Pro, you get 100+ professionally designed slides and templates, 16 layer types, dynamic generators, animations, and more. To bring you up to speed with what this intuitive plugin can do, let’s take a look at Smart Slider 3’s top 10 features.

1. Default and Absolute layers

There are two different visual ways in Smart Slider 3 to create content: using Default and Absolute layers. It’s these innovative editing options that set this plugin apart from the competition and help make it the easiest to use slider plugin for WordPress.

Working with Default layers is like working with a page builder. You can use columns and rows to quickly build your slides, and with a clean design that’s fully responsive.

Working with Absolute layers, you have the freedom to work with layers unobstructed, much like you would in Photoshop. You can place your layers anywhere you like and even position them on top of each other to create stunning sliders with dynamic effects.

2. Rich Layers

Imagine if Photoshop didn’t have layers. It would be difficult to design and edit images, right? Surprisingly, many slider plugins don’t offer layers, which severely limits what you can do with your slider designs.

Not Smart Slider 3, though — it’s the most advanced slider plugin when it comes to layers, boasting 21 different layers, which you can use to create a professional and good-looking layer slider.

3. Extensive Slide library

Whether you’re time poor, have no idea what you’re doing when it comes to design, or just need a kick-start with designing your slides, Smart Slider 3 Pro comes with a stack of beautifully designed templates that you can customize with your own content.

The Slide Library comes with 100+ pre-designed slides for everything from product sliders and hero headers to magazine layouts, and testimonials.

4. Impressive Template Collection

In addition to the extensive Slide Library, Smart Slider 3 Pro also has a huge collection of professionally designed slider templates, which you can also browse and import. The template collection includes customizable slider, block, and page templates.

Once you’ve imported a template, you can change the colors, fonts, layers and more to suit your website. If you’re new to Smart Slider 3 Pro, playing with the design of a demo template slider is a great way to learn how the plugin works — and what it’s capable of.

I highly recommend checking out the plugin’s collection of example sliders so you can get a feel for what you can build with Smart Slider 3 Pro.

5. Dynamic Generators

One of Smart Slider 3 Pro’s most useful features is its ability to pull in dynamic content from loads of different sources — 32 sources, in fact — including WordPress posts, WooCommerce products, YouTube, Dribbble, Pinterest and more.

How is this feature useful? Say you wanted to auto-populate your sliders with videos from your YouTube channel, images from your Dribbble portfolio, or photos from your Flickr account. Also you can create a Post slider or a Product slider, which show your latest post or product, and can update itself automatically. You could do all this with Smart Slider 3 Pro.

6. Animations and Effects

Sliders have evolved far beyond the simple image sliders and transitions that dominated websites 10 years ago. What’s exciting about working with sliders now is that there are awesome animations and effects you can use to add both bold and subtle elements to your site.

Here are some of the animations and effects you’ll find in Smart Slider 3 Pro:

Background Animations

Whether you want to fade, zoom, rotate or explode your slides, there are 70+ background animations you can use for the transitions between each slide.

Layer Animations

Similar to background animations, layer animations let you animate the individual layers of your slides which you can cheer up your slider.

Text Animations

With text animations, you can bring your words to life by animating lines, words, or individual characters. A split text animation on your heading layer, or the animated heading attracts the eye and catch the visitor’s attention.

Parallax Effect

Add depth to your sliders — or, at least, the illusion of it — with parallax effect. With parallax enabled, your slides will move at different speeds, creating an optical illusion of depth.

Animated Shape Divider

Add moving curves, clouds, and diagonal shapes to your sliders with the animated shape divider.

Ken Burns Effect

Make your sliders “pop” with this elegant zooming and panning Ken Burns effect, which was originally invented for film. It’s a simple way to give your static images the illusion of motion.

Particle Effect

This effect is stunning yet deceptively simple. The particle effect adds moving shapes and lines, dots, triangles, and polygons that follow the cursor.

7. Responsive Options

With Smart Slider 3 you can create responsive WordPress sliders, so you slider will automatically adjust for different devices. Even the free version of Smart Slider 3 is fully responsive and has a lot of device specific settings. You can set the font sizes to lower or bigger on each device, or set different padding or margins, and wrap after columns value.

Smart Slider 3 Pro features you more responsive options than most of slider plugins. You can define device specific slider sizes, and you can use a different slide background image for desktop, tablet or mobile.

8. Speed and performance

There’s a common misconception that sliders are resource-hungry and negatively impact site performance. While some sliders may well slow down your site, you can rest assured that Smart Slider 3 Pro won’t.

It comes with image optimization (you can optimize and preload images to improve your website’s loading speed), lazy loading and — impressively — script optimization, which boasts efficient code, asynchronous loading, and minification. These features alone are more than you’ll find in any other slider plugin.

9. Developer-Friendly

Smart Slider 3 Pro is intuitive enough for beginners to use, but is also packed with features for developers. In the Pro version you get access to a bunch of advanced options, giving you even more control over your slides.

10. Support and Updates

Last, but not least, one of the best features of Smart Slider 3 is the folks who build and support it. The team at Smart Slider 3 put their heart and soul into this plugin and it shows — from the regular updates to the friendly customer support, you can trust that when you buy this plugin, you’ll be well looked after.

The free version of Smart Slider 3 has a 4.9 out of 5-star rating at WordPress.org. When you scroll through the latest reviews, you can see how much people really love this plugin! When you buy the Pro version, you can be confident that you’ll get even better, faster support.

Conclusion

Smart Slider 3 Pro is the most feature-rich slider plugin for WordPress. But it’s more than just a slider plugin — it’s a visual builder that lets you create sliders, blocks, app showcases, and other page elements for a truly dynamic website.

If you want a slider plugin that’s feature-rich, user-friendly, and optimized for performance, Smart Slider 3 Pro is a popular and versatile option that’s worth checking out.

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