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-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 […]

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

]]> 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.

Get on board! Join our 142,416 subscribers!

Get our latest news, tutorials, guides, tips & deals delivered to your inbox.

No spam. No charge. Just curated emails.

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/free-full-width-slider/ Wed, 06 May 2020 11:48:19 +0000 https://smartslider3.com/?post_type=blog&p=18144 People love sliders and they demand to have them on their sites. That might be the reason why the most popular WordPress themes use a full width slider as their banner. Sliders are great tools to show beautiful images to the visitor, when they arrive at your site. There are many slider plugins out there, […]

The post Do you need a Free Full Width Slider for your Site? appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]> People love sliders and they demand to have them on their sites. That might be the reason why the most popular WordPress themes use a full width slider as their banner. Sliders are great tools to show beautiful images to the visitor, when they arrive at your site. There are many slider plugins out there, both free and premium. Word has it that the best slider plugins are the premium ones. Today I want to show you a free full width slider plugin, which is as good as a premium one.

What is a full width slider?

Before we dig into the details, let’s learn what a full-width slider is. A full width slider is the kind of slider, that fills the horizontal area of the browser. But these sliders do not fill the height of the browser. Generally speaking, the height of the full width slider depends on the browser width. The wider the browser, the higher the slider, which makes it look amazing on today’s wide monitors. Speaking of which, it’s mandatory for any image slider to be responsive and look good on every device. A full width slider fulfills this purpose perfectly.

Meet Smart Slider 3: the best free full width slider plugin

Smart Slider 3 is the best rated free full width slider plugin in the WordPress Plugin Directory. More than 800.000 happy users choose this free full width slider for their website. The slider looks and feels like a premium slider, but it’s totally free. What’s even more, it offers every option to create a beautiful responsive full width image slider. There are beautiful transitions to choose from, and the slides can autoplay. Smart Slider 3 is a responsive WordPress slider plugin, which you can use to enhance your site’s look.

Why should you choose Smart Slider 3 as your responsive slider plugin?

Smart Slider 3 has many options to make you want to call it your favorite slider plugin. Apart from being free, there are several reasons to choose it. It lets you create any layout you imagine. There’s also beautiful slider templates which help you get started. Do you need a simple image slider? Smart Slider 3 lets you create such sliders with ease. The best part is that Smart Slider 3 won’t let you down even if you need to add content to your slides.

Enrich your slider with content using layers

Every website has a story waiting to be told. If you use Smart Slider 3, you can tell this story using layers. You can create headings, add long paragraphs or buttons. Of course you can customize every layer to your liking. For instance, you can change the font color and size. If your site uses a specific font family, you can use that in the slider, too. You can edit your layers using a visual editor, so you don’t need any coding knowledge.

Love using rich media? Smart Slider 3 lets you add image and video layers, too. An image layer can be great to add icons or other design elements. Videos, of course, are very helpful to enrich your slider with visual content. You can add videos from YouTube and Vimeo to your slides. They have their own options to configure them to your liking. For instance, there’s an option to set a cover image or make the video autoplay.

Control your slider’s responsive look

Smart Slider 3 is a responsive slider, and lets you adjust your layers to each device. You can change the position of the layers and their spacing, too. This way you can ensure that the slides look great on every device. If you have textual layers, you can increase or decrease the font size to ensure legibility. Is your slider too crowded on small screens? You can hide any layer on any device to make some room.

How to create a free full width slider using Smart Slider 3?

While Smart Slider has lots of useful features, creating a full width slider is an easy task. First, click on New Project. Then select Create a New Project, where you can configure the basics of your project.

During the project creation process, you’ll need to enter a slider size. You need to do this to be able to work with the slide editor, and to set the dimensions of your slider. If you created a slider that wasn’t full width before, you can change this with a click of a button at the Size tab of its settings. Of course you can also change the size of the slider.

A good free full width slider plugin is feature packed. Smart Slider 3 has many useful options to further control the slider size. For instance, if you want to avoid that your slider gets too small, you can set up a Minimum slider height. Do you want to prevent your full width slider from getting too large on big screens? Use the Maximum slider height feature. If you use Smart Slider 3, best tools are at your fingertips to create a great free full width slider.

Create Beautiful full width Post sliders

Despite the fact that WordPress is no longer just a blogging platform, many people still use it for this reason. Blogs have great and interesting content, which is often featured on the homepage of the site. The best way to have many blog posts on the homepage is using a post slider. Smart Slider 3 is a great free full width slider plugin, which lets you create unique content for your site. This versatile slider has another great feature for you to use on your site. With Smart Slider 3, you have the ability to create a dynamic post slider.

Compatible with every theme

Smart Slider 3 is compatible with every WordPress theme. You can use any widget position, the theme offers to display your full width slider. Of course, you can publish the slider to your posts or pages, too, using its shortcode. In addition, Smart Slider 3 supports the most popular page builder plugins available. If you use Divi, Elementor, Beaver Builder or Page Builder by Site Origin, you don’t have to bother with shortcodes. You’ll find a special Smart Slider 3 module in your favourite page builder.

Final thoughts

A good responsive slider is an essential part of every modern website. Whether you want a simple image slider, or a layer slider, Smart Slider 3 will help you achieve your goals. You’ll also love the responsive settings the slider offers. You can use them to create the perfect slider for every device. Why not give this free full width slider plugin a try?

Get on board! Join our 142,416 subscribers!

Get our latest news, tutorials, guides, tips & deals delivered to your inbox.

No spam. No charge. Just curated emails.

The post Do you need a Free Full Width Slider for your Site? appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

]]>